Moral of the story: ignore bad things and hope they go away.

Looking at the postscript the coder put up, I think the moral is "don't blow things out of proportion."

That is, report that a mass shooting happened. Don't harp on it so much that everyone everywhere fears a mass shooting going on right now on their front lawn. The same can be applied to shark attacks, terrorism, etc.

I also tend to think the problem has two factors: The desire for ratings vs. the need to inform and the need for information vs. the tendency to misapply information to reinforce beliefs and fears.

That's one way to look at it.

Based on this game, if I want everyone to be relatively happy and safe, I must not pay any attention to the problems. I realize that's not the intention, but it's a valid argument against the claim that we become what we behold as put forth in this game's mechanics.

The TV made me do it.

Cute, if a bit obvious.
I'm assuming that there's always only one possible outcome.

I agree that it's cute, simplistic, and obvious. I really like that about it.

I also believe that the SE community reacts in a similar way. Like many communities, we have a point system. More upmods equals more attention. I will click on a +6 to 10 post with a a mediocre title before I'll choose a post with an interesting title but has neutral or negative mods.

There are some people who post things regardless of what other members think, but the majority of members tailor their posts to be interesting to other. Looking at the last 20 posts, most of them have pictures of Trump. It looks like a mini-loop to me. That's not to say that the posts are not interesting, important, or meaningful.

Looking at the election, however, I believe that the media elected Trump. There are many things along the political spectrum that made a Trump victory possible, but the media was the biggest. Liberal, conservative, extreme, comedy shows, game shows, the View, SNL, the interwebs and youtube channels, Twitter, Facebook...they all talked about him nonstop. It legitimized him and elevated his status from a B-list punchline to the unbelievable GOP nominee.

The idea of not giving credibility someone like Trump reminds me of the movement to giving attention to a shooter when a mass shooting happens. It not about not reporting or paying attention....it's how the reporting is done. It's about stopping the loop.

I think the game works with the assumption that you are handed a society that already has started a loop (hence only one ending).

Point well taken, only the media does not operate in a vacuum, it is not necessarily an autonomous creature that generates content and amplifies it on its own.
Despicable as Trump may be, he deserves due credit for knowing how to play the media, and how to create and maintain an audience. The media didn't create him or make him president, this was a collaborative process.
But I also question the notion that people are simply empty vessels, waiting to be filled with whatever they're fed and manipulate by the media. Sure it's easy enough to see the people who elected Trump as suckers who got conned, but were they conned by the media, Trump himself, or some larger delusion borne out of cultural/economic disconnection?

I agree that people are not empty vessels. They are part of the loop. If you try to take pictures in the game of things not involving the hate spiral, then you get a message saying that you are not giving the people what they want.

Trump knew exactly what he was doing, the media saw ratings, and then all hell broke loose. More people were exposed to Trump, and more hell broke loose.

Let's just keep in mind that more people actually voted against Trump. In real life, the positive messages of dissent and resistance are just as powerful, if not more so.

Very true. As for dissent and resistance: I think things have to progress to a point before those really come into play. Also, just because more people voted against Trump doesn't change that a large portion of his supporters came from the aforementioned loop.

Did you get the gay midget clown porn ending? If not, we may have been playing different games.