The #1 Thing Fueling Our Extreme Polarization & Misinformation Nightmare
- Kevin Lankes
- Sep 23
- 10 min read
Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/gJNdRrbT0kI
I have fifteen years of experience creating media in print and on the web, and I know exactly why America is so incredibly polarized right now. In fact, there’s one particular thing we can point to with clarity that’s more responsible for radical political partisanship and violent political rhetoric and action in America. We’re going to talk about that one thing here today. I’m going to tell you how it came about, why pretty much no one is talking about it, how some people have taken advantage of it to make themselves very rich, and what our options are for flipping the script on this going forward.
In my professional analysis of the current media environment and cultural overview of the political landscape, both in America and abroad, the one thing that’s most responsible for the polarization, radicalization, and general division of the United States right now is the ad revenue model of digital media. If you’re skeptical, or you don’t really know how the model encourages polarizing content, just hear me out, I promise I have the receipts.
The ad revenue model of digital media ensures that mainstream narratives about practically any event are reactionary and fear-based. They have to be, in order to get views. This is an ad unit. There are a number of them across different types of content. They have something called a cpm, which stands for cost per mille, mille being latin for a thousand. This is the most tracked and vitally important metric to ad revenue. There are lots more, but this the first major obstacle to being seen on the internet and getting paid. It means that you get a certain amount of money per every thousand clicks or views of a particular ad unit on your content.
So if your click-through rate pays out per one thousand views, like it does in digital publishing, then you’re going to want as many thousands of views as you can get. And professional content creators, whether they be journalists or elsewhere in the larger world of media, are trained in how to pull people in to a story. We workshop headlines painstakingly before publishing anything. We work with ad ops teams to keep people glued to pages for as long as possible because ad units switch out in thirty-second increments. That’s the standard, but you can tweak the timing. But time on page or time viewed is really really important, because it determines how many ads people are seeing as they switch out to the next one, and again, you’re looking for thousands and thousands of people to stay glued to your piece for each of these ad cycles.
The more you succeed at this, the more valuable your content becomes, and the higher your cpm will climb. Cpm is also heavily tied to the niche or area of content, so for instance, business news or marketing how-tos are more valuable to advertisers than say, lifestyle news or your nephew’s gaming channel. Even if your nephew is famous. All things being equal, certain niches will still draw in higher bids for space on their content.
And this all happens automatically. There are exchanges out there where companies buy space inside ad units across the web within fractions of a second. At one time, you had a lot of what we call direct sales, where you’d have sales reps manually selling ad space, but now the vast majority is done through this automated process called programmatic advertising.
In effect, as a content producer, what you’re doing is navigating a series of robot gatekeepers. You’ll hear a lot of people in digital content talk about “the algorithm.” Every platform has its own. They’re all proprietary, and they’re all programmed with rules about all kinds of little things. Any tiny detail can derail your chances of being seen on a certain platform. What this means is that content creators have an incentive to be as sensational as possible, in order to dominate the metrics and make the algorithm happy so that it pushes your content to more people, and to overcome obstacles built into the algorithm so that people click and stay on your page even if the robots aren’t happy about something or other. All of this within reason, because there’s a feature called brand safety built into advertising networks, and a lot of the time there are banned words lists and other tools that can keep really egregious content from being seen or making money. But those aren’t foolproof.
When this whole change happened from an analog world to a digital one, multiple news networks were flailing. Tons of content operations went under because they didn’t know how to be seen anymore, in this vast digital void. What happened was, certain people figured out that sensationalism sells, which has always been a pretty basic tenet of human consumer psychology, but at this point it was now being applied to the wealth of human knowledge and the social information ecosystem. And I don’t think I have to tell you that’s bad.
So now you have the major news guys figuring this out and honestly many simply getting by on name recognition alone, and then others like the New York Times and long-form journalism like the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Harper’s, etc., continuing to use a subscription model in order to meet revenue goals. And that’s the only other real option for digital media, but not everyone can do it, especially not in the early days. No one was going to subscribe to your nephew’s gaming blog back then. But the ad revenue model allowed for a real democratization of publishing. And you’d think that could ultimately be a good thing, if it weren’t for the fact that the more sensational content could be, the more it would take over the algorithms.
Enter the grifters, those with no shame, no rules, no training in media or journalism, no ethical restraints, and a simple desire to make as much money as they possibly could. Think what you want about modern mainstream corporate journalism, I certainly do, but at least they have a codified code of ethics and rules, and there are consequences for journalists who break those rules. Someone who makes up details of a story or invents sources, for example, will quickly find themselves out of a job and probably ostracised from the field altogether. But random assholes on the internet don’t have this problem. They can say whatever they want, and they do, in order to get their content in front of as many people as they can. Because, again, money.
We have a lot of evidence that backs up certain conclusions in the digital media space. For instance, conservative media is really killing it, and I kind of also mean that in a literal sense, but you’d have to watch my other video on where political violence in America is coming from to get that whole story. The reasons for this were confusing for a very long time, but there are a couple of strong possible solutions. One is something I’ve repeated very often in training my own direct reports inside media operations, and that is that stories and headlines that illicit strong emotions have the best chances of going viral. And there is no stronger emotion than outrage. Hate, fear, jealousy, all the most negative reactionary emotions, these are the ones that get clicks.
We know from the research that right-wing rhetoric is increasingly more violent and incites strong negative emotions. We’ve also seen and experiment re-confirmed recently that shows that the fear centers of right-leaning people are larger and more active. Put the two together, and you have a succotash. But any of us are susceptible to rage bait. Every other headline these days is designed to anger you about something your political opposition is doing, something outrageous, and get you to click and stay glued to the page for as long as possible so the outlet can make money from the ad placements.
