It's Facebook. Facebook is the reason for the uproar. Facebook has drawn a lot of attention to ad-based revenue companies like Google. Facebook is the modern da

It's Facebook. Facebook is the reason for the uproar. Facebook has drawn a lot of attention to ad-based revenue companies like Google. Facebook is the modern day version of Geocities, except, now it employs modern advertising technology to harvest information and engage users. Facebook has apparently grossly mishandled how it engages users; providing a platform for the proliferation of false information (like idiots on Geocities) but now in the form of "news". Facebook has also grossly mishandled it's users information; providing dubious 3rd parties with information that's been used to, among other things, target specific demographics to influence ELECTIONS. Because of the ire Facebook is drawing from the entire world, Google is being group with them because of their business model. Google's big fault here is in it's likely emulation of Facebook's engagement model (likely same tech, same time) in steering users towards more extreme content in an effort to maintain engagement- mostly on YouTube. I think the average HN user can understand how and why this happens. It's 1.0 of the engagement game. Ad-tech that analyze the content of a video and attempts to match it with similar content. Only apparent problem is, it's not that smart and it tends to direct towards the extreme - or likely the easiest content match- more extreme content likely repeats similar phrases more often, idk, someone with more insight can jump in here.