Do you ever scroll through social media and see a post that has you just itching to reply?

You know the kind. Sometimes it’s asking an inane question with an obvious answer, or occasionally someone will say something just so incredibly wrong that you scratch your head immediately get the urge to correct them.

Do you?  Do you click and open up the comment box and jump right in to say your piece?

Thing is… you probably shouldn’t. This is mostly all click bait.  It’s an engagement trap. It’s designed to prod your subconscious into scrambling out a reply before your fingers even realize what they are doing. 

It’s a hook, you are the fish. It’s a flame, and you are the moth.

I see these kinds rolling up through my feed so often, and I sometimes get the urge to open up the replies to have a little chuckle at all the people earnestly arguing with the original poster. Who falls for this stuff, I wonder. But we both know, don’t we? We all fall for it now and then. And believe me when I tell you the original poster cares not a whit what you think or say. They are not posting to change your mind or become your new internet frenemy. 

Writing pithy posts that squirm under your skin and evoke a reaction from you is pretty much a science at this point. And it is such a lucrative one, it is a business, too. Clicking, liking, sharing, commenting—all of these actions that you do in response to this ire-generating post are little flags for the algorithm, which itself doesn’t care if you are happy or sad, angry or jubilant. The algorithm only wants engagement. It only cares if you interact with the post.  When you do it amplifies it, elevates the voice of the author, give credibility to the account, and shines a glowing digital spotlight on any future posts by that same invisible person.

Engagement. Clicking. Correcting. Answering. All of it is fuel for the fire that sets the engines of those accounts aglow and blasts them higher into public prominence. 

What happens then?  One might suppose any number of things happen to an account that has supercharged itself in the algorithm, but if you don’t believe they are sold to someone with a message more sinister than the click bait you clicked on—why not write me a comment or two and tell me all the reasons I’m so wrong, huh? If you’re giving out engagement for free, I’ll take some too.

I recently took a mini-vacation to the mountains here in Alberta and I spent a couple nights in a hotel near the ski hills. 

All sorts of local folks do this… and then spend their evenings chilling in front of the television with a cozy drink in hand. The last guy who had my room left his social media accounts logged in on the television in what was now my room, so I’m pretty sure that’s what he had been up to, too.

Algorithms, in case you didn’t already know this, drop us into informational silos. They are feedback loops, showing us increasingly more—and more extreme versions—of what we have already watched. And because of this, we don’t often get to peek into how other people are being walled up in different kinds of silos completely opposite of our own.

This guy, another Albertan—I did some research with his username—had been mainlining right leaning video content like it was oxygen. The account was logged in when I opened up the app and I clicked through to see what he had been watching recently, and it amounted to a steady diet of single-perspective politics that ran so counter to the reality in which I live I was almost nauseous reading the click-bait titles and thumbnails.

I was kinder than I should have been, and logged him out, taking more care with his privacy that he was obviously capable.

But I did spend the weekend pondering how any of us can break through the silos that these platforms are erecting around all of us. That is, if I were to meet this guy in real life and attempt to have a conversation, how to do you bridge the gap when the things he is watching are literally dehumanizing me, my family and my friends. 

How could a single conversation attempt to compete with a firehose of hate and misinformation? 

How do you live together when the things these kinds of folks are watching are pushing the idea that certain people are not even worth living with?

There is a clever trick used by people doing dark deeds? Have you noticed?

It’s not complicated. In fact it’s just about the simplest thing to do when you have a huge audience and a big microphone. 

When you have broken a rule, committed a crime, or hurt someone physically, mentally or otherwise, then is the time for you to do one simple thing: you accuse the other side of doing the same thing.

You don’t need evidence.  You don’t need facts. You don’t need truth.

You just need to claim that someone else is doing what you are (in fact and often provably so) actually doing.

This isn’t advice, of course. It’s gross and morally corrupt—but then when has that stopped some people, right? But it is a weapon of misinformation that is actively used against us as regular people routinely these days. What it is instead is a warning to think critically and look deeper: not every dark deed is equal. Not every accusation is true. And the people pointing fingers at each other are just as likely to be deliberately muddying the waters of reality to devalue the accusations aimed towards them.

Sadly, this tactic works. When a half-attentive audience hears that all sides are broken, dark and corrupt they usually don’t have time or resources to dig into the evidence, they don’t look if there is fire at the source of the smoke, they just see a haze and assume it is all bluster. Dark deeds are ignored or equated or hurt the victims even more.

When both sides are pointing fingers it usually means that one of them is very guilty and the other is being smeared. Stay vigilant.