I went out of my way to couch that in 'if this plays a role in your decisions' to try to avoid this impression. Some people are straight looking at the financi

I went out of my way to couch that in 'if this plays a role in your decisions' to try to avoid this impression. Some people are straight looking at the financial figures, and others have an ethical component to their investment. The comment was for that second audience. That said, I'm not sure how viable this third approach is, of basing investment decisions upon the emotional response to perceived interpretation of a single stranger's anonymous internet comment. On the surface it looks somewhat like an equivalent of including ethics in the decision making process, if one were to boil ethics down into simply an emotional response. I'm sure a lot of people see things that upset them as 'wrong' and things they approve of as 'right', without evaluation of any independent standard. But however one interprets ethics, it doesn't really factor into this third process because it's not based on the company, it's based on a reaction to an individual (or more likely, a categorization of an individual). This is just putting your money where your 'hate' is (perceived virtue signaling by stranger), without consideration of the company. This type of decision making process opens the potential for a lot of manipulation of the decision maker. Maybe in a few years an advertising program will pick up on this in some form of behavioral analysis of the decision maker's internet activity. Perhaps it interprets similar comments and then tracks it to actual decisions, creating an archetype of the personality that can be driven in such a manner. Then it starts the targeting. Maybe at first it promotes some posts but not others into the decision maker's field of view to ensure an appropriate pre-disposition. EG, if virtue signaling is the trigger, it identifies and promotes these to put the decision maker into a rebellious state of mind. Then it forces the trigger with some specific advice designed to gain a similar reaction to what it has seen from this decision maker in the past. Not to bring social credit back into it, but by way of comparison, the above is only a mildly dark pattern in algorithmically driven social and psychological manipulation. It's also probably a lot less likely to occur in the next decade.