providing the user with media similar to the media they spend the most time viewing or commenting on.
And also that increased engagement is directly correlated with anger. Social media companies have a financial incentive to drive partisanship- when a user gets angry, they are more likely to post stuff, which in turn causes the algorithm to show them more stuff that makes them angry, which makes them more likely to post stuff, etc. And all the while the company is collecting all that ad revenue. Behind the Bastards did an episode on Facebook and they said that at one point in time, Facebook’s recommendation algorithm was weighting posts that users marked as “angry” five times heavier than posts marked as “happy”.
So if you’ve ever wondered why an anonymous YouTube account gets recommended right-wing shit-heads like Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, Tim Pool, or Charlie Kirk so quickly, it’s because of that. Not only do they intentionally try to inflame the right with made-up stories about the left (“They’re coming to make your guns get gay married to illegal immigrants!”) the left gets angry at just how blatantly, stupidly wrong those stories are. Thus, engagement.