This is a post about politics. It is not a post about Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, or why you should vote for any particular candidate. I want to talk about a different, larger problem.
Up until the invention of the Internet, it was difficult for a newspaper, magazine, or TV station to know how many people had consumed any given piece of content. Newspapers could track how many people bought the paper, and they knew if articles were featured on TV or radio spots, certainly. There was, however, no way to track exactly how many people read a single story or were so moved by certain coverage that they walked across the office to hand the paper to a friend.
Today, there is. Websites today track what stories you click on, how long you spend reading them, and whether or not you then share the story on social media. They know if you finish one story and click on another headline, or leave their site thereafter. They know if you come back to the story multiple times (probably to leave or read comments), and they often even know where you came from – for example, did you see the link on Twitter, or did you click on it on Facebook?