News is not a consumer product. Certainly I prefer to hear good news, and I am made unhappy by bad news. But this is not the same as preferring chocolate ice cream over strawberry, so that ice cream vendors can appeal to my preferences with ads for one flavor over the other.
News is situational awareness. I need to know what’s going on around me, so I can make effective plans for the future, mitigating threats and taking advantage of opportunities. I enjoy warm sunny days, and I am happy when the weather forecast predicts that the next few days will be warm and sunny. But if the weather report tries to "make me happy" by falsely predicting a sunny day when there is likely to be a thunderstorm this afternoon, I am not well served.
Isaac Asimov’s robot story, “Liar!” (1941) describes the bad results when a telepathic robot tries to follow the First Law by telling people what they want to hear, rather than what’s true.
Online social media often make the mistake of treating news as a consumer product, selecting news for each reader that corresponds with their preferences. News is treated like any other content — a lure for consumer attention, the better to sell ads aimed at those same consumers. In terms of situational awareness, serving me only news that fits my desires and preconceptions is serving me very poorly indeed.
How can they fix this? It’s reasonable for social media to observe, for example, that I am more interested in immigration issues than in international trade. But it’s not acceptable to serve me only news items that fit neatly within my (generally liberal) worldview. For adequate situational awareness, I also need to understand how others see the world, and how they respond to critiques from people like me. I need the social media to filter out (unless I ask!) messages from flaming partisans on the other side (or even on my own side!), because they will not help me toward a broader understanding of the issue. There is a real art to speaking effectively to people with very different opinions. Good social media should identify news items and opinion posts that are good examples of that art, and pass them on. (Doing this well may require advances in artificial intelligence, but those advances are within reach.)
When I read this kind of news, I am increasingly broadly educated on the issues I care about. I am better able to discuss these issues, even with people I disagree with. And I might even find myself changing my mind or moderating my position, thanks to new insights. This brings me closer to being the kind of educated citizen that the Founding Fathers of our country wanted to see.