American Eagle's "great jeans" ad led to a media outrage cycle after conservatives on X amplified a minority of liberal posts that claimed the ad had racist undertones.

Only a small percentage of users engage in truly toxic behaviour, but they’re responsible for a disproportionate share of hostile or misleading content on nearly every platform, from Facebook to Reddit. Most people aren’t posting, arguing, or fuelling the outrage machine. But because the super-users are so active and visible, they dominate our collective impression of the internet.

The once-prophesized future where cheap, AI-generated trash content floods out the hard work of real humans is already here, and is already taking over Facebook.

The point is, Elon Musk has been angling to become a beloved poster for a minimum of five years now. Since my brush with this want of his, the man had to buy the entire goddamn website just to win status as a poster of note, only to instantly become one for all the wrong reasons. He bought the spotlight, pointed it at himself, and almost immediately became the consensus pick for the worst user in the site’s history. It had to sting, and now everyone has seen how well he’s handling that experience:

An anarchist introduction to federated social media

I should not know who Pete Buttigieg is. In a just world, the name Bari Weiss would mean as much to me as Nordic runes. This goes for people who actually might read Nordic runes too. No Swede deserves to be burdened with this knowledge. No Brazilian should have to regularly encounter the phrase “Dimes Square.” To the rest of the vast and varied world, My Pillow Guy and Papa John should be NPCs from a Nintendo DS Zelda title, not men of flesh and bone, pillow and pizza. Ted Cruz should be the name of an Italian pornstar in a Love Boat porn parody. Instead, I’m cursed to know that he is a senator from Texas who once stood next to a butter sculpture of a dairy cow and declared that his daughter’s first words were “I like butter.”

Giggle Palooza is a Facebook page with 1.6 million followers. It was created in 2011 and is essentially just a super basic meme page for old people. There’s a ton of Garfield on this thing.

The screenshot above is what the page looked like in August 2019. As you can see, some of it is vaguely conservative, but for the most part, the memes it’s posting are a pretty harmless mix of email FWDs, bad cartoons, and old people jokes. The coffee one in the lower left is sort of funny.

Giggle Palooza’s main feed, right now, however, is awash in far-right propaganda and paranoid fascistic ramblings. Last week, Giggle Palooza appears to have briefly gone offline for sharing insurrectionist content.

Thus, a cycle is born, in which part of the media’s new role is to gather and verify information that now originates outside of traditional channels: information is synthesized and produced by the hive mind; the media contextualizes and verifies it; the hive mind then digests and synthesizes that new, verified information, producing even more new information based on that; and this repeats, endlessly. Eventually, a highly refined product emerges. But the process is messy, and now more visible than ever. Unfortunately, as we saw last night, it can sometimes lead to terrible things. But there is no going back.