May I have your attention?

One of the more difficult to parse changes in the past few years as it pertains to tracking shifts in the news has been trying to find the line in the sand between what actually constitutes “news” and what is, for lack of a better way to say it, everything else. Social media has complicated this enormously. For however much it has empowered the average person, this capability is still largely dependent on infrastructure. Even when plausibly unintentional, our continued gamification of reality has unintended effects, and it renders most of the heuristics we use for determining the veracity of information fairly insolvent. This coincides with a global propaganda war waged on several fronts, using SEO, LLMs, and paid ads as weapons against minority groups with no social or economic capital with which to push back.