If You Make It Trend, You Make It True
Renee DiResta's investigation offers a stark warning about the trustworthiness of the content they read online - even beyond the usual concerns about partisanship.
Usually, when someone says people are “ruled by algorithms”, it’s a bit of an overstatement. People don’t lose their critical thinking skills just because of a sorting program on a social media site.
However, enough people are happy to engage with content that supports what they already think that anyone who can direct a crowd can amass a disproportionate amount of influence.
Invisible Rulers is Renee DiResta’s investigation into how online crowds become mobilized around different narratives. She explores the deliberate attempts to shape crowd opinoin and direct it toward political ends that represent a niche set of interest more than a broader public one.
DiResta begins by descibing how one influencer made a conspiracy theory about Wayfair go viral.
The Great Wayfair Conspiracy
In June 2020, a QAnon YouTuber named “Amazing Polly” tweeted a page of Wayfair cabinets and wondered why they were so expensive, why there were price differences between similar models, and why the cabinets had girls’ names. Polly intimated that Wayfair was invovled in child sex trafficking.
Her post went viral in July as the QAnon community built on Polly’s speculations by posting images of missing children alongside cabinet models with the same names. Polly’s nonsense gained enough traction that social media algorithms “saw the sudden high-velocity outpouring of interest in pricy filing cabinets as a signal to surface the [sex trafficking] theory to even more people.”
It’s a stark example of a reversal in who can decide which ideas massive audiences become exposed to:
“The power to shape public opinion—for centuries, the purview of invisible rulers withi media, institutions, and positions of authority who had the capacity to define and disseminate messages—is no longer controlled from the top down. The new invisible rulers—influencers and algorithms supported by online crowds—excel at bringing information (along with a proliferation of rumors) to mass attention, from the bottom up. Underpinning this ecosystem is a new reality: if you amke it trend, you make it true.”
Not All Events Are “Real” Events
Events are real in that they occur in reality, but not all of them are significant or have the meaning that are sometimes ascribed to them. DiResta quotes a famous propagandist, Edward Bernays, who described pseudo-events, which only took on meaning because media reported on it.
Social media platforms have given many new influencers the ability to create these kinds of events.
“Pseudo-events may differ depending on which faction a user belongs to—anti-vax, pro-choice, transit activist, QAnon. Within their online community, your neighbor or your sister may well be blind with rage about an obscure topic mentioned in an ephemeral tweet that you’ll never see. And yet, it is completely real to them: if you make it trend, you make it true.”
Pseudo-events can be anything from tweets to conspiracies based on sensationalized news stories given new context. A boring announcement of a cabinet sale for one user can be evidence of a global conspiracy for another.
Outrage about pseudo-events can even be coordinated to hack the “trending” section of platforms like X.
Outrage at Scale and on Demand
In 2020, Shahid Buttar, a Democratic Socialist started the hashtag #PelosiMustGo. He wanted to get this hashtag to the top of X’s trending topics section to maximize pressure on Nancy Pelosi to relent to a the more progressive wing of her party.
He coordinated with several thousand Discord server members to tweet #PelosiMustGo at the same time on the same day. It began to climb the trending news rankings. Once it reached rank seven, the Republican candidate who ran against Pelosi in California tweeted the same hashtag.
After that, the hashtag moved from only the Democratic Socialist corner of X to QAnon, then to the partisan conservative outlet The Daily Wire.
“Most of the hundreds of thousands of Twitter users who saw that hashtag trend never knew that #PelosiMustGo began because someone gave marching orders in a private Discord channel. The hashtag hit their field of view, and they reacted. They likely assumed that some sizable number of Americans somewhere were spontaneously tweeting against the then Speaker of the House—and clicked on the trend because they were curious about why.”
Stories that get a lot of attention on social media aren’t necessarily impactful. Especially in subjects like politics, the attention can result from coordination that users know nothing about.
Invisible Rulers is an important read for anyone who curates their news online.