The Predictability of a Social-Media Discourse

Online, reactions follow an unsurprising pattern, even as the events that cause them feel increasingly unpredictable.

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By the time you read these words, last Sunday’s Oscars slap will already be filed away in the dusty meme catalog in your head somewhere between “Binders Full of Women” and “Bernie Sanders’ Mittens” (Oh, you alphabetize your meme catalog? Sure, buddy.) In a week, you’ll only be 83 percent sure the slap didn’t actually happen in the Trump era. Everything online burns too hot and too fast. And because this is a newsletter that thinks a bit too hard about how information travels, I wanted to take a moment and do that for The Slap™.

I’m writing this on Monday evening after a day of internet surveying, and the thing that sticks out to me is just how predictable the discourse surrounding the slap has been. In an era where almost every big cultural product is painstakingly scripted and designed to achieve some hopeful level of virality and engagement, we got a genuinely shocking, confusing moment: two incredibly famous people involved in a physical altercation at a globally televised event rooted in fusty pomp and circumstance and tradition. And yet the reaction to the whole spectacle played out the same way any usual political scandal or social-media dustup might. Even the notion that this event would unleash a take-pocalypse to end all other bad take cycles failed to materialize.

If Future Charlie had appeared in your living room around the Oscars pre-show (sorry to intrude) and told you what was coming, I’m guessing that, depending on how much of a sicko you are, you could have written a general script for the aftermath: Twitter explodes, first with confusion and then with a general shock. Likely even before there was any real clarity about what really happened, the first strident opinions trickle in, blaming Chris Rock or Will Smith for the confrontation. These opinions are confidently voiced and confidently amplified by like-minded people, enough that they catch the eye of people who think that opinion is bad or perhaps even dangerous. The incident itself, thanks to quickly available hi-res images, becomes a meme around the same moment. Some people will be having fun with the meme, while others, viewing the event through a more serious lens, will be quite upset with those making jokes. As soon as Smith wins the Oscar, you’ll get the takes about whether he deserves the award. But most everything after is mostly a second-order take—a commentary on the commentary. By the show’s end, the slap has achieved Mass Attentional Event status, which means it is a vessel for content of any type. Any bit of expertise in a related or unrelated field can be affixed to the attentional event, and any other news or cultural event can be viewed through the lens of the Mass Attentional Event. So naturally, you’ll get at least a few Ukraine/Slap remixes.

You’ll get people delighting in the fact that the event is scrambling people’s brains, and you’ll get the people whose brains have been scrambled and are just...tweeting through it. You’ll get one famous person who steps in it early and deletes the tweet but becomes the avatar for a cringey reaction. You’ll get the people who’ve been accidentally thrust into the conversation because they have an unfortunately similar name and social-media handle. You’ll get parodies about bad takes and then people who think the parody jokes are real, and then the people who get mad that the people fell for the parody jokes because, come on, they should be better than that. You get the MAGA contrarians latching onto the take that Hollywood is full of horrible, hypocritical cretins and this is proof. You get the people who are exhausted by Mass Attentional Events like this complaining, and the people who love Mass Attentional Events getting ready to drink from the firehose. And then you have the most worthless group—jabronies like myself who like to proclaim WE ARE IN A MASS ATTENTIONAL EVENT.

sort of feels like the slap discourse is what all of twitter has been preparing for the last 2 years just without knowing it

— Charlie Warzel (@cwarzel) March 28, 2022

If you spend even casual amounts of time online, I bet you could have predicted two-thirds of what transpired post-slap. Yes, there was a brief moment of confusion, as some people attempted to figure out how to rotate the incident to fit into their larger cultural/political framework, but that sorted itself quickly. By morning, everything was in its right place.

And so of course we’d have slap truthers. Of course we’d have spats over the definition of assault that get hijacked by people having a separate discussion about the definition of violence that spins off into a discussion about wokeness or something (I tried to link to tweets here, but nearly all of them have now been deleted!). Bits and pieces of these threads then get scooped up—by members of the press writing on deadlines, by trending topics aggregators, by anyone, really—and dropped, usually without the full context, into larger stories (I’m sort of doing this, here!). People who don’t spend their days chained to social-media platforms for their jobs see these posts and then have their own diverse and usually predictable reactions—many of them end in some form of outrage.

The weirdest thing about this system is how reliably it functions. Yes, the slap was a genuinely wild thing that happened on live TV. But it doesn’t seem to matter all that much what the root content everyone is reacting to is—the output is usually quite similar. It feels like a theater performance; everyone has a part and has been working on the lines and the blocking. The curtain goes up, you hear a slap, and the program begins. This very newsletter you are reading is me playing my role in this system.

