Apepollo11@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Psychology.
Feeding people bad news makes them scared. Scared people want to be kept updated, so tune into the news. Repeat.
Also: Scared people look for authority to guide them. Lots of money/power to be gained by having crowds of people who trust you.
Presenting people with scary news keeps them coming back to you and offers opportunities for the stakeholders to profit.
Exactly the same reason social media presents awful stuff all the time now. Ragebait is more profitable than nice stuff.
ChicoSuave@lemmy.world 2 days ago
What’s ironic is that advertisers limit speech because they don’t like upsetting content and should love a good news channel.
Tiresia@slrpnk.net 2 days ago
If advertisers loved a good news channel, all corporate news would be good news channels. But scared and tired people make far less informed decisions, making advertising far more effective.
The countless horror movies you can watch online are far more upsetting than a streamer saying “fuck”. Censorship isn’t about avoiding people getting upset but about having infrastructure for silencing speech that they and their corporate partners don’t like.
Imagine if cops couldn’t give out fines, then they would miss out on being able to choose to let white people off with a warning while fining black people for the smallest infractions. This means cops would be less effective at maintaining white supremacy. And so cops have to be tough on crime despite all evidence showing that it makes crime worse. Because cops exist to maintain and expand white supremacy, and more specifically the supremacy of rich white Christian men.
Likewise, an advertiser who has a well-established policy of punishing “advertiser-unfriendly” phrases like swear words can then use that policy to suppress certain voices while letting other voices gain fame by boldly defying the rules with only a slap on the wrist. This infrastructure has allowed them to very quickly start censoring Palestine, Minnesota, and discussion of productive forms of activism and resistance in general. Whether this is a service they sell to rich white men or if it’s them choosing to do this because of their rich white owners, the buck stops with them.
vsg@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
Also, many of the platforms doing this speech control often allow not-so-family-friendly advertisement. YouTube, for example, doesn’t allow a sex education channel to show female nipples, but an AI-generated borderline pornographic ad for a fake game is A-okay.