A Ragebait Breakdown: “Liberals Did It!”
Someone spent a lot of money on this propaganda. Fuck.
A thing I wrote came up in my Facebook’s “on this day” list of past posts. I had spent some time laying out manipulative tactics in what is effectively was a video version of what we would call fake news today. I decided to put on scat-sense since I genuinely have an interested in the nature of news and advertising norms. I figure it might help some of my readers understand more of why the topic interests me.
For context, if you haven't, I suggest reading a meta piece I wrote that distills Rage-Bait into it’s essence. It’s a term I invented to express a troubling pattern in click-bait I was seeing in modern social news sharing platforms. Click-bait meets partisan spin for advertising dollars is basically a prevailing definition of fake-news.
Basically, the site in question had an article that was completely spinning and infecting the Detroit issue with political rhetoric. The site took on the same tropes as the early versions of UpWorthy and they leaned heavily on forcing viral memes. Seeing that aggressively viral template being used to disrupt conversations was alarming.
What really bothers me about this piece is that they are:
1) Rehosting a youtube video with infectious rhetoric for advertisement views.
2) Using clickbait headline tactics (you'll notice that the incendiary 'title' of the piece only shows up on social sharing due to the opengraph tag — in fact there is no mention of “liberal” in the page itself). This particular tactic seems to crop up a lot.
“WATCH: Liberals Tried To Show Us How To Properly Run A City, Then This Happened…”
vs
“Detroit In RUINS! (Crowder Goes Ghetto)”
3) Main content is plastered with social sharing buttons.
4) Article is using a hot button political topic and a drama laden opinion piece to net views.
5) The video is vastly simplifying the discussion to being a caricature of the issues for the sake of pushing a narrow world view in an attempt to target a viewership demographic.
Why did I break out and explore that particular piece?
For some context, my jobs at the time involved working at the vendor that provided the CRM systems that Detroit used for their water billing / customer management.
I had seen an interesting article in the news on the odd economic situations around utility billing there and I had questioned if there was some ethical concerns. I can’t comment on concerns in public, but I would have quit had I found issues that I disagreed with.
The larger problem, and the real concern for me, was how I found it becoming harder and harder to have an honest discourse on these issues. Stuff like this was showing up in my news feed all the time. When there is such extreme profiteering over what otherwise seems like a humanitarian crisis, it makes me angry.
With toxic shit like the rage-bait above floating around on internet I can't tell who's the bigger shark - those looking for a scoop and an angle, or those looking to scrape off some from the top. (I’ve been starting to view it as a parasitical mutation of otherwise healthy marketing norms, but that’s for another post.)
Its kinda ironic how journalistic integrity was actually a hot button issue back with the Detroit bailouts.
Politics and marketing seem to ruin everything.
Rage-bait: not even once.
