Not sure i fully agree with that. Yes theres far more information on the internet to research. Theres also way more fake information too and a lot of social media interaction is full of bots or misinformation.
In terms of what "hooks" the masses, rather than i nice detailed piece, the attention span of people watching "shorts", looking at twitter which has a limited numbers of characters but most importantly, social media "tailors" (more engagement so you are hooked) your feeds to send you what you want to see, so you are just getting reinforced with more and more news of the side you want to see. If you want to see racist news, you are only going to get fed with racist news. If you want to see corbyn is a saviour news, you will only get this.
There is no balance unless you deliberately look for it but people are too lazy and won't do it.
I think this is the bigger problem, separating out the real news from the fake **** and the bots. And like you say, the soundbite, bitesize snips of info that don't give any context or deeper analysis. It's too easy for somebody on social media to post an inflammatory headline and before anybody has bothered to check the facts, it's gone viral.
I think in some respects, my generation had it easier when I was a kid. You had BBC, ITV and then later Channel 4. So everybody was seeing the same news and could make an informed decision on it.
There was a youtube channel that I watched with my daughter when she was quite young, called Bill's channel, it was a bloke who presented stories/memes etc to kids and then asked if it was real or fake. It was done in a really kid friendly way and it's given my daughter a good critical thinking approach to stuff that she sees on the internet.
