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In March of 2006, the world wide web was introduced to Twitter, a micro-blogging website that started the phenomenon of social media. A few months later, in September, Facebook turned public, and with it, introduced a different paradigm - social networking - with more complex networking abilities than other competitors of the time, like MySpace.
Every one of these applications at the time had its own “gimmick”, its own use case: Instagram was for photography broadcasting; Snapchat introduced “Snaps” - messages and photos with 24 hour lifetimes that would disappear once elapsed. With the introduction of this last one, the paradigm of isolated, use case specific apps disappeared. It went belly up the moment Instagram decided to copy the “Snap” functionality with their own name: “Stories”.
This behavior of unification of content formats became noticeable across various different platforms, with the “Stories” functionality showing up in Facebook, then later in WhatsApp (a messaging app, mind you) as “Statuses”. Content was becoming unified, posted in the same couple of formats, in a variety of different websites. It was easy to spread messages, and easy to exploit the system in order to disseminate the right kind of messages, if you had the know how.
People did have the know how. That’s why the Trump presidential campaign made use of data gathered by Cambridge Analytica in the 2010s to build psychological profiles on 87 million Facebook users, giving them an idea of what kind of content to pump into these websites and what kind of profiles to appeal to in order to win majority vote. A lot of it, nowadays, is what we describe as “misinformation” and what in more radical circles has received the overused misnomer of “fake news”.
Today, a lot of misinformation is circulated but for a while it did not have the impact that companies and political actors wanted. Misinformation is built on 3 pillars. In order to have the desired impact, it needs to appeal to 3 specific problems with the way we see the world. Back then, 2 of these were already easily exploitable.
First, we have the human brain’s inherent Confirmation Bias. If not trained in the opposite direction, the brain has a usual tendency to seek, interpret and remember information in ways that confirm beliefs we already hold. It is one of the main biases we must be aware of when doing any kind of research, as it might lead to erroneous conclusions.
The second are our emotions. Not that it’s a flaw of the human brain to feel, I’d never claim something like that, but the human is more likely than not to think with the heart rather than the brain. Enter the Appeal to Emotion. If you see a lot of stuff on the internet, you’ll probably already identify this one. The type of content you’ll most likely see trying to make claims that are not completely true but use this fallacy to lead you in their direction is the so called “ragebait”. It appeals to human emotion and it works wonders because it especially appeals to negative emotions - which are already proven to have a higher impact on our perception of the world than positive emotions (Gaskell, 2021). Appeal to Emotion is a logical fallacy in content trying to weave an argument about the reality of the world, as it makes a claim based on sympathy or empathy instead of sound or logical grounds.
One final pillar remained then for bad actors attempting to weave a network of misinformation, and one that still hadn’t been perfected: Argument from Repetition. To talk about this one, I need to talk a bit about how its potential was spotted in a new phenomenon that was starting to rise after Snapchat’s “Snaps” and Instagram’s “Stories”: “short-form content”.
2012’s Vine might be the most important platforms to talk about because it was one of the first and most successful to try its hand at what we now call “short-form content” - videos of, at most, 6 seconds were the only thing allowed on the platform.
It was short lived, as it did not survive the advent of Musical.ly, an app that also incentivized short form content but was focused more on lip syncing to songs and didn’t have a content time limit. You might not know it because it too was short lived. After only 3 years of operation, its parent company was bought by ByteDance Ltd., and merged into a little app you might know today as TikTok.
TikTok was perfect. Not in our optic, it’s one of the worst apps we as a human species have ever invented, but in the optics of people who want to spread misinformation, it was perfect. Despite making ample use of Musical.ly’s lip syncing mechanics, it also allowed people to make videos of themselves just talking, to stitch themselves into other people’s videos and to duet with other videos, normally used to “react” to videos. It also, just like Musical.ly, did not have a content time limit.
The moment this kind of format appeared, it shot like wild fire to other platforms. Instagram introduced Reels into its app, which quickly showed up on Facebook as well. YouTube introduced Shorts, which were the exact same format. None of these formats were regulated for misinformation and everyone was allowed to make videos about anything, and using any kind of auxiliary content like music, video, whatever, as it wasn’t seen as a serious format. It should be. It was the ground-works for content to be weaponized in order to weave Arguments from Repetition. The feed allows you to scroll through millions of short videos in an hour, and from this, the only thing that dictates your viewing experience is an algorithm that picks and chooses videos according to your tastes. At least, that’s how it’s sold.
The reality is much more grim. This is the trifecta: Content, long or short, that works off your psychological profile of what content you value, and normally, this is content that reacts with your Confirmation Bias, content that appeals to the echo chamber you’re already a part of. This confirmatory content must also, from time to time, Appeal to Emotion, especially negative emotions, as these will rile you up and cement that content in your brain, and in return, will boost engagement for the app. Finally, the cherry on top of the cake - Argument from Repetition: what if we can make you believe something by showing you content weaving the same argument, with the same kind of format that already confirms what you believe in and appeals to your anger, or sadness, or indignation, or hatred, and does it over, and over again until you start hearing it in your sleep.
For certain circles, this entire system has already been gamed to work as a propaganda machine, because short form content was meant to be binge consumed and not scrutinized. The “Manosphere” weaves conservative and toxic messaging about the role of the man in society, and its messages can be condensed and delivered in short, syringe shots through short form content (Breuer, 2025). The Far Right is incredible at this, being able to twist numerous forms of imagery of innocuous nature by falsely contextualizing and, thus, presenting them as the very “evil” they criticize day in and day out (Shaw, 2023). Certain messaging like this even seeps into other kinds of feeds of more innocuous nature in order to realign people’s thinking towards certain extremes. And it’s not just the Far Right that gets its messaging across. I’ve seen my own feed, of bigger Leftist lenience, also try to force me into its own machine with content that confirms my pre-held beliefs, appeals to my negative emotions and weaves its arguments through constant repetition.
You see it once, you see it everywhere, and if you see it, maybe it’s time to leave the platform, the app, whatever it is you see. Yes, it’s harder to maintain contact with people, but it’s better to be a bit more digitally isolated than to be digitally indoctrinated by anyone.
