What holds attention is not what is accurate, and the model pays for attention

The argument

A second argument offered for this position concerns what the model selects for. Proponents observe that an influencer's income depends on attention, that attention is awarded by systems which measure engagement, and that the content which engages reliably is not the content which informs reliably. Certainty outperforms qualification, a dramatic claim outperforms a careful one, and a simple explanation of a complicated matter outperforms an accurate one. None of this requires anyone to intend deception; it is what the incentive rewards, and people who do not follow it are selected out before they are visible. The argument is that this produces predictable failure in the domains where the stakes are highest. Proponents point to health, money and nutrition as the clearest cases, since each combines genuine public hunger for guidance, real difficulty, and advice that cannot easily be checked by the person receiving it. In each, the honest answer is usually that it depends, that the evidence is mixed, or that the questioner should see someone qualified, and each of those answers performs poorly against a confident protocol delivered by a person the audience likes. Holders of the view argue that the comparison is with institutions rather than with perfection. Broadcasters and publishers were often slow and sometimes wrong, but they carried editors, corrections, liability and a reputational cost for being caught out, and the person speaking was not personally paid by the result. An influencer carries none of that machinery, and the audience has no way to tell a well informed account from a merely confident one. On this account the harm is not that some influencers are unreliable, which is true of every medium, but that the medium supplies no mechanism by which reliability wins.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Opponents argue that the critique describes mass media generally rather than influencers in particular. Broadcasters and newspapers also competed for attention, also favoured the dramatic over the qualified, and carried their own commercial and political pressures, and the editorial machinery praised here coexisted with long records of being confidently wrong. They also note that the same openness lets qualified people reach audiences directly, including practitioners who correct bad advice in public and whose own accounts have grown by doing so. Several add that audiences use these sources alongside others rather than in place of them.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P2] The same attention pressures operated in broadcasting and the press, so the premise identifies a feature of mass media rather than of influencers. [Rejecting P3] Qualified practitioners now reach audiences directly and publicly correct poor advice, which supplies a corrective the premise says does not exist. [Rejecting C] Audiences typically consult several sources rather than one, so the conclusion overstates how much any single account determines what they come to believe.