Trump may have a point about fake news

In recent years, much scrutiny has been paid to the workings of social media algorithms. Driven by escalating competition for human attention, social media sites became filled with negative or controversial posts, because these attract more protracted engagement than anything else. Since reader attention attracts revenues, any profit-seeking algorithm will learn to highlight divisive content at the expense of more important topics. So a story about Hawaiian pizza might be more lucrative than one about human trafficking, since the idea of pineapple on pizzas polarises opinion more than a story about something universally agreed to be bad.

But this problem is not confined to digital media. What sells newspapers, or elevates the status of journalists, is scarcely matched to the importance of a story. (One reason there are few bankers in jail is that they commit crimes which, in journalistic terms, are boring.)