The Rorschach Internet
Why everything feels true—and nothing feels agreed upon
On April 27, King Charles III and Queen Camilla visited Donald Trump at the White House. Coverage of Trump’s welcome varied dramatically.
President Donald Trump was at his “very best” … when he welcomed King Charles III and Queen Camilla to the White House … Royal broadcaster Ian Pelham Turner explained. “This was the president at his very best. His was quite an emotional speech, spoken at times with humor and passion.”
At The Atlantic, Jonathan Chait had a very different interpretation:
President Trump welcomed the British monarch King Charles III … and gave a speech that, on its surface, expressed warmth between the two countries. But its true purpose was darker... The analysis Trump endorsed is that America is defined not by its founding values but by its Anglo-Saxon cultural and genetic heritage.
Fox News and The Atlantic described the same event, and the same speech. But each selected different elements, emphasized different meanings, and presented a different reality to its audience. This ambiguity has been a hallmark of Trump coverage since his first run for the Oval Office. The difference is not in what happened, but in what is seen.
You may think one of these accounts is an accurate description of Trump’s speech, while the other is propaganda written to mislead the gullible. But it is more likely that both writers described the speech as they experienced it—and filtered that experience through their outlet’s editorial framework.
This reflects a broader shift in modern media consumption. Periodical publishers saw a 40.5% drop in revenue between 2002 and 2020. Televised news channels lost around 25% of their viewers between 2016 and 2022. Many readers now come to these outlets through social media recommendations and Google searches.
Hard-pressed publishers have strong incentives to give their audience what it wants—and social media audiences tend to favor clear, emotionally resonant material that reinforces their preconceptions. Each outlet emphasizes different elements and draws different conclusions. They produce narratives that feel consistent to their audiences, even when they diverge sharply from one another.
In the 20th century, news came from a few sources. You learned about the world from your local newspaper, your favorite magazines, your radio and later your television. Each of these sources reached out to a diverse audience and aimed for the widest possible appeal. What resulted was a baseline narrative for what was happening in your community and in the world.
We no longer have that baseline. Instead, information is filtered into personalized streams catering to our individual preferences. We create our own narrative, and with it our own reality.
We have many more sources of information at our fingertips than 20th century viewers. But our options are not unlimited. Each social media outlet has a Terms of Service policy that sets its boundaries. They also have algorithms that will restrict the visibility of posters who violate written or unwritten rules.
Most of these rule sets are designed not to punish wrongdoing but to ensure maximum engagement. Your feed is carefully calibrated to deliver content that inspires clicks, likes, comments, and shares. If your posts consistently attract eyeballs and activity, your audience is likely to grow. If they do not, your reach may quietly decline.
While they play a vital role in your social media experience, the algorithms are proprietary. Nobody—outside of a small group of developers—knows how posts are judged and feeds are built. A sharp drop in reach may mean you said something offensive. Or perhaps the latest update has deprioritized one or more of your favorite topics or formats.
For many users, social media serves as their primary news source. But not all sources are equally reliable. Administrators try to steer users away from fake news. But determining what qualifies as “fake news” is not always straightforward. Consensus weighs heavily in most systems, as does reputation. But that means the correct response gets less traction than hundreds that are incorrect in the same way. Or an incorrect response from a “trusted source.” And the systems that weigh and rank sources are as impenetrable to the average user as those that determine their reach.
This ambiguity gives rise to conspiracy thinking. When people can’t understand how something works, they try to explain it. Users start viewing the systems not as imperfect but as actively malevolent. Fact-checkers are dismissed as propagandists whose real job is not to find the truth but to hide it. The platform becomes a tool by which hidden masters manipulate their unwitting subjects.
You might expect this mindset to drive users away from these platforms. In most cases, it does the opposite. Their feeds continue to deliver content that captures their attention. And because the underlying systems remain invisible, users often experience these ideas as their own conclusions rather than as the product of a curated environment. They may distrust the system, but they continue to communicate within it—and, in doing so, internalize the information it provides.
Mechanically curated feeds provide you what their equations determine that you want. As you continue scrolling, you come to believe that the information on your feed is what you want. You follow those who share your curated interests and argue with those who don’t. Your convictions deepen. You come to believe not only that you arrived at your views independently, but that they are the only correct ones.
Social media not only shapes your online experience. It transforms the way you interpret your offline relationships. The world feels more polarized, divided between Good People and Bad People. Those who question your worldview sit firmly in the latter category. These conflicts regularly break up families and friendships.
On August 11, 2017, Jennifer Wright at Harper’s Bazaar advised readers “If You Are Married to a Trump Supporter, Divorce Them.” As she explained:
We live in interesting times, and by interesting, I mean on the very verge of the second dark ages. Or, at least, some people believe that. Other people believe everything is fine, somehow. Don’t ask me how…
You do not need to try to make it work with someone who thinks of people as “illegals.” Just divorce them… Supporting Trump at this point does not indicate a difference of opinions. It indicates a difference of values.
A Wakefield Research study taken that same year revealed that 11% of Americans, and 22% of Millennials, had ended relationships over political strife. Furthermore, 22% of Americans and 35% of Millennials knew someone whose marriage or relationship had been negatively impacted specifically due to President Trump's election.
Dopamine helps fuel our sense of pleasure and excitement, as well as our craving for continued stimuli. Cocaine and methamphetamine act on the dopamine system. So do sexual stimulation and anger. These same reward pathways also help determine the stories you read, the images you share, and the ads you click.
The more dopamine content generates, the more widely it travels. Anger-inducing posts travel particularly fast and far. The anger may be aimed at a target; it may be aimed at the poster. Whatever the motivation, it registers as engagement. Scornful comments rank just as highly as praise. Both keep the viewer glued to the screen and increase retention time. The longer viewers keep scrolling, the more ads they view and the greater the company’s revenue.
