Keep them fighting each other.
The most engaging thing on the internet is contempt for the other side. The platforms know it — their own research says so — and media on every side sells it, sometimes knowing it's a lie. Energy that could target power gets spent sideways instead, on each other.
This is a receipts piece about a single mechanism: division is profitable. We grade it symmetrically — left outlets and right outlets, each on its own record — because the point is the machine, not a team.
What this page is about
Two things are documented. First, the machinery: Facebook's own researchers found its algorithms “exploit the human brain's attraction to divisiveness,” and peer-reviewed work shows that posts attacking the political out-group travel about twice as far as anything else. Second, the practice: named actors — an operative who confessed his own culture-war brand, a network caught airing a lie it privately disbelieved — turned that mechanism into a business.
We collect the receipts on both sides of the aisle. The through-line is not that one team is worse; it is that division is the product, and the audience is the raw material.
The mechanism, then the proof it's used on purpose
Facebook's own research said its algorithms feed division — and executives shelved the fix.
FACTA 2018 internal Facebook presentation stated that 'our algorithms exploit the human brain's attraction to divisiveness,' warning that unchecked, the platform would feed users 'more and more divisive content' to hold their attention. Senior leadership, including Mark Zuckerberg, largely shelved the research and weakened or blocked the fixes — partly out of fear of appearing biased against conservatives. Pointedly non-partisan on its face.
“Our algorithms exploit the human brain's attraction to divisiveness.”
Attacking the other side is the most engaging thing you can post.
FACTA peer-reviewed analysis of ~2.7 million posts found that content about the political out-group was shared or retweeted roughly twice as often as content about one's own in-group; separate research shows moral-emotional language spreads farther ('moral contagion'). The engagement economy therefore pays a structural premium on hostility — regardless of who is posting it.
Hostile actors deliberately exploited the identity-division machine.
FACTRussia's Internet Research Agency ran coordinated fake accounts on both sides of America's hottest identity fault lines — race (fake Black Lives Matter pages and fake pro-police / anti-immigrant pages at once), immigration, religion, guns — to inflame division, disproportionately targeting Black Americans. Documented by the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and its commissioned analyses. Proof that the mechanism is not just exploited by accident.
Right — a culture-war panic, confessed in its architect's own words.
FACTChristopher Rufo, of the Manhattan Institute, turned 'critical race theory' — a niche academic term — into a national culture-war brand, and admitted the strategy publicly. The manufacture is on the record in his own posts; this is the rare case where there is nothing to infer.
“We have successfully frozen their brand — 'critical race theory' — into the public conversation… We will eventually turn it toxic… recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.”
Right — a network that aired a divisive lie it privately knew was false, to keep its audience.
FACTAfter Fox News correctly called Arizona for Biden in 2020, its audience began fleeing to Newsmax. Internal communications surfaced in Dominion Voting Systems' defamation suit show Fox hosts and executives privately disbelieved the stolen-election claims while airing them to win the audience back — Tucker Carlson texted that 'Sidney Powell is lying by the way. I caught her. It's insane.' Fox settled with Dominion for $787.5 million in April 2023. The clearest documented case of a media company knowingly selling division for commercial survival.
“Sidney Powell is lying by the way. I caught her. It's insane.”
Right — a tabloid inflated a claim its own reporting couldn't support, then revised the number up instead of correcting.
FACTOn July 26, 2026, the New York Post's cover declared 'Thousands of 9/11 families demand Mamdani be banned' from the 25th-anniversary ceremony at Ground Zero — while the Post's own online version said 'over 1,100 signatures' and 'at least 300 victims' families,' and the petition's organizer, Giovanni Galante, told Popular Information he kept no verified list of family signers and that the '300' number was a guess ('that's how we got the 300 number'). Rather than run a correction, the Post edited the story repeatedly; by July 28 it reported Galante now 'estimated between 3,000 and 7,500' signers were relatives — a figure that grew after the debunk. A follow-up piece reportedly put 'at least ten' reporters on the story and surfaced ten named 9/11 relatives who opposed Mamdani. CBS News initially amplified the 'thousands of families' claim, then quietly deleted its social post after being told of the inaccuracy while leaving the article up. Counter-fact: September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, representing some 250 victims' families, publicly backed Mamdani's attendance and called the campaign Islamophobic. We report the documented behavior — the print-vs-online contradiction, the uncorrected upward revision, the reporter effort to backfill a headline — and attribute the sharper characterizations to the outlet that surfaced them; we do not, in our own voice, call it a lie.
