The behaviour of the press really has concerned me during the pandemic, I know yellow/tabloid journalism is nothing new but that kind of sensationalism on top of highly targeted social media is. I have no doubt the press as an industry is at least in part morally responsible for causing cases of intractable anxiety and depression in their customers. Media outlets have a Darwinian struggle for your attention and the emotions of fear, rage, and rushed judgement against your neighbours all produce incredible engagement metrics. Think of how many people came to watch public executions in the 19th century for example, we as humans eat that kind of thing up like a half-starved labrador.

Since social media became widespread our society has possessed a well-oiled machine powered by human sentiment and the pandemic has filled that machine's fuel tank with liquid fear and suspicion. News sites don't exist to report the news, they exist to get your eyeballs on them whatever the cost and drive up their site traffic (in the case of most media outlets to serve more ads, in the case of the BBC it's an enormous part of the UK's soft power domestically and overseas).

Think of how many inaccuracies, oversimplifications, and claiming that edge-cases are the norm goes on in the press when it comes to our industry, the tech industry. How many times do we read unsubstantiated bollocks even from supposedly reputable publications about AI or cybersecurity, roll our eyes at the obvious inaccuracies, and move on to the next article about COVID which we suddenly take at face value as though our last reaction never happened at all? The truth is usually messy, complicated, and with hundreds of asterisks; it often cannot be made concise or useful to get eyeballs on ads. It certainly can't be concisely summed up in a five-minute article or judged as a binary true or false by the likes of Mark Zuckerberg.

That's not even mentioning the likes of the UK's SPI-B (a subcommittee of SAGE) which I think has acted very unethically in its approach of employing what in my opinion are abusive behavioural psychology tactics against the British population. The reliance on inducing fear among the general public to improve compliance statistics I think will be judged very harshly by future historians, and this deliberate emotional colouring of current affairs by public sector authorities won't just go away with the pandemic; a power once used is rarely given up voluntarily. The nice thing about conspiracy theories is that they give a feeling that at least somebody is in control however malevolent and that's actually a comforting thought to many, but I think the reality is that we've built an enormous machine that in an Asimov-esque way has run out of control doing exactly what we told it to do: optimise eyeballs on ads with engaging content. Nobody's really in control, and I think that's terrifying to a lot of people.