On the perverse incentives driving social media's loudest voices

They are accountable only to themselves, and they gain share in an attention economy by being outrageous - but the bigger the audience they get, they more powerful they are.

I don’t want the gatekeepers back.

I’m the last person to want the gatekeepers back.

The legacy media gatekeepers tried to hammer me into silence in 2020¹. They failed. By 2021 they were so frustrated that they cheered when the White House and Pfizer made Twitter ban me. In a meta-irony, since then they have failed to report on Berenson v Twitter and Berenson v Biden — gatekeeping their gatekeeping.

So I have no love for them. In the new world, everyone has access to X. This Substack wouldn’t exist without that megaphone. We’re not going back, and I don’t want to.

But.

But lately the social media hysteria has reached a new pitch. Candace Owens claims the government of France is trying to kill her and has edged close to suggesting Charlie Kirk’s friends were involved in his assassination.

Big social media voices on the left are equally insane. Nepo-baby Hassan Piker just almost got himself arrested in China during a stream from Tiananmen Square (in which he said he felt no patriotism for the United States). Other highlights of his trip included his slobbering praise on Mao Zedong’s “Little Red Book.”

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It’s easy to discount the influence people like Owens and Piker have. Easy, and wrong. They have huge audiences - Owens has 7.4 million followers on X - and politicians on both sides pay attention to them and their obsessions.

Which is why it’s so unfortunate that they have incentives to act as outrageously as possible. Again, this issue is not partisan. I’ve seen it myself. People like Owens and Piker (and me) are our own brands.

We have no institutions protecting us — or reining us in. If no one is reading or watching or listening to us, we struggle to survive, but if we can reach a mass audience, we can be far more successful than we would at a traditional media outlet.

None of this is a secret, but the influencer incentives are straining our system.

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(Hasan Piker, leftist douchebag extraordinaire and alleged dog-shocker, wandering through Tiananmen Square. The Chinese police should have sent him to a reeducation camp for… whatever it is he’s weaving.)

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As some of you remind me from time to time, the United States is not a democracy. It is a constitutional republic, and we depend on our elected representatives to rule for us.

Not to rule us, to rule for us.

For all their many, many flaws, politicians still face the direct judgment of voters — of every American — in a way that that no one else in the system does. Elections are where the rubber meets the road. They are where voters course-correct and reward or punish politicians (and parties) for their priorities.

Last week, a meeting between Donald Trump and New York City-mayor elect Zohran Mamdani went surprisingly well. A lot of people offered theories, but the real reason may be simply that each man recognized the other for his political skill. Both have an uncanny ability to speak to voters and beat an entrenched political establishment.

Trump knew somehow in 2015 that Republican voters were disgusted with immigration and the Iraq war; Mamdani knew promising to “freeze the rent” would resonate with average New Yorkers, even if it is ridiculous public policy. They set their own courses. They led the media, and everyone else.

But most politicians aren’t as charismatic or good at connecting with voters — and prefer to follow the media’s lead, a safer path.

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In an attention economy, the most powerful media voices are those with the most followers. The best way to grab the most followers as an independent voice is to be loud, brash, angry, and to proclaim that you have the truth the legacy media does not.

In 2020 and 2021, when media and governments worldwide were misleading or lying about nearly everything Covid and mRNA vaccine-related, I could check all those boxes — without hurting my journalistic integrity. I had a huge voice.

More recently, I have not been on the bleeding edge on X or Substack. My audience remains large, but it is orders of magnitude smaller than people like Owens or Piker.

This is partly because I’ve been too busy writing to podcast. But it’s also because I will not say anything I don’t genuinely believe and can’t support with evidence. I KNOW a fair number of you want me to proclaim ivermectin a miracle drug, for example.

But I haven’t seen the evidence for that, and I will not lie to you to try to grab your attention.

So it’s no accident that people like Piker and Owens and all the people who have ridden in the wake of her conspiracies recently have taken center stage lately. They’re good at getting attention, by any means necessary. Thankfully, Joe Rogan has mostly avoided this dynamic, maybe because he built his audience before the walls completely collapsed, and his listeners trust him.

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There are so few big independent voices that are committed to independent contrarian journalism and to truth-telling at the same time. This is one, and I hope that matters to you. If it does, please sign up — for pennies a day, you can help me defend the truth.)

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But the ordinary concerns of voters, of average Americans, don’t make for good social media content. How does one dramatize inflation? THIS PACKAGE OF HAMBURGER SHOULD BE $3.99, NOT $6.99! Or the fact that so many schools are doing such a bad job teaching kids to read?

So people like Owens are able to grab attention, make fortunes, and at least partly drive the political process. They aren’t accountable to bosses and they do not have to care about building long-term brands or companies.

If they are wrong, they can simply move on to their next crusade. And even if they’re really wrong and blow up, they can make enough money in just a couple of years, pushing every limit is a rational choice.

Plus the glow of attention is its own reward.

So they have hijacked the system, for now.

But the voters will speak again. And I still hope and believe that most Americans — 70 or 80 percent on both right and left — are not interested and don’t have time for online hysteria — and may punish politicians who don’t speak to their real concerns.

We’ll find out soon enough.

1. And in 2019, to a lesser extent, when they tried to marginalize Tell Your Children.