the site’s algorithm will start to funnel the user similar stories and pages – all to increase engagement. For Facebook, rising engagement is the only metric that matters, as more engagement means more screen time to be exposed to advertisements. This is the darker side of Silicon Valley’s much celebrated metric of ‘user engagement’. By focusing so heavily on greater engagement, social media tends to parasitise our brain’s adaptive mechanisms. As it happens, the most engaging content on social media is often horrible or enraging.
