centralization

Almost exactly six months after Twitter got taken over by a petulant edge lord, people seem to be done with grieving the communities this disrupted and connections they lost, and are ready, eager even, to jump head-first into another toxic relationship. This time with BlueSky.

BlueSky’s faux-decentralization

BlueSky differentiates itself from Hive, Post, and other centralized social media newcommers by being ostensibly decentralized. It differentiates itself from the Fediverse by not being the Fediverse, and by being funded by *checks notes* Twitter. Oh, and by being built by Silicon Valley techbros, instead of weirdos who understand consent and how important moderation is.

I would like to propose a new term: outrage dividend.

Outrage dividend is the boost in reach that content which elicits strong emotional responses often gets on social media and other content sharing platforms.

This boost can be related to human nature — an outrage-inducing article will get shared more. It can also be caused by the particular set-up of the platform a given piece of content is shared on — Facebook’s post-promoting algorithm was designed to be heavily biased to promote posts that get the “angry” reaction.

A tale of two media outlets

Imagine two media organizations.

A Herald is a reliable media organization, with great fact-checking, in-depth reporting, and so on. Their articles are nuanced, well-argued, and usually stay away from sensationalism and clickbaity titles.

This post was written for and originally published by the Institute of Network Cultures as part of the Dispatches from Ukraine: Tactical Media Reflections and Responses publication. It also benefited from copy editing by Chloë Arkenbout, and proofreading by Laurence Scherz.

Tackling disinformation and misinformation is a problem that is important, timely, hard… and, in no way new. Throughout history, different forms of propaganda, manipulation, and biased reporting have been present and deployed — consciously or not; maliciously or not — to steer political discourse and to goad public outrage. The issue has admittedly become more urgent lately and we do need to do something about it. I believe, however, that so far we’ve been focusing on the wrong parts of it.