The troll operation liked divisive, emotionally charged content because the social media platforms liked divisive, emotionally charged content. Culture-war stuff issues of race and gender and identity in general, issues that got a rise out of people. Facebook and Twitter were and still are optimized to send traffic to posts about these subjects, and so the troll outfit optimized its content accordingly.

This was the story of Mic.com, one of the first online media startups to capitalize on left-wing millennial outrage culture. It went hard on social-justice issues and directed ire at everyone from manspreaders to Nazis. Clicky, empurpled headlines oversold conflict and outrage.

While the writers and reporters may have believed in the companys mission of social justice, the sites founders had actually stumbled backward into it. An expos about Mic, published by The Outline in August , revealed that Mic chanced upon the social justice narrative, discovered it was Facebook gold, and mined away. One former staffer told The Outline that Mic learned you could commodify peoples feelings about race and gender for clicks earlier than most other online publications.

The founders of Mic were trolls in the standard internet sense. They tapped into strong feelings and sentiments they didnt necessarily share, and thus they reverse-engineered a briefly successful media operation out of the algorithmic preferences of social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.