Social media, as we know it, has probably changed forever. A lot of posts, especially on text-based platforms like Twitter (sorry, I don’t call it X) have become more and more vitriolic, with lots of nuance being lost in most arguments. A lot of people are colour-blind, seeing everything as black and white when in reality there is a lot of grey in between. Why?
The Commodification of Opinion (Payment for Posts)
The biggest game-changer has been the implementation of payouts for reach and engagements. If you know that you are being paid x amount as long as y number of people engage and see your tweets, you’re incentivised to say absolutely ANYTHING, as long as it brings enough views your way.
To get this reach, posts have evolved to include rage-baiting, ethnic or religious banger tweets, while others have leveraged on body-revealing or body-positive posts. When you combine this with the other monies which come in via PR deals from “influencing” or other “payments for services rendered”, it becomes a race to the bottom of who can do the most outrageous things to get the most amount of views.
According to research from MIT, false news spreads six times faster than true news on Twitter, partly because provocative content generates more engagement. This isn’t just our imagination. Platforms have literally designed their monetization to reward whatever gets the most reactions, regardless of whether it’s true, helpful, or even remotely reasonable.
The Personalisation of Ideologies
As people build personal brands on social media, we tend to express our values (i.e., what we deem as important in shaping our worldview) via our tweets and posts. This in turn leads to an aggregation of people (an audience) who identify with the values that have been expressed, and in turn follow. While it is always good to find a community of people who share interests, this elevation to said pedestal also comes with some downsides:
- You have to keep saying/doing things that would keep you in the good graces of this group of people. Once you’ve built a following around specific positions, maintaining that audience requires consistency, sometimes at the cost of intellectual honesty. Content creators become trapped by their own audience’s expectations. This is what some people call “audience capture,” where you become an ideological prisoner of your own followers.
- Another group of people who share opinions that are mostly diametrically opposed to your views will go out of their way to drag you down. Building an identity-based audience inevitably attracts opponents — users who define themselves in opposition to your values and actively work to undermine you. This creates an adversarial dynamic where every post becomes a battlefield.
- The tendency to view most issues through the same lens around which you have built your online persona and identity. A creator known for feminist takes feels pressure to frame every topic through gender politics. A libertarian commentator must find the free-market angle on every story. This intellectual monoculture limits the depth and breadth of what we can actually talk about online.
To make matters worse, the algorithms amplify content that generates engagement within your existing network, creating feedback loops where you’re primarily exposed to perspectives that confirm your existing beliefs (for example, my “For you” page only has tweets from accounts that love Madrid and believe that Barcelona is the scum of the earth). Research published in Science Advances found that even brief exposure to opposing viewpoints on social media often increases political polarization rather than reducing it, partly because such exposure typically occurs in hostile, confrontational contexts.
The Facelessness of It All
As more and more people gain access to the internet, this also means that more and more foolish opinions gain visibility. If you are eloquent enough, you can build an audience around your ideas regardless of whether they have any merit — you just need to sound convincing (Agba John Doe energy).
Concurrently, with the safety that comes with anonymity, social media bullies feel more empowered to launch scathing attacks, knowing that their tweets can never be traced back to them. Anonymous accounts can spread misinformation, harass others, and poison discourse without facing real-world consequences. The faceless nature of online interaction removes the social accountability that normally moderates behaviour in physical spaces.
This anonymity cuts both ways though. While it protects bullies and bad-faith actors, it also allows marginalized people to speak freely without fear of retaliation, and enables whistleblowers to expose wrongdoing. But the dominant effect on platforms like Twitter has been negative — anonymity more often shields toxicity than it protects vulnerability.
A Case Study
Background: In the backdrop of a hot social media debate on the importance of acknowledging male spousal support during the phase of pregnancy and delivery, a social media user gives a balanced/nuanced opinion on the matter while encouraging moderation.
Gbemileke responds by citing statistics about actual violence against women (141 murders, rapes, abuse), essentially saying “but violence IS happening, so how can you say most men aren’t out to kill?” Thus looking at a conversation through a lens of feminism and gender violence, she commits some logical flaws:
- Statistical misunderstanding: Even if 141 women were murdered by men this year (a horrific tragedy), this doesn’t mean “most men” are trying to kill women. Out of millions of men, 141 perpetrators literally proves the original point — that most men aren’t murderers, even though some men commit terrible crimes.
- Shifting the argument: The original tweet is about combating catastrophic thinking and the assumption that the opposite gender is inherently malicious. The response replaces “most people aren’t dangerous” with “violence doesn’t exist,” which isn’t what was said.
- Missing the point: Favour Y. is addressing the online discourse that paints entire genders as enemies, not denying that violence happens. You can simultaneously acknowledge that gender-based violence is real AND recognize that most individual people aren’t violent predators.
Stage 2:
Another user responds to her claim: “141/100 million doesn’t make most”. This is a straightforward statistical observation. He’s pointing out that 141 cases out of a population of roughly 100 million men doesn’t support the claim that “most men” are dangerous. It’s basic math about proportions and the meaning of “most.”
To rebut his stance, she commits another logical fallacy by building a strawman. Gbemileke reframes his statistical correction as a dismissal of the victims’ lives (“141 women’s lives don’t matter”). This is intellectually dishonest because:
- Acknowledging that 141 ≠ “most men” is NOT the same as saying those 141 deaths don’t matter. You can recognize that every murder is a tragedy while also recognizing that statistically, this doesn’t represent the behavior of most men.
- She’s using emotional manipulation: By reframing a statistical argument as callousness toward victims, she shuts down legitimate discussion about what “most” means and whether it’s fair to characterize an entire gender based on the actions of a tiny minority.
- It’s bad faith argumentation: Instead of engaging with his actual point (the statistical interpretation), she attacks a position he never held (that victims don’t matter).
This is textbook engagement-farming too. Notice how her reframing got 25K views while being logically flawed. Outrage and moral accusations perform better than nuanced statistical discussions.
Stage 3:
To “counter her point”, an anonymous account then responds by stating that “Yorubas are educationally disadvantaged. This escalates to ethnic tribalism. Rather than debate the substance, they’re now attacking her based on her ethnic identity (assuming she’s Yoruba based on her username or profile).
From a generic, relatively-nuanced conversation, this thread devolved till it involved tribe, gender and personal intellect. If you had no dog in this fight at the beginning of the exchange, there is a good chance that you would have felt slighted if you are a man, identify as a feminist, or are from the Yoruba tribe by the time you reached the end. This is how social media outrage builds. This is the anatomy of an outrage.
Olaoluwa on X (formerly Twitter): ""A lot of people here do and say things, not because they believe in them, but because it is the cool thing to do"- The Anatomy of an Outrage / X"
"A lot of people here do and say things, not because they believe in them, but because it is the cool thing to do"- The Anatomy of an Outrage
Originally published on Medium ↗