Today’s media is indistinguishable from social media posts
Because a lot of stories are nothing more than re-hashed social media posts – literally, sourced to social media, and usually taking the form of someone oppressed someone or did something nasty and the Internet reacts.
The “news” is just an extension of social media and blog posting now.
These fluff pieces are the work of content mills, whose goal is to generate as much content as fast as possible, in the hope that may be 10% bubble up in the search engines to get sufficient clicks to pay for their creation cost through algorithmic ad networks.
These “stories’ all from the same content mill author, all sourced from anonymous social media posts:
- Safeway shopper slams local store over ‘toxic’ storage practices: ‘That doesn’t seem like a safe way of doing that’ (yahoo.com)
- Petty HOA sends passive-aggressive letter to homeowners after refusing to allow solar panels: ‘Some people never grow up’ (yahoo.com)
- ‘Disgusting’ photo of John Travolta’s home sparks outrage online: ‘It’s absolutely ridiculous’ (yahoo.com)
- Tyrannical HOA board faces backlash after mandating ‘ridiculous’ paint jobs for entire neighborhood: ‘Totally unreasonable’ (msn.com)
- ‘Absolutely astounded’ homeowner shares photos of ‘no-lawn’ transformations in their neighborhood: ‘These are fantastic’ (yahoo.com)
And here are more:
At least 3 of these 4 items on MSN Start are fluff pieces:
Max My Money is a real content mill fraud (supposedly created by Max Marvelous – really?)
If you click through the story, you quickly see that every item was likely sourced from a social media post. And this is news? It not only is not news, its terrible writing quality – absolute garbage.
These stories – and they are not even creative writing – are designed as click bait.
“News stories” 100% sourced to social media and usually to anonymous people on Reddit, Twitter, etc.
This is journalism in 2023. All to sell click-bait to advertisers.