There is a single person on the internet whom you do not want to negatively engage with your content, and that is Greta Thunberg. If Greta Thunberg owns you, you will literally go to jail. That story, if you missed it, came at the end of 2022, when “Manosphere” personality and general all-around douchebag Andrew Tate attempted to troll Thunberg by bragging about his car emissions. Thunberg responded.

Tate did not handle her response well, and filmed an angry response in which he insisted that the pizza boxes he was eating out of not be recycled. The problem was, the pizza box was visible. It had the name of a local Romanian pizza chain on the side of it. Which gave Romanian authorities, who wanted Tate on human trafficking charges, all they needed to find him. Tate is now in prison awaiting trial. Authorities seized 15 of the cars he bragged about.

As delightful as this story is, I need to note: this is not how owning people usually works.

Generally speaking, if you hate something someone is posting, you should not engage with it. Social media algorithms reward content with high levels of engagement, because high-engagement content keeps people on their website longer. So if you hate something and you are commenting on it, sharing it, giving it a frowny-face — whatever — you are promoting it. For free.

How content becomes “sticky”

Recently, I’ve had a few videos do well on TikTok, the best getting between 35k and 142k views on the app. In my personal terms, that’s enormous, but as far as TikTok goes, where the big videos get millions upon millions of views, it’s not particularly out of the ordinary. TikTok (like all social media) has an analytics tool that allows me to see the video’s stats, and I can see from these that, in the case of the video that got 142k views, people have spent an accumulated 14 weeks watching this 3-minute video.

That is an insane amount of time for all of humanity to be listening to me babble about Lord of the Flies.

What’s made the videos that have taken off work is that I start with something that sounds like a strong, harsh opinion (“Lord of the Flies is bullshit!”) and then I give an actually pretty tame reason as to why (“Because I think kids are generally pretty goshdarn swell!”).

It is the second message that I’ve made the video for (I actually liked The Lord of the Flies as a book, even if I disagree with its underlying messages), but it’s the first part that gets me tens or even hundreds of thousands of views. This is because people hear a strong opinion and they want to fight you about it (“Lord of the Flies is actually about the British ruling class you MORON,” “Shut up, commie,” “This guy’s a RACIST,” etc.).

As a (god help me) influencer, I engage with the first few comments on the things I post, as this can help the piece get a toehold in the deluge of content that is TikTok, and then when it starts to blow up, I step back and largely ignore the people who despise me. They are being mean, yes, but they are at the end of the day doing me a solid by engaging with and promoting my piece. I will sometimes — and these are my favorite commenters — have people tell me I am wrong, and then will tell me that the correct opinion is… the one I expressed in the video. It’s a beautiful thing.

Your attention is literally a commodity

From a “building my brand” perspective, this knowledge of how the algorithms work is all pretty useful, but from a media consumer perspective, it is dangerous. Because our instinct, when faced with something we view as wrong, or evil, or abhorrent, or whatever, is to immediately go fight that thing. But in the attention economy, that gives the thing you hate more power.

This played no small part in making Donald Trump President. That man maintained his power — truly — until Twitter finally decided to deplatform him after January 6th. After that, his Tweets could no longer be engaged with by every third person on the planet, and they could no longer dominate the news cycle. Sure — he could put them onto Truth Social, or send them out as genuinely unhinged “press releases,” but none of the people that hated him were reading those. So he lost his power.

Now, much like Andrew Tate, he’s GOING TO JAIL. (We are not sure how much Greta Thunberg hating Donald Trump had to do with this, but our best guess would be: it didn't have nothing to do with it!)

Part of modern media literacy is understanding this dynamic, and learning to not engage with the stuff we find vile. The internet, and social media in particular, is genuinely an attention economy, and you should try to treat your attention like you treat your money, and spend it responsibly. Does this mean you can’t occasionally splurge and spend it on nonsense? Of course not! Watch “The Cheese Tax” as many times as you want!

But otherwise, try to consider how you spend your attention on the internet. The late, great, Ursula LeGuin wrote in her book The Left Hand of Darkness:

To oppose something is to maintain it.They say here “all roads to Mishnory”. To be sure, if you turn back on Mishnory and walk away from it, you are still on the Mishnory road. To oppose vulgarity is inevitably to be vulgar. You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.

Consider what you want to lend your attention to, and then do so consciously. Otherwise, you’re just being manipulated into elevating the voices of vile people.

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