Just like politics, our worldview is becoming less about what we think and more about what we feel. Internet culture might be pushing us all apart—by design
Our world appears to be angrier. We seem to disagree more with each other, especially online. When Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen went public in 2021, one of the things she said was that “publishers are saying, ‘Oh, if I do more angry, polarising, divisive content, I get more money.’ Facebook has set up a system of incentives that is pulling people apart.”
The Cambridge Analytica scandal showed how social media manipulation worked for political ends almost 10 years ago, and while social media firms have changed since then, and are more aware of the worry of manipulation, we, the users, still experience the world as an angrier, more polarised place.
It continues, to X (formerly Twitter) making money from advertising next to tweets that media analysis firm NewsGuard claimed was from users “advancing false or egregiously misleading claims about the [Israel-Palestinian] conflict.”
There has been much theorising that so-called ‘filter bubbles’ were the cause of our polarisation. The theory went that the algorithms running our media feeds were serving us only content we agreed with. This has been shown to be wrong. Some now believe that it is our constant exposure to things we fundamentally disagree with that is making us disagree even more.
If we look at history, this time of anger and polarisation is likely not unique.
Surely in times of great upheaval, extreme anger and polarisation also happened—for example during the French Revolution. However, what is certainly new is our level of exposure to polarising opinions and events, and this exposure happens in large parts on social media, where we spend so much of our time and, increasingly, get our news.
On TikTok, #wartok is full of images from wars in Palestine and Ukraine. Competing accounts supporting either side in any conflict can draw in a lot of money. There is, in other words, money in emotions, because emotions mean engagement, which means clicks, and clicks mean advertising revenue and the potential for direct donations as well for some content creators. But let’s be frank—even successful creators make small money compared to the media companies that host and profit from their work.