Advertising is such a big part of the modern world where they carefully research the human psychology and take advantage of it to sway consumers into buying their goods or services. It's difficult for an individual to fully tune out, after all a ton of services on the internet are free at the cost of being exposed to advertising.

But this cost leads to the economic incentives correspondingly being morphed - to get paid, websites need a lot of impressions and clicks, so they change their headlines or messaging to lure in more views, even if it means exaggerating heavily or just straight up making things up. And advertisers also still get data, lots of data on maybe browsing habits or building up a profile of the kind of user you are. So a free internet comes at the cost of ads being everywhere, which as you say compounds their psychological effect, in addition to website quality being lowered as they try to bait more clicks, and of course our data being monitored and perhaps privacy breached.

Then there are the older mediums like television or newspaper, which also rely on advertising but they are easier to tune out of and give advertisers a lot less tracking or data power

On a side note, I think the series list at the bottom of the article is getting pretty big... Maybe a sort of "advertisement" for your other articles if you will although you're not looking to take our money haha, maybe consolidate into one master link?