Left — the same mechanism, three ways.
FACTLeft-leaning outlets run the machine too, each documented. (1) The New York Times' 1619 Project lead essay claimed 'one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence… was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery'; five eminent historians (Wilentz, McPherson, Wood, Oakes, Bynum) rebuked it in December 2019, and the Times later quietly edited the digital text to 'some of the colonists.' (2) The 2019 Covington Catholic viral clip was framed as violent white supremacy from a misleading 30-second video; the full footage showed a third group had harassed the students first, outlets issued corrections, and Nick Sandmann reached undisclosed settlements with CNN, the Washington Post, and NBC. (3) A January 2020 CNN panel mocked Trump voters as a 'credulous boomer rube demo' in fake Southern accents. NUANCE: the settlements were confidential and not admissions of liability, and Sandmann's other suits (NYT, CBS, ABC, Rolling Stone, Gannett) were dismissed — we report a rush-to-judgment and its walk-back, not 'defamation proven,' and we grade only the one 1619 claim that was walked back, not the whole (Pulitzer-winning) project.
The net effect is 'manufactured sides.'
PROBABLY TRUEGraded PROBABLY TRUE as the synthesis: because the attention economy pays a premium on out-group hostility, and because named actors deliberately work that seam, the politically engaged are steered into spending their energy fighting each other rather than the interests documented elsewhere on this site. The mechanism is FACT; that it adds up to a deliberately divided public is the fair, hedged reading.
The rule: document the machine, never pick a side
- The harm is division, full stop. We do not frame any of these as one side “doing the other's work,” and we never treat the audience being divided as a benefit to a team. The audience is the victim, on all sides.
- Symmetric receipts. Right-coded and left-coded examples, each graded on its own record. When one side's case is cleaner than the other's (Fox/Dominion is court-documented; a viral misframe rests on corrections and settlements), we say so.
- Confession beats inference. The strongest entries — Rufo, Fox/Dominion — are cases where the actors said the quiet part on the record. We lead with those and hedge the rest.
A divided public is a distracted public
This is the outrage half of The Outrage & Apathy Economy: keep the engaged fighting each other, and the same interests documented across this site — in finance, surveillance, and war — face a public too busy with the neighbours to look up. It is the state-actor division story of Sowing Division, privatized and put on a profit motive.
Questions worth taking seriously
Isn't this just 'both sides' false balance?
No — we grade each case on its own evidence, and we say plainly when one is stronger than another (Fox/Dominion is a court-documented confession; a viral misframe rests on corrections and settlements). Symmetry here isn't pretending the cases are equal; it's refusing to exempt any outlet from the same standard.
Are you saying the media invented all political disagreement?
No. Real disagreements about real things exist. The claim is narrower and documented: the attention economy pays a premium on out-group hostility, and some actors deliberately amplify or manufacture it for profit and power. That's an accelerant on real division, not the sole cause of it.
If you are named on this page
If you are named on this page, or are a party materially affected by the claims made here, and you wish to respond, correct the record, or add context, use the Contact page. Responses are published verbatim alongside the original claim, with the sender identified and the date of receipt. The channel stays open for the life of the page.
This site aggregates and grades a record that other outlets and primary sources have already put on the record. Every FACT-graded claim above is sourced to court filings, government reports, sworn whistleblower disclosures, published investigative journalism, or named-source statements. The citations are the accountability mechanism; this section is how you get on the record too.
The record
- WSJ — Facebook's own “exploit… divisiveness” research, shelved
- PNAS — Out-group animosity drives engagement (2021)
- U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee — Russian active measures, Vol. 2
- Christopher Rufo — the CRT-brand strategy, in his own words (2021)
- Forbes — the Fox/Dominion internal messages
- Washington Post — the 1619 Project historians' letter
- Reason — the Covington Catholic media failure