I Used to be in a Cult Part Four: Sympathy for the Fascists

Social media is a collection of cults, all created by algorithms. Every social media outlet, from YouTube to Twitter, has an AI algorithm that is designed to keep you addicted to their website or app by constantly pushing content in your direction that will keep you scrolling or watching videos for as long as possible. The owners of those social media outlets have done this deliberately, because the longer you’re on their outlet, the more ad revenue they can generate. They purposefully made the algorithm to make you addicted to their outlet so you’ll be on your phone or computer for every waking second of every day. And with every algorithm, there’s a hundred people on each outlet watching what content you’re viewing so they can adjust the algorithm to make you as addicted as possible. This was discussed in Johann Hari’s book Lost Connections, and The Chaos Machine by Max Fisher, the latter of which I haven’t mentioned until now. Both are great books and I highly recommend them.

The Chaos Machine goes a step further than Lost Connections. While Lost Connections talks about how social media is designed to be addictive, The Chaos Machine talks about how social media companies exploit the brain that we’ve had to evolve for real life, human connection, and uses it in ways that we’ve never evolved to handle.

Dunbar’s Number is the theory that our brains evolved to have 150 people in our lives. Family, friends, coworkers, neighbors, etc. This is because in the hunter-gatherer days, we didn’t have a larger number in our community. We evolved to have relationships with no more than that number of people. Social media made us into a community of billions; far greater than our brains are able to handle. Our brains also don’t know how to differentiate the real world community from the online community. When we go online and the social media algorithms create a new community for us, as far as we’re concerned, they’re the same as the people we talk to in real life.

Our brains are evolved to think like our community. If the social media algorithms determine you to be a part of a leftist community, you’ll start to think like that community. If they determine you to be a part of a fascist community, they’ll send you in that direction. Most of us don’t want to be discarded by our community. We’re evolved to want to belong to the community. So after seeing enough political propaganda from our online community, we eventually stop questioning them and just adapt their ideas. We get addicted to likes, having our content reposted, and having positive content shoved our way. And we also find ourselves wanting to do harm to those that threaten the community. It’s why when we spend our days debating politics, we don’t do so with the intention of changing anyone’s mind. We do it because we want the other person to shut the fuck up.

I got addicted to arguing with people online because I saw them as a threat to my community. I neglected my family because I wanted to purge threats from my community. It’s why I neglected my real life friends and dropped former real life friends that I communicated with online. I got more addicted to purging threats to my fake online community than I was with cultivating the relationships in my real world community, and it nearly destroyed me. Because of Dunbar’s Number, I ditched real world friendships to be a part of a fake, online community. My brain needed less than 150 people to communicate with, and I sacrificed my real world relationships so I could have those 150 relationships with strangers on a screen. On my end, I’m ashamed of myself. I’m ashamed for ending all those relationships. Some of which, despite my best efforts, will never be repaired.

On the other end, where the people that run these social media outlets caused an addiction, I’m filled with anger towards them for turning me into that person.

Nobody wakes up one day and decides to become a fascist. They don’t wake up and start hating people because of the color of their skin, their nationality, and they sure af don’t decide out of the clear blue that they want a government that just hurts people and never helps them. The world is struggling with fascist movements all over, and it’s because of social media algorithms.

Social media algorithms thrive on posting things that will get our attention. The best way to get our attention is to piss us off. Old media knew that. The old saying with newspapers was, “If it bleed, it leads”. Our brains are wired to pay special attention to threats. We don’t pay nearly as much attention to uplifting things. When we see things that are happy (like a video of a cat being cute), we enjoy it for a few seconds and then move on. But when we see something like a story of undocumented immigrants taking over an apartment complex, we pay attention. We comment on the story. We share the story. Even if we know it’s bullshit, we post comments saying it’s bullshit, and we might even post a link from Snopes saying it’s bullshit.

The algorithm doesn’t determine whether or not we’re engaging with content because we like it or hate it. As far as the algorithm is concerned, if we’re engaging with the content, we want to see more of it. It’s why I always felt like every time I beat someone in an online debate, five more people showed up to debate. The algorithm determined that whatever I was commenting on was engaging, so they showed it to more people.

Let’s say you’re some 17 year old boy who’s apolitical but likes video games. So you go on YouTube to watch videos of people playing video games. You post some comments on a video and watch the video all the way through. YouTube’s algorithm says, “Let’s recommend some more videos about gaming”. So you click on one and watch it. YouTube’s algorithm recommends another, except this gamer has some right-wing political ideas that you find weird. At first you think the ideas are bullshit, but you like the gamer despite it because you know dick about politics but watching them play video games is fun. YouTube starts recommending other videos of even more right-wing gamers. You watch and after a while, you find that their ideas start making sense. So you start watching more recommended videos. Some of these aren’t about video games at all, but just right-wing politics. And you’re agreeing with them. You’re engaging in the comments. This has become your community now. A few months later you’re on 4chan posting pepe memes, screaming about how minorities are killing this country and “illegal immigrants” all need to be murdered. If you’re really radicalized, you take it to the real world and shoot up a mosque in New Zealand or a church in Texas.

