Anger

Donald Trump is dying! The left can’t stop The Storm from coming! Biden, Clinton, and Fauci are going to be arrested! Trump is going to be taken down in court!

Every day, I see the rabid masses of toxic internet communities salivating at big promises by accounts with high follower counts and all-too-promising news headlines. These engagement farmers ultimately never follow through, because it costs them nothing to lie.

These low-signal high-volume broadcasters get away with it because:

  1. Outrage generates buzz
  2. Internet attention spans are low
  3. People are always refreshing waiting for “something” to happen

However, things rarely materialize, because:

  1. “Slam-dunk” cases are easier to chirp about from the internet than they are to prosecute
  2. Sometimes politicians are caught breaking crimes that are regularly broken, and to actually prosecute it would put more people in the crosshairs than people realize
  3. The “banality of corruption”; sometimes it’s simply advantageous to look the other way or bury a story than to chase it and weigh public perception

Whenever people with zero stakes in the outcome of a story push it as hard as they can, pause and question if your own feelings are being manipulated to boost their noise.