When Viral Conflicts Take Over Social Feeds

Antigua Newsroom explores Aussie pokies history this week’s episode of Under the Cortex, we talk with New York University Professor Steven Rathje about his research on what goes viral and why. He’s got a lot to say about the role of social media in global conflicts and how it’s being weaponized online.

For example, when Russia invaded Ukraine last year, the war became the first of its kind in which the horrors of battle were streamed to the world via user-generated content on TikTok. Soldiers on the front lines and civilians trapped in bombed-out apartment blocks shared their experiences of seeing advancing tanks, being shot at, and receiving rations packages with the world by uploading video to their accounts on the platform. Their posts, along with reports from accredited journalists and the countless viral memes about cats, made their way into the feeds of the 5 billion people on social media.

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This fueled communal tensions centered on ethnic and sectarian identities. And as social media platforms’ algorithms have spent the past decade fine tuning to prioritize inflammatory content over all else for engagement, they have created an environment in which it is relatively easy for digital ‘influencers’ to escalate conflict during ‘windows of risk,’ which are periods of elevated danger that offer opportunities to stoke inter-group tensions.

A recent study looked at content that went viral in the United States and Japan, and they found that polarizing content (content that triggers high arousal emotions, like outrage) tended to be more contagious than neutral or positive content. So, if someone sees that their content is going viral and they’re incentivised to create more polarizing content, it can lead to an escalation of violence.