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Some people may disagree with what my thoughts on this, because the ad revenue model of journalism and online media is showing a lot of cracks right now and doesn’t really work very well. And while that’s completely true, it doesn’t change the fact that everyone alive is trying to make money on the internet this way, because there really aren’t any other viable options, and this is just how things are set up now. It certainly isn’t viable for major news networks who’ve hit their ceiling, but the model works all the way until it doesn’t.
And one really important thing to point out is that it really works for independent actors. Random people on the internet can and have created gigantic misinformation empires that make them filthy rich by spewing absolute nonsense on the internet that people then really believe. These operations can be as simple or as complex as you want. The fact is that one person can run them. I’ve known people who have done this and I’ve heard about tons more where just a single person made a killing running sites like this. NPR covered one of these cases way back in 2016 when the uproar over fake news was at a fever pitch. They tracked down the owner of a disinformation operation to the suburbs of Los Angeles. The story is fascinating, and I suggest you read it. The link is down in the description with the rest of my sources. Jestin Coler, a registered Democrat, created a series of fake news sites catering to the extreme right-wing and made upwards of $30,000 a month as of 2016.
Then there are more organized actors, some of them even state-sponsored, and they get resources from governments that are hostile to American democracy. I’m not going to relitigate Russian interference in the 2016 election, because we have the data and it’s all out there proving that Russian assets went into creating massive disinformation empires to turn the tide of public perception.
But one infamous Macedonian disinformation cell run by a group of teenagers became a real focus in the years following the election. You can read about that below, including testimony from some of the writers and creators who worked on this stuff, and the effect it had on the information ecosystem. We thought for a long time it was sort of spontaneously created by a group of teens who were looking to cash in on the new fake news gold rush made possible by ad revenue. But more recently we’ve tracked down the cell’s founders to pinpoint one very rich Macedonian lawyer who partnered with some high-profile U.S. Republicans, including one former candidate for the Nevada State Assembly.
Not that this is confusing or mysterious at all, but just because data and the pursuit of truth is important, researchers have studied this. A study from Stanford University published last year in the journal Nature confirmed every detail of the process. Not only can someone make a ton of money spreading misinformation on the internet, the way the ad buying process works, companies aren’t even aware that their ad dollars are going toward buying space on false or even radicalizing content. Because most of the ad space is sold programmatically through automated bids on an automatic exchange, there’s just no possible way for anything to keep track of where all the company’s ads are going before you find yourself funding something potentially terrible. It reminds me a little bit of the global antiquities market. Lots of the most preeminent cultural institutions have ended up purchasing and displaying objects that, when investigated, have actually come from looting operations run by terrorist organizations like Al Quada. Oopsies!
Fun story, but I guess they can put down those dismantled rare buddhist artifacts now because they can just make radicalizing content online and make all their money that way now instead.
Okay, to sum up, we have a problem with increasingly polarizing rhetoric, that leads to increasingly more disturbing actions. And like everything else everywhere else, it’s driven by greed. Like Jestin Coler, the guy in the California suburbs who created his own right-wing misinformation empire. He told NPR that eventually he was planning on blowing the lid off the whole thing and announcing that everything he was writing was nonsense. But he said the lies spread too fast, and they made too much money. The grifters you see spreading misinformation might not even be in ideological agreement with the side they’re pandering to. I think that’s really important to keep in mind as we continue to think about how we’re all manipulated by this system. We also have larger and larger networks accumulating through monopolies that are systemically in pursuit of as much profit as possible, all putting out similar content to compete with everyone else for views.
And AI content is only making the whole situation worse. Because now one individual can run a whole website filled with AI content or a several sites, or video channels, all by themselves, and the content is complete nonsense. But it pays, so what do they care?
For big companies and major news organizations, there’s a ceiling for the amount of money to be made. And a lot of big companies have gone under or gone through round after round of layoffs, because at a certain point, the ad revenue model of digital content is no longer sustainable. So, it turns out that it’s a big problem for the public, and a big problem for businesses, too. What can we do about that?
I personally have two proposed solutions. I think we should have an independent media funded by tax dollars. I think NPR and PBS are wonderful, but they get the bulk of their funding through individual donations. That’s not ideal. We all want to have access to news that can’t be swayed one way or the other, that’s only interested in the facts. And that’s only possible if everyone is responsible for paying for it. The issue with this solution is that we’re going to have a lot of arguments sprouting up about who exactly gets to handle oversight. In my opinion, it should be the people who study journalism and political science and who have several degrees in the fields and lots or published research. But honestly I think the experts should be in charge of pretty much every field, since they literally no more than anyone else on a particular topic.
The second solution that’s top of mind for me is already happening. And that’s more independent journalism. Not only do we have tons of regular concerned citizens making youtube channels and substacks, we have a lot of professional journalists who’ve been fired for speaking out who are now taking up prominent positions in the cultural narrative using these media. There are growing networks of independent writers and thinkers, scientists, philosophers, and more, all sprouting up to take the place that corporate media once had a stranglehold on. There was a time when I was very hesitant about this reality, but it’s getting really clear as we look at current events that the corporate media is very intent on appeasing the current administration instead of reporting factual information and upholding its obligation to the truth, and to accouantablilty.
So if you’ve been wondering where the polarization of America has come from, if it seems like it came out of nowhere for you, I think I have a fairly convincing lead to point to. I think that the ad revenue model of journalism is the underlying cause of radicalization across party lines. I think we have complex discussions about freedom of speech in America and whether or not freedom of speech means freedom of reach. And I do think it’s going to be excruciatingly difficult to fix this, but I think we have a few threads to pull on. So let’s pull on those threads and do some f*cking good wherever we personally can in the world. See you next time.
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