On social media most people are beholden to democratic behaviour, whether they know it or not. Seeking ever more views, likes, shares, etc to reach as many people as possible regardless of the content they produce. Social media companies and others in turn incentivize this behaviour with followers, exposure, and many times a monetary incentive. They are incentivized to seek more followers and viewership.

Whether this is a psychic profit (mental gratification/dopamine) or monetary profit (twitter payouts), the end result is likely the same. They are incentivized to behave, associate, and speak in a certain manner. The only way to do that is to continue to promote narratives that are and will be widely accepted or that generate reactions. This is often called engagement bait or click bait.

These people’s actions are necessarily then in pursuit of this psychic or monetary profit. As such they cannot be trusted to tell you anything more than what will profit them the most, regardless of what they actually believe or what the truth actually is.

Further, they can not be trusted to challenge popular narratives in their in-groups or audiences and are actually incentivized to seek out people in other demographics or in different markets to increase their psychic or monetary profit through rent seeking behaviour and thus will likely create rent seeking in-groups that are not consistently aligned with your interests. They will use you for what you are worth and shift into pandering to that which drives their profit. This is not limited to passive audiences either as they can often be incentivized to seek profit through external sources that don’t necessarily drive “clicks” or “likes” but do drive monetary profit incentives.

As a result, they are more likely to engage in actions that would seem contradictory but in actuality are quite consistent with their incentives. This includes adopting and promoting things you think they would otherwise not but also remaining silent in arenas where their rent seeking in-group has vested interest. This leaves them open to manipulation by fear of losing incentives and thus manipulating their behaviour and ultimately what they tell you, including foreign interests.

We like to tell those who are older not to trust people on the internet but it seems many of us haven’t learned that lesson ourselves.