This is valuable information, though depressingly presented.
The article reminds me strongly, and for similar reasons, of Clay Johnson's The Information Diet, a book I found overall tremendously disappointing -- this review describes most of the reasons:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/254961608?book_show_ac...
In particular, Johnson keeps presenting the situation of low-quality information as a matter of choice, whilst flagrantly ignoring two of the massive elephants in the room:
1. Search-engine and social-media rankings drive much of the engagement. A slight tweak to those algorithms can ... make Upworthy downworthy:
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=upworthy
2. Agnotology. Culturally-induced ignorance, or slightly less charitably, those with more money than God lying to the world loudly enough to prevent any other message from being heard. The story of corporate-financed disinformation, and the persistence of it, even to the very same individals and organisations, over numerous campaigns -- lead, asbestos, tobacco, CFCs, nuclear power, and now fossil-fuel carbon emissions -- is absolutely depressing.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchants_of_Doubt
And if you think the practice is new or particular to the present, it's not. There's a delightful little book, the transcript of a speech, by Hamilton Holt, Commercialism and Journalism. It's the text of an address he gave at U.C. Berkeley in 1909, on the phenomenal growth of the publishing industry, and of the advertising which fueled it. He quotes an anonymous publisher:
"There is no such thing in America as an independent press. I am paid for keeping honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. If I should allow honest opinions to be printed in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation, like Othello's, would be gone. The business of a New York journalist is to distort the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilivy, to fawn at the foot of Mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. We are the tools or vassals of the rich men behind the scenes. Our time, our talents, our lives, our possibilities, are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes."
https://archive.org/stream/commercialismjou00holtuoft#page/2...