The internet runs on ads.
Ad companies pay for all the “free” popular social media we use. Ad companies dictate to social media what their clients want their ads to be associated with, not associated with, and drive media of all kinds to push inflammatory and click-bait content that drives engagement and views. It’s why you indirectly can’t swear, talk about suicide, drugs, death, or violence. Sure, you technically can unless ToS prohibits it, but if companies tell their ad hosts they don’t want to be associated with someone talking about guns, the content discussing guns gets fewer ads, fewer ads = less revenue, low-revenue gets pushed to the bottom.
So lowbrow political rage bait, science denialism, and fake conspiracies drives people to interact and then gets pushed to the top because it gets ad revenue. Content that delves into critical thought and requires introspection or contemplation languishes.
Ads are destroying society because stupid and rage sells views.
I’m not generally disagreeing with your assessment of the current situation, just a little historical BTW.
Interesting, I never thought of it that way.
However, most of that is still part of advertising; producers proactively strive to get reviewed.
Reaching out to reviewers is still technically advertising in the broadest definition of the word, but it is distinct from commercial advertising where companies pay to broadcast their specific messages to users.
This distinction is also reflected in the way that most companies are operated these days: reaching out to reviewers with information and offering them review units would fall under the marketing / communications / strategy department, but wouldn’t be referred to as advertising unless they were paying the reviewer for a positive review, which isn’t even legal in some places.