That is it exactly.

Even 24 hour news only has so many seconds of time to put things on the screen and you only have so many hours to try to understand what is happening in the world.

There news gets chopped up into TikTok or Tweet-sized memes which contributes to the distortion (consider a Tweet vs a Last Week Tonight show on any topic), each of those memes are evolved and signal boosted by social media and out the other end of the algorithm pops content that maximally compels your attention which is flavored with the bias from the recommendation algorithm (i.e. What ever bias Elon/Zuck/ByteDance wants to introduce: suppressing Gaza protest coverage, promoting alt-right viewpoints, etc)

Look at the screen time on your phone, what percentage of your day is spent being told what you're going to read next by an algorithm?

The motivations of the algorithm are not to maximize your understanding or knowledge or tether to reality, they are to make you scroll one more page. People can see how effective large AI systems, like LLMs, can be when deployed at scale.

Recommendation algorithms are also machine learning, but with less pre-IPO hype and they are just as powerful and are deployed at a scale where almost every person on Earth has their world view affected by them.

They have to go or be severely regulated. They can be useful when they recommend you books or movies, but when they're the gatekeeper of information for the majority of the population then they are informational weapons of mass destruction and should be regulated as such.