when things don't work out the way someone expects them to, yet lots of other people seem okay with how it did work out, that person has to either change or justify their thinking. even 'i understood less about this than i thought' is a change of mind for those who once assumed they had it all figured out.
i lost a spelling bee as a kid and for a minute there i convinced myself i did spell 'address' correctly, buuut 'some places only use one D and the judges didn't know that', and that's why i lost. when i returned to my seat in the audience, and told my mother 'why i lost', she looked me dead in my tear-filled eyes and said 'sweetie, that's a lie and you know it'.
and i'm thankful every day that she did. she could have danced around it so easily, either justifying me or not denying it yet offering alternate explanations which might help support the idea.
lying to yourself to justify something not going how you had it planned in your head is a very human response, but it ain't exactly a healthy one. let alone at scale.
for every post that doesn't do well on social media, there's an 'algorithm' or a 'shadowban' to cite. some all-powerful moderator trying to socially assassinate you, you personally. there are plentiful real examples of companies doing this, with which one can point to and say 'this is happening to me, too!'
but often it's just, the platform isn't built in a way where every post can succeed, nor should that be a desirable goal. i don't want nazi propaganda just barely skirting terms of service to be given the same weight as queer art and gaming essay vids and shitposts.
viewers, over time, due to the limited hours in the day, have to choose to engage with certain posts instead of others, regardless of their intent. the more people on the platform, the easier it is for another person to get attention instead of you. this eventually creates biases about what posts do well and what doesn't.
outrage in controlled bursts is a reliable-enough meal ticket for some people, no matter where they fall on the political spectrum. 'look how terrible this poster is' as they continue to actively seek out terrible posters to post about on the terrible posting website.
every 'main character' who is told they're the scum of the earth, was given permission to post and post about their behavior by shared rulers, by the companies who own the platforms so much of internet infrastructure were built on top of.
over time, posts tend to get louder, angrier, hornier, whatever it takes to make it more enough for people to feel a need to comment on it, engage with it. this is seen as the system working as intended for social media corps.
engagement's engagement, after all. even if the comment is 'you're promoting genocide please stop', that's still engagement, and when you hit back to return to the main feed, that's a chance for an ad refresh!
so the angriest, loudest, horniest posters rise to the top, elected via populism to become Content Creators. just think: you can be one too, if you can find a new adjective! at this stage of elevation, any active moderation is seen by Content Consumers as destroying something they, as a collective, helped to build. but Consumers are supposed to be Consuming Content, we can't take that away from them! then they'll stop engaging
consider, though: a platform which definitionally, knowingly, divides people into 'creators' and 'consumers', 'influencers' and the 'influenced', 'hyper-posters' and the 'carols journeying into qanon', is a platform with a built-in class divide.
if you rule over a small nation and people are unhappy with how you're treating them, at their material conditions: keeping them blaming each other for it takes heat off yourself.
social media platforms aren't nations, though, are they? which means there's no consequences for using nation-ruling tactics, according to the executives! once the angry mobs take it offline, then it's someone else's problem. no matter how many mass shootings, how many literal genocides, their platforms directly contribute to inciting.
when failures of the machine are seen as failures of that machine, then it's easy to bring back in the very same machinists to try again, who conclude the problem was user-error.
the machine works as intended.