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I’ve written about this phenomenon from different angles and spent a lot of time thinking about the various ways that tech platforms kick these attentional cycles into overdrive. But this week I came upon the work of Prateek Waghre, who runs a newsletter called The Information Ecologist, which painstakingly examines “the interactions between various participants in the information ecosystem” with a focus on news and political events in India. Anyhow, he’s mapped out his mental framework for events like the slap, which he calls his “Anatomy of an Internet Conflict.” It looks like this:

It’s...a lot to take in. And so I recommend reading one of his “anatomy” pieces, as they’re quite thorough and interesting. But here I’ll try to crib a few of his points that I found helpful. The first is that in one of these conflicts, “actions will have ambivalent effects.” The way I interpret this insight is that these conflict events generate a ton of content, noise, chaos, bad vibes, etc.—but it’s not all that clear, at the end of the day, if any needles really moved.

Perhaps that’s because of his second point, which is that “an algorithmic reward will create parallel feedback loops—[that] may or may not have a tangible outcome.” In Waghre’s model, he has a Group A, which kicks the storm off with a post that includes some piece of content or speech that is deemed dangerous by Group B. When Group B calls it out—a behavior incentivized by algorithmic engagement, as other members of Group B reward it—Group A members will usually double down. Waghre notes that this creates a “cloud of conflict” consisting of:

• Pointing out harms (B)
• Accusations (B)
• Accusations in a mirror (A)
• Whataboutery (A and B)

Basically: Both sides get caught in their own feedback loops, which perpetuate more conflict and also, usually, more self-assuredness. Waghre importantly notes that this type of model isn’t meant to both-sides a given conflict—there may very well be good and bad actors in all of these confrontations. He’s just focusing on the dynamics.

In all circumstances, Waghre notes, there is an inherent “tension between taming the beast and feeding the monster.” So many of these social-media conflicts involve the amplification of other content—the best example here is the quote tweet. An amplification of something you disagree with will create awareness and act as a signal. But that signal will likely recruit members from both sides of the conflict. It may have the intended effect of creating pressure on the people you disagree with (from platform enforcers, or outside entities, or from law enforcement). It may also draw new people who disagree with you into the fray. Waghre notes that all of these dynamics work on each other at once, which might be why it’s hard to tell “who wins” in one of these conflicts.

What is striking about Waghre’s deconstruction is how it clearly highlights how all participants described in the paragraphs above are locked in a system that they, themselves, are perpetuating. If living in one of these “clouds of conflict” on social media is exhausting, it is because of that tension between taming the beast and feeding the monster. Our feeds are a cascading series of prompts: to joke around, defend people and things we care about, to raise awareness, to humiliate others, to contribute and feel seen. It’s not just hard psychologically to resist those prompts (especially when people rightly or understandably feel marginalized or attacked or outraged); it’s also—for many participants in these ecosystems—a business decision of sorts. Raising awareness and pushing back or calling others out might be righteous at times, but it also means generating engagement for yourself or your cause and the thing you dislike. There’s a constant risk/reward calculus we’re asked to make before posting, and the problem is that the deck is stacked against us. We take the prompt, we play the role, we create a bit of the broader feeling of exhaustion we bemoan. This is how we end up inadvertently rewarding many of the most shameless people in politics, media, sports, you name it.

I don’t think you need a map like Waghre’s to feel all of this in your bones or to be exhausted by it. At Garbage Day, Ryan Broderick touches on both of these things—the fact that these cycles play out enough that the extremely online are developing “viral pre-exhaustion” when they can sense a Mass Attentional Event on the horizon. He described Twitter as “a fandom app for current events”—which probably helps explain why people would lean into and even relish these conflict events, even though engagement is often futile. It’s a bunch of people (self very much included) whose identities are wrapped up in knowing everything that is happening all the time and having thoughts about it in a way that feels like participating in current events but really, mostly, isn’t.

And it might also explain that flatness I felt around the response to a genuinely shocking news event. A part of being alive in the world right now is that the reaction to everything feels so predictable even as the events themselves feel increasingly unpredictable and destabilizing.

There’s a tedious part of me that wants to say that maybe we retreat into these predictable cycles because they’re a way of exercising a bit of agency during these moments. But I’m guessing it’s simpler than that—we’ve all just got lizard brains that seek affirmation and belonging, and we’ve outsourced a lot of our public communication to platforms that exploit those natural urges by offering short-term engagement reward incentives. Either way, I think we can all agree: Hollywood’s Biggest Night!

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