This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, November 2nd, 2021.

I'm Caleb Brown.

When legacy media outlets go after Facebook and other speech platforms for stoking outrage,

it's hard to take that entirely seriously. Cato's

Walter Olson details the delicate balancing act that print newspapers have had to

engage in for at least the last many decades and why this latest attack on in about Facebook that has been hotly discussed in the last week related to the

Facebook files the Facebook papers is the degree to which the company was

aware of information that was placed on their platform that

was driving a lot of anger and Facebook to the gasps of or traditional media didn't do anything about it.

And that's...

We always have to remember who's saying what.

You have to remember like where certain claims are coming from.

The Washington Post headlined one of its articles in the package

with a very engaging headline about how anger was rated five times as

highly as alike.

And you had to read down into the article to realize that Facebook had experimented with

waiting for the different emoji that it introduced a few years ago and it understood I think by talking to almost any

psychologists in the area that with like having been the default when users chose a different emoji it was a sign that they cared more on average or were more engaged and so

Facebook started out by waiting all of the other emojies five times as much.

Now, the washed post singled out anger,

but of course love and later care and the others

were all getting the same multiple.

...