Speaker 2
So there's a phenomenon called audience capture. And audience capture is a term that gets used to refer to social media content creators, usually, whether that's Substack or Twitter or TikTok, anywhere, it doesn't matter, where because they get paid in part by the size of their following and engaged followers, meaning they want the followers to share their content, they want the algorithm to surface their content. So they're creating content both for humans and for the machines. One of the things that happens is they have this interesting line that they have to straddle, particularly if they're creating content in a hot button space. So let's say that you're creating content, you know, for the American left, right? But your following is increasingly maybe the socialist left, or maybe the more like kind of global left, as opposed to maybe classical liberals that you started with. When those followers criticize your work and say, oh, you're an apologist for this, you're not writing enough about that, you haven't taken into account this group, this niche position, this other thing. They're not going to want to alienate that audience who now has a whole proliferation of different left-wing writers that they can go choose from. So whereas in a newspaper environment, there were different challenges, right? The newspaper had to appeal to the advertisers. So maybe they would be captured by industry. They wouldn't criticize pharma as much as they should have or something like that. It's happening at a much more kind of granular individual level. And that desire to create coverage and content appealing to a particular niche is really what lets them earn a living. And so you see them moving in the trajectory to ensure that they don't lose their audience by putting out something that their audience is going to hate.