You're listening to Comedy Central.

Ow.

Oh, my gosh, tonight is a staff writer at The New Yorker, an author of the best-seller,

Trick Mirror Reflections on Self-Dilusion.

She's here to talk about social media companies monetizing hate and how we can use the internet

as a force for good.

Please welcome Geotolentino.

So you've written about social media companies and how they monetize rage.

Is there any way that they could be incentivized to stop this?

One way that I think about it is like, did corporations all throughout the last century

until the 70s have any incentive to stop poisoning rivers and dumping their waste all over

the place?

They did, and it's cheaper to be shitty, right?

It is in their financial best interest to just keep poisoning the river until someone

makes them stop, which we could.

But it's in their best interest for us to feel bad, right?

You never hear someone being like, I had an amazing day.

I just sat and I scrolled for six hours, right?

Like, you only do that when you feel, you only scroll that long when you feel bad, and

when you do that, when you scroll for that long, you feel even worse, and then you do it

more.

And that cycle is the primary way.

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