a) People always crave attention and validation --Internet increasingly makes it easy to give validation to people which is shallow. (i.e people who don't know

a) People always crave attention and validation --Internet increasingly makes it easy to give validation to people which is shallow. (i.e people who don't know you saying how great your comments, how great your life is, how great your political views are) b)people crave emotion (good or bad) --Due to the way these social media companies are structured, they only want user engagement, they don't really care about quality of engagement. So they purposefully design it to be as addictive as possible. This means shallow content seeps up foremost that generates strong emotional responses. c) Politics, sports, things like these activities are very tribal, and so generate strong emotions. They also give people validation because people can attach themselves to a movement and feel part of a community and be validated by other members of that community. The more tribal these movements (us vs them), the more drama, the more excitement for the user. I would argue social media companies might actually be worse off by not taking advantage of these trends (fiduciary wise) because for sure some other company will. It's like living in one of those drama tv shows.