They definitely did do this (though arguably not intentionally to spread outrage) and scammers took advantage of it. Scammers spread misinformation that generat

They definitely did do this (though arguably not intentionally to spread outrage) and scammers took advantage of it. Scammers spread misinformation that generated controversy to drive revenue to ad farms (and of course Russia leveraged it more for political rather than monetary purposes). Steven Levy's new book (Facebook: The Inside Story) goes into a lot of detail. One interesting thing was that in 2016 the false stories tended to target pro-trump conservative groups because the lies spread more easily (more willing to just share things that fed into existing cognitive bias). They tried fake lies with the left too, but they tended to be less effective because people would call them out as fake and they'd fizzle out (though I'd suspect today it'd be easy to spread lies feeding into the more extreme aspects of the left too). Today though they're directly aware of this and FB in particular has a ton of people working on 'integrity' to stop this kind of bad incentive.