Advertisers once joked that 80% of their budget was wasted, but they didn’t know which 80%. Today’s advertisers can access reams of data on their dashboards. They can sort by demographics, geographic location, and other variables to figure out which combination of positive and negative reinforcement is most likely to convert to a sale, lead, or subscription.
You’ve seen the “chumbox” ads at the bottom of many web pages:
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Take a look at this celebrity’s REPULSIVE home
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You probably roll your eyes at these ads. But you’ve also likely clicked on at least a few. Chumboxes have been appearing at the bottom of pages across the web for over a decade now. You’ll find chumboxes on TMZ, Fox News, and other high-traffic sites. In 2025 Taboola, one of the largest chumbox providers, reported earnings of $1.912 billion with $569.5 million in gross profit.
Easy access to metrics hasn’t just shaped advertising. News editors now have detailed insight into which stories spread and which fall flat. They know which topics get eyeballs and which risk driving viewers away. This shapes their decisions as to what gets coverage and how it is covered. They may not use chumbox-level clickbait headlines. But they rely on A/B testing to determine which headlines attract the most viewer interest.
News shapes its readers, and readers shape the news. Information has become less universal and more carefully targeted. We no longer argue about reality—we scream at each other across voids.
And as our realities diverge, so do our myths.
The crowd by definition seeks action but cannot affect natural causes. It therefore looks for an accessible cause that will appease its appetite for violence. Those who make up the crowd are always potential persecutors, for they dream of purging the community of the impure elements that corrupt it, the traitors that undermine it. The crowd’s act of becoming a crowd is the same as the obscure call to assemble or mobilize, in other words to become a mob… the word mobilization reminds us of a military operation, against an already identified enemy or one soon to be identified by the mobilization of the crowd.
Rene Girard, The Scapegoat, 16
When people live in different realities, they no longer simply disagree. They begin to organize against each other. The Other becomes a vessel of corruption, a Jungian shadow made flesh. Because we inhabit many realities, we find many potential scapegoats. Political identities receive the lion’s share of attention. But these splits can mask cultural and generational differences that are equally important.
The rules of shared reality are simple; we must agree on certain facts and how to interpret them. In the age of mass media, there was enough common ground to allow for diversity and debate. But when you’re on a tiny island of reality surrounded by hostiles, there is much greater pressure for group consensus. Different interpretations are no longer fodder for discussion; they are signs of betrayal.
We have always held reality together through mythology. Today we identify “myth” with falsehood and old wives’ tales. But that’s only because our myth of Science has told us that we can only depend on that which can be weighed, measured, and quantified. Myths are shared narratives that explain the world, create meaning, and encourage group cohesion.
Some of you are screaming right now that science is not a myth. As a method of inquiry, it is not. It is a tool that relies on observation, experimentation, and verification. But most people don’t practice science, they trust it. For them science functions as a shared framework for understanding the world.
That framework offers explanations, creates meaning, and fosters a degree of social cohesion. We accept its conclusions because we trust—or trusted—the system that produces them. In recent years that authority has weakened as competing narratives and alternative frameworks have gained traction.
Myths depend on heroes and villains. Cultural divides are often based on which side a mythological figure occupies. The internet has turned Donald Trump into a hero to some and a villain to others. That mythic split reflects and reinforces equally deep chasms between political groups.
Is Trump a hero or a villain? A dozen people might look at one story or one meme and come up with a dozen interpretations. Our answer depends on our political identity. We create our own Donald Trump based on the narratives we favor and the stories our feed presents to us.
So where do we go from here?
There is no return to shared mass media and a single narrative. We cannot fix our predicament by adding more moderation, nor will the issues be solved by removing it. The problem is not temporary; it is structural.
Enforced consensus from above leads to the rise of underground narratives distributed privately. The Soviet “Samizdat” movement offers a good historical example. It also produces growing distrust in the system and, ultimately, backlash against the enforcers.
Total unmoderated freedom leads to noise drowning out the signal. Usenet discovered this the hard way. Ultimately users seek out walled gardens—spaces where conversations aren’t buried in abusive, illegal content. Both extremes recreate the same problem in different forms.
We find ourselves in a world of competing narratives, algorithmic mediation, and fragmented information. Our problems are not going away. We must find ways to navigate them. Nobody is coming to rescue us from our thought bubbles. We must save ourselves.
We can start by questioning our own conclusions. Instead of taking our ideas for granted, we can ask ourselves why we think and feel as we do. At first this may seem like a waste of time. Your ideas are perfectly clear and logical; only an idiot or a person acting in bad faith would question them. But if you are willing to walk through that door in good faith, you will be able to truly claim the ideas which survive your scrutiny as your own.
By stepping outside of our initial reaction and weighing the information from a more neutral position, we can spot factual errors and misinterpretations. We can seek out material from political opponents and try to understand how they arrived at their conclusions. When you do this, you’ll find lots of drek on every side. But you will also find wisdom in unexpected places.
Universal agreement is not an option. It never was. We’ve been arguing about politics since Athenians held meetings in the polis. What we can hope for is partial shared ground. That starts with a willingness to engage with opponents and tolerate civil disagreement. You may not create shared beliefs, but you can build a common frame from which you can debate and discuss them.
Recognizing a myth does not destroy it. It lets you understand it in its proper perspective. We live by narratives. Understanding those narratives, and their limitations, allows us to use their structures without becoming lost in their labyrinths.
The alternative? Escalating fragmentation. Increased polarization. Continued dehumanization. Inevitable conflict.
We can have scapegoats, or we can have opponents we respect and whom we argue with fondly—and sometimes not so fondly. We can have discrete groups, or we can have battling mobs. The choice, and the responsibility, lies solely with us.