Or let’s say you’re me. A liberal in 2008 who is celebrating Barack Obama becoming the next president and on Facebook. Facebook sees you and starts pushing more political content your way to your liking. But the content makes you angry. A post about a guy saying that Obama is a secret Kenyan Muslim. The Republicans trying to kill Obamacare. Mitch McConnell being Mitch McConnell. You make jokes about it or rage in the comments. Occasionally a troll comes by in the comments and you make it your life’s mission to tear down their self esteem and send them back to their own corner of Facebook with their tail between their legs. So Facebook starts pushing more of that content your way. The content creators notice that the stuff that creates outrage gets more engagement, so they post more stuff that makes you mad. You start learning about ideas you hadn’t heard before about institutionalized racism and sexism. After a few years, Facebook starts recommending more leftist pages and groups, which helps because you’ve become a bit disillusioned with the Democrats and their endless failures to enact any progressive legislation. Then the 2016 election happens and you lose your mind. Facebook starts recommending far left pages talking about socialism and anarchism. Those pages hate the Democrats, which you think is strange at first because you’ve always known Democrats as “the left”, but you don’t say anything because you don’t want to be an outsider to your new online community. You’re also dealing with trolls in the comments full time like it’s your job. And after watching Trump for the last four years and the Democrats not taking any real means to stop him, you’ve lost faith in the government. You’re now an anarchist and feel like you’re one bad day from burning the state to the ground (chill out, FBI, I’m not making any plans for political violence-just stating that for the record).

Side note: I sometimes wonder if I’d have become an anarchist if I grew up in a country like Denmark or the Nordic countries where they have strong social programs and labor protections. I know that if I lived in a government that was more concerned with listening to their citizens, I probably wouldn’t be so angry with the current state of affairs.

The hypothetical about the 17 year old that turned into a fascist isn’t a hypothetical. It’s how Bolsonaro got elected in Brazil. It’s also how Trump got elected. It’s why Trump’s followers seem like they’re in a cult. They are. The cult of social media.

When I learned how the social media algorithms work, I didn’t hate fascists anymore. Ninety-nine percent of them weren’t fascists on their own. They became that way through constant propaganda being pushed on them by YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. I don’t hate them anymore. I pity them. They’re as brainwashed as I was. The algorithm just pushed them in a different direction. In the real world, they’re as human as I am. They’re motivated by a fear of the unknown, a hatred of “the other”, and think they’re doing what they need to make their community safe.

The owners of the social media platforms know what they’re doing. They see radicalization as the cost of doing business. After January 6^th Mark Zuckerberg deleted a bunch of fascist pages and groups that were pushing radicalization, but he allowed them back after a few months when he saw that engagement dropped. Twitter did likewise with thousands of followers. Engagement dropped, the value of Twitter dropped, and Elon Musk swooped in to buy it and we all know the rest. The owners of social media will do whatever they have to do to keep us glued to our screens, and if it means that an attempted coup and some mass shootings happen, that just the cost they’re willing to bear to keep their stock prices up.

The best way to beat fascists isn’t by voting, or arguing online, or even punching them in the face. We need to destroy the algorithms, and even my anarchist ass knows that it’s going to take government regulation to force their hand. Some governments and NGOs in Europe are working to build the means to make it happen. We’ll still need political pressure to do it here.

One part of The Chaos Machine stood out to me. They talked about how Brenton Tarrant, the New Zealand mosque shooter, had his livestreamed videos from Facebook posted on 8Chan. While most of the commenters, in accordance with their community, egged the shooter on and praised him, one of the young men watching the video was horrified. He had started to question the community quietly because after they radicalized him into being an incel, he began a friendship through Facebook messenger with a woman. He had believed what the incel community taught him about women-that they were all heartless sluts and bitches that hated all men. His friendship with that woman caused him to realize that what he was taught was wrong and he began to question everything his online community had taught him. The cracks formed in his ideology. After seeing the video of the mosque shooting, he left the platform. He left fascism. It made me think of stories of white supremacists that left the movement not because people punched him in the face in the street, or because they raged against them online. It was because they ended up meeting other minorities in the real world and made friends with them. Along with stopping these algorithms that feed us propaganda and teach us to hate and be in a constant state of anger, we need to just fucking talk to each other. I promise you’ll find we’re more alike than different.