just about every digital media company is manipulating and optimizing the information it shows users, generally for commercial reasons. Much of this is essentially “manipulating emotions”.

via The Facebook Effect, by David Kirkpatrick.

I wrote the following comment on David K’s Facebook Page post linked above

Yes, David, I agree, and I also think that , secretly, companies also
manipulate emotions by secretly condoning and enhancing space and opportunity
for the troll overrun that we see on many sites, especially political ones. I
wont claim that is the case with all of them. I’m sure that some are genuinely
frustrated and desire healthier dialogue. I am deeply desirous of healthy
dialogue, espcially on politics and social issues and theological sites. I
think Facebook could benefit from having people on staff that are versed in
dialogue and online behavior and the effects of technology on conversation, in
a multitude of major areas, since each hs its own “community of
discourse”……so many people in flame wars talk right past each other because
they aren’t able to hear what people from a different perspective are saying
becuase of “specialized, insider language used”. Facebook could realy benefit
from being able to have “online community leaders” in different areas and
different ideological communities within those areas.

Politics and religion/theology are even more so. There is such diversity of
opinion and specialized segments within each of those. Facebook could develop
a “Social Graph” that is accurately tuned to various political or theological
communities of discourse. The taxonomies of the various groups organize their
thoughts on certain subjects differently, and therefore an interest in one
area each has its own particular subsets of categories under a major topic,
that is different from the subsets of another ideological/theological group
under that same topic.

I wrote all this to say that therein lies a way out of the temptation to manipulate,  for lack of an understanding of the community,  which seems to leave us with an approach of “we’re not gonna solve this conflict,  so let the conflict (flame wars)  draw flies and therefore increase our traffic. Or,  we can’t do much about it. We dont wanna censor,  and we dont wanna close down.  For lack of a plan to steer the conversation toward greener pastures and out of the slime and flames,  many organizations including  online community elements on their websites (usually consisting of comments and user profiles) just “leave it to its own devices”.  I saw this on the website of The Hill yesterday.  An article on John Kerry’s comments about Climate change being as big a threat as ISIS,  was overrun by right wing “denier trolls” who seem to be drawn like flies to articles about climate change and especially climate change actions like the #PeoplesClimate March last weekend in NYC. Kerry took it a step further (and I was glad to see it), and dared to suggest that not only is climate change a crisis,  but it is just as serious as ISIS or Ebola.

I wade deeper still,  into the theological debates about this.  UMC.org has an article on their front page about UMC members involved in the People’s Climate march on Sunday.