I don't mean "hacked" as in some malicious individual planned to mislead you. I mean we've screwed up our brain's information processing with the constant flow of urgency (for eyeballs). We're basically unable to pay attention to anything that isn't immediate. The bias you mention in compounded by others biases as the information is shared with each individual's bias. I also suspect that there can be bad actors in the chain, who intentionally mislead, often for pretty banal reasons (protecting their own perceptions).
I recently read about how Trump is "crashing" the stock market, and I was like oh crap, but when I checked it was only down a few points. Not only will I now ignore this source, but it's also probably nudged my overall distrust a little bit. Possibly the person writing the article figured it was important enough to warrant notice (it is) but realized no one would pay attention if it didn't sound urgent, so they gussied it up a lot... Imagine how much more dire it was after it got shared a few more times. If I got my news from Facebook then I might have thought democracy had collapsed and roving bands of gun toting anarchists had taken over.
> "Trump is "crashing" the stock market, and I was like oh crap, but when I checked it was only down a few points"
Forbes has a page "realtime billionaires list"[1] where they track the day to day wealth changes. Musk lost $12.5 billion today, Larry Ellison lost $2.8 billion today, Mark Zuckerberg gained $820M today.
When a few points means billions to the people who fund and own media outlets, who are also famously competitive and willing to do anything to make the numbers go up, it becomes more clear why we hear of the market "crashing" but it doesn't seem much different to us. (and that's outside the usual political complaining about everything the 'other' party does, whatever it is).
I recently read about how Trump is "crashing" the stock market, and I was like oh crap, but when I checked it was only down a few points. Not only will I now ignore this source, but it's also probably nudged my overall distrust a little bit. Possibly the person writing the article figured it was important enough to warrant notice (it is) but realized no one would pay attention if it didn't sound urgent, so they gussied it up a lot... Imagine how much more dire it was after it got shared a few more times. If I got my news from Facebook then I might have thought democracy had collapsed and roving bands of gun toting anarchists had taken over.