Political Posts That Go Viral Have This in Common, & It’s All Your Fault
- Kevin Lankes
- Feb 3
- 7 min read
Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/WkEHy08vzbQ
We need to talk about something really important, and it’s about why we’re all still 15 years old and standing in a row with our friends by the lockers, refusing to talk to anyone else, terrified to talk to anyone else, desperately trying to work up the courage to even imagine a world where we could ask our crush to the prom, while they’re across the hall in their own group, not even looking over here at all.
What does this have to do with social media and the virality of political posts? Just about everything, it turns out.
Have you ever wondered why we only have a certain set of established positions? Just, about everything? I have. I think about this all the time. Mostly I think about it from the viewpoint of journalism and also politics, but it’s true of absolutely everything you can think of. And if you find something that it’s not true of yet, as soon as you discover and comment on this thing, established positions will immediately sprout up about it and people will immediately dig in about it. Dr. Seuss famously satirized this phenomenon in his story, The Better Butter Battle Book.
So here’s the thing behind all this. I just read a new study from researchers at the University of Wisconsin that looked at 11,836 social posts that were made during the “stop the steal movement” right after the 2020 presidential election. Their findings tell us that the key factor in the spread of these kinds of political messages is a psychological phenomenon called collective narcissism. The idea behind collective narcissism is probably somewhat self-explanatory just after hearing it, but it’s the addictive sensation and resulting compulsive actions spawning from the idea that you’re part of a group or collective that views itself as superior to others. If you’ve been watching this channel lately, then you know my stance on current events, and it’s not going to surprise you when I tie this even more directly to what even scientists are telling us it is now, and that is white supremacy. Reading this new study was not shocking to me, I feel like, once again, we’re just continuing to confirm what’s obvious and right in front of all of our eyes.
But what was really surprising was what happened when I went looking for further confirmation. I wanted to know if this idea of collective narcissism was responsible for viral social media posts in general. There is some evidence that social media is simply a mechanism for engaging in collective narcissism. The group you’re part of, for safety and security and mental well-being, inevitably all together feels a sense of entitlement, and that translates to sharing posts around with each other as a way to signal your own identity to others. We’ve known this identity validation part of social media for a long time, I think colloquially, and this other thing, the group clique dynamic, we’ve been engaging with that from the angle of echo chambers.
But it’s much more than that. Because an echo chamber is the idea that people are only getting their information from a particular range of sources, and they’re simply not physically seeing information from elsewhere. And while I think that’s real, I also know from my own experience in media that it only goes so far. I’m definitely a very online person, but from all of the information I see, coming in from all different sides of the spectrum, I have to assume that regular, normal people who aren’t as online as I am are still seeing at least a portion of that same spectrum of information. So echo chambers, I believe, are not the function of the algorithms alone. Like, we all said that the interweb algorithms only show us the things they know we’re interested in so that we keep scrolling. That’s certainly true. But I think it’s time we stopped throwing up our hands in despair because of the things we’re telling each other the robots are doing to us. Because the way the algorithm works is that you have to signal to it what you’re interested in and what you don’t care about.
There’s a humongous human element here that as a society, we’re simply ignoring. In order to find yourself inside an echo chamber, you have to get there intentionally. What that means is that people are seeing information from all sources and choosing to deliberately engage with only a small sampling of those sources. This is where the collective narcissism comes in.
Perceived in-group superiority is a major problem with human social psychology. I’m planning to get into this a little more in a future video because it’s something I’ve been wildly interested in for many years now. But the main takeaway is something my mother told me when I was little. She was telling me a work story in the car one day and I don’t remember the details or what I said to make her say this, but I just remember what she said next, which is something that I’ll never forget as long as I live. She said, “most people never really leave high school.” And she’s absolutely right, on so many levels. Maybe high school is less like this now, I’m not totally sure because I hear mixed things, but when I was there, and definitely in the decades before I was there, cliques were the dominant form of peer society. You had jocks, nerds, votech grease monkeys, band geeks, goths, punks, scene kids, and outcasts. And while the groups change and evolve and the necessity and strength of their cohesion waxes and wanes, the psychological mechanisms that compel us into creating and joining them are never going anywhere. At least not for a few thousand years. Evolution is slow.
So going back to the example of opinions, the reason there are only so many established positions on an issue is the same reason we have these elective group memberships. It’s because identifying with an established position on something is actually a form of identity politics. Sorry, all you anti-woke snowflakes out there who may be traumatized after hearing that. But that’s honestly part of my mission here, I’m trying to open eyes to the reality of the human condition and the reality of the scientific universe. I want us to live consciously and with agency in the world around us, and not be led around by instinctual caveman vibes that we’ve been running on via autopilot for 200,000 years.
But I digress. It’s this uncovered phenomenon of collective narcissism and group cohesion that gives us our sense of safety in the world. But we don’t need it. We don’t live in a world where we have to stick so closely to our social groups for fear of our physical safety anymore. We can choose to adapt more fully to the modern society we live in. We can do things like, decide there aren’t just two sides to every position. Because in reality there are an infinite number of opinions one could have on a topic, there are as many as there are points in the field of three-dimensional space. It’s time to get out of our little trenches we’ve dug with our best buds and accept the information we’re seeing from other sources.
But here’s the twist. You knew it was coming. Even though there are infinite possible opinions, there’s only one reality. We desperately need to start accepting that, too. At one time, we kind of did, science and research was sexy, it was inspiring, it was taking us literally to new heights, including the actual moon. We loved science in America, and we genuinely wanted to follow its developments in order to understand our lives more fully. And it sucks that that’s gone. But as I say this, I can also admit that the only reason we had that moment in time is because it was another major historical moment of collective narcissism. We loved science because it was going to be another victory over the Soviets for our democratic freedom-loving 1950s wholesome way of life -- and it was a symbolic victory, but still a victory of our superior in-group over theirs.
I’ve always said that even when a group is right about something it’s generally by accident. The global left side of the political spectrum, minus the unquantifiable positions on social issues like immigration, which I argue are quantifiable but I’ll let that go for now--but otherwise the left is where you find the majority of policy that’s actually based on fact and reason. But we still only get there accidentally, because mostly everyone is just latching onto an ideology in order to caveman logic their way to safety. And until we can stop doing that, and get rid of the underlying aspect of collective narcissism that makes this an inevitability, or at least, until we can finally become aware and enlightened enough to understand what’s happening, all of us together, and simply decide not to let it run our lives, then and only then are we going to be able to really start agreeing on reality again and in a much better and safer way. Only then are we going to progress as a species.
Only then are we going to be able to stop having recurring dreams about standing against those lockers with our friends, our friends really encouraging us to ask our crush to the prom, or depending on your clique, maybe encouraging us to go home and get our grandma to buy us some Miller High Life and chill in the basement and forget about prom night altogether. Was that too oddly specific?
I started this whole exploration after I found the Univeristy of Wisconsin study about the commonalities of all the social posts that went viral about trump’s stop the steal movement. But then the data I found after further research led me in a really surprising direction, and I want to go into that in another video. So if you’re interested in finding out what makes social media posts go viral overall, what the characteristics are of viral social media posts, at least the commonality in general, then make sure to like and subscribe so you see that when it comes out.
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