Emotional Content

A significant portion of viral content on social media is either staged, or somehow manipulated (lacking context, creatively edited, etc) to evoke an emotional response.

They may be videos, memes, or even just inflammatory messages.

When we see these,
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we should be careful about sharing/RT’ing the content, even if it’s just to mock or debunk it.

Emotionally divisive content exists to target people across the whole political spectrum - left, right, fringe, moderate; everyone.

As liberals, it is easy to think that propaganda
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only exists on the right, but this simply isn’t true.

The difference is in how they are targeted.

We can recognize propaganda on the other side easily, because it is obviously outlandish or unbelievable to us - it’s more difficult to recognize when it is targeted to us.

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To give an example on the conservative side, I once saw a video posted by @/redstaterising (I’m blocked) that showed a trans woman in crazy makeup, in a children’s library, putting on a provocative show.

The caption claimed that liberals wanted this in all our kids’ schools.

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This was obviously intentionally shared to evoke an emotional response - specifically, to trigger disgust in conservative viewers.

Why? To create/exacerbate divisions between people in society - to drive a wedge into the fault lines between us.

I actually responded to this..
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tweet.

I said that I am a liberal, and that I wouldn’t want my kids exposed to that in daycare, and that I didn’t think any sane person would.

That was the most-liked comment I’d had on twitter at the time, and I people were thanking me for saying it.

After it reached a
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couple hundred likes, and I had started having a couple of genuine conversations with people, @/redstaterising blocked me so I could no longer respond.

Because the point of that video was to create division - it was designed to make conservatives disgusted by liberals.

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As a liberal, I could easily see it for what it was. This wasn’t some pervasive invasion of our kids’ schools that was being pushed by liberals everywhere; if it was real at all, it was taken completely out of context.

It was propaganda.

Why does it work for conservatives?
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Because conservatives and liberals are different - we have personality differences (as in the Big 5 Personality traits in psychology).

The way these express themselves, is that we are susceptible to different kinds of emotional messaging.

A book that discusses this is

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The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, by Jonathan Haidt.

It’s a great book that covers much more than this, but below is the rough gist of this section, from my notes:

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Roughly speaking, we can say that conservative media uses messaging that targets things that are important to conservatives - like the Sanctity/Degradation, and Liberty/Oppression values.

That video triggered both of those responses, & targeted the feeling toward liberals.

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So what does that have to do with liberals?

Well, liberals get emotionally manipulated exactly like conservatives do. The only distinction is that liberals respond to different emotional triggers, based on different emotional/moral foundations.

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What is more likely to evoke emotional responses in liberals?

We - liberals - are more susceptible to appeals to our senses of Care/Harm, and Liberty/Oppression.

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For conservatives, the video I described earlier assaulted their senses of Liberty (can’t make decisions for their own children), and Sanctity (degradation of their children’s minds).

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For liberals, there are videos of racism, children being harmed... emotional assaults on the senses of Care/Harm and Liberty/Oppression (conservatives and liberals see Liberty a bit differently, but that is a different topic).

Two examples that I have seen are
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1) Images of children in camps - even when those photos weren’t taken in the US at all
2) Videos of small children (and adults) using racist/prejudiced language.

If you are a liberal, ask yourself: Isn’t it difficult not to react to these, and to immediately share them?

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It *is* difficult, and that is the point.

And, in fact, that is the first sign that we need to question what we are seeing.

If something we see online evokes an emotional response, then that is a clear sign that we need to be very skeptical.

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Right now you may be thinking of a particular video you recently saw, and may be thinking to yourself that what I am saying right now is bunk - after all, “I *saw* that child saying racist stuff. What difference does the context make? It’s bad regardless of the context!”

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And that is *exactly* the response that we need to be conscious of.

Because anything that overrides our care about things like context and facts is, by definition, emotionally driving our next reaction.

And that next reaction will be predictable:

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It will be to share it with others, affirm that this is wrong, and then *blame* someone for it.

And that, is exactly how the differences between all of us in society, are exacerbated, and then propagated as if through an emotional virus.

And we do it without asking...
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Do I know who made that video/image? Do I know what their motivation was in sharing it? Am I sharing something that might not be constructive?

If we are sharing content without asking these questions, we are contributing to the same divisiveness that we are fighting against.
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This is a very difficult thing for us to see in ourselves.

You may be denying this right now.

If you are, ask yourself: If I find it difficult not to believe the worst stories that I see about conservatives, can I judge them for believing the worst about liberals?

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To be crystal clear here: this is not a “both sides” argument.

If you read this and think “Well, kids in concentration camps are obviously worse than a trans person in a library,” then you are missing the point.

This is not the outrage olympics.

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This is about understanding why people have been so successful at dividing us.

Once we grasp this, we can also see how social media & tech companies manipulate our psychology - and even how our elected officials manipulate us to pursue their own agendas.

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I know this was a super long thread. I have been meaning to write it for a while now, but it is a big topic.

There is a lot more to unpack, but hopefully this provides enough insight to be helpful.

Removing Trump isn’t going to make these things better - that part is up to us.

Addendum: I’m going to add a few links here that might be helpful as well.

First, it’s good to understand that anger (i.e. outrage) itself can be addictive: https://psychcentral.com/lib/is-anger-an-addiction/

Big error/correction:

The video I mentioned was not a trans woman putting on a provocative show. It was a man dressed in drag putting on a provocative show.

The tweet claimed that liberals are pushing to have this performed for toddlers in day care.

We aren’t as rational as we like to think we are.

The emotional part of us - the “lizard brain” if you will - is like an elephant. And our logical brain/cortex is just a rider on that elephant.

We like to think that the rider is making all the decisions, but it’s rarely true. https://twitter.com/clearing_fog/status/1209535709939290112