NYT:

….The emergence of Vice President Kamala Harris as the new Democratic front-runner touched off new paroxysms of disinformation and explicitly hateful comments. More than one in 10 posts mentioning her on X on Sunday included racist or sexist attacks, according to PeakMetrics, which tracks activity online. They included false claims about her race and whether she was ineligible to run for the presidency because she was not a citizen. (She is a citizen, and she is eligible to run.)…

Most social media platforms profit when outrage and indignation results in more engagement, and ultimately, more advertising revenue. Companies have little incentive to alter the algorithms that allow toxic content to spread, despite calls from political leaders appealing to society’s better angels.

That dynamic appears all but certain to define this year’s presidential election, as it did in 2016 and 2020.