One of my favorite pieces of dialogue from any movie is this exchange from Broadcast News, the 1987 James Brooks film about a love triangle among two television reporters and one producer. Aaron is warning Jane against falling for Tom, the handsome but morally flimsy newscaster who stands for everything she’s against.

Aaron: I know you care about him. I’ve never seen you like this about anyone, so please don’t get me wrong when I tell you that Tom, while being a very nice guy, is the Devil.
Jane: This isn’t friendship. You’re crazy, you know that?
Aaron: What do you think the Devil is going to look like if he’s around?
Jane: God!
Aaron: Come on! Nobody is going to be taken in by a guy with a long, red, pointy tail! What’s he gonna sound like? [Hisses] No. I’m semi-serious here.
Jane: You’re seriously…
Aaron: He will be attractive! He’ll be nice and helpful. He’ll get a job where he influences a great God-fearing nation. He’ll never do an evil thing! He’ll never deliberately hurt a living thing. He will just, bit by little bit, lower our standards where they are important. Just a tiny little bit. Just coax along flash over substance. Just a tiny little bit. And he’ll talk about all of us really being salesmen. And he’ll get all the great women.

In the ‘90s, Maureen Dowd used it to describe Bill Clinton. Trump is such a glaring conman, so blatantly cruel, that it doesn’t quite fit. Today, I think it better suits the voice of so many leading online publications, all across the political spectrum, that have to sensationalize reality in order to turn any profit. When I arrive in Hell, the Devil will sound like a 2017 headline: hyperbolic, #relatable, manipulating its audience with the false intimacy of chattiness combined with moral righteousness and absolutism and authority, with nothing to actually offer but a screenshot of a celebrity tweet followed by other people’s angry tweets in response, look at all these tweets, let’s just keep clicking and scrolling and watching until we’ve become even more complicit in the deaths of our neighbors, our country, our planet.

That isn’t to place blame on the writers tasked with carrying out marketing-as-journalism. Their understandable fatigue and nihilism are palpable in every few marketing-as-journalism stories I’ve clicked on in the last few days alone (because of my lizard brain; because the absurd celebrity-plus-wild-card-social-justice-issue Mad Libs headlines embolden me to feel both amused and indignant). “I have to get this article to 250 words for Google-related reasons.” “So basically, some of you may be saying ‘what the fuck did I just read?’ And that’s exactly what you should be saying because this is 2017 and Taylor Swift covered in multiple table cloths is news. Xoxo. LYLAS.” Does one piece of strong investigative journalism every few months justify countless “news” items that speak to the most unthinking, most complicit, and so most dangerous, parts of the human mind? I can’t decide. I do know that an obsession with celebrity created Donald Trump, that mistaking culture wars as representative of our political climate created Donald Trump, and that the complexity of thought modeled by such publications—appropriated from the most eye-grabbing moral outrage performed on social media—is so hollow, so simplistic, that it could be mimicked to a T by Russian trolls to create propaganda that would alter the outcome of the 2016 election.

A recent study from NYU parses the psychological layers of our reactions to moral conflict when engaged with online, defining “moral contagion” as “the spread of moral and political ideas in online social networks.” It’s a contagion because these reactions are not informed strictly by the conflicts themselves, but by the mode through which we experience them and how quickly our experiences of them can be broadcast. Communicating every thought about every moral conflict has become so effortless, even obligatory, that it feels like nothing could possibly be informing our reactions beyond the conflicts themselves. But another study, in Nature Research Journal, explains how reading about moral outrage online triggers stimuli we would not experience from hearing about it offline, creating the opportunity for marketing-as-journalism to go viral:

“Research on virality shows that people are more likely to share content that elicits moral emotions such as outrage. Because outrageous content generates more revenue through viral sharing, natural selection-like forces may favour ‘supernormal’ stimuli that trigger much stronger outrage responses than do transgressions we typically encounter in everyday life. Supporting this hypothesis, there is evidence that immoral acts encountered online incite stronger moral outrage than immoral acts encountered in person or via traditional forms of media. These observations suggest that digital media transforms moral outrage by changing both the nature and prevalence of the stimuli that trigger it. The architecture of the attention economy creates a steady flow of outrageous ‘clickbait’ that people can access anywhere and at any time.”

I’m not saying no one ever shares anything they’re outraged by because it has made them genuinely, justifiably upset. I am saying our feelings are not the only factors in our reactions, and are not what matters most to the publications and platforms we may not realize we’re creating free content for.