I got Inception’d last week.
Not by a person. Not by a party. By Instagram. In about ten minutes, while I genuinely thought I was just killing time.
I’d opened the app and suddenly stuck on posts about the protests, Students crying. Lathi charge by police. A boy holding a torn answer sheet. A 59-year-old man from Ladakh starving himself. Reel after reel after reel, all saying the same thing. The system crushed these kids and nobody cares.
By the end of it I was properly angry. Ready to argue with anyone who disagreed.
Then I called a friend who’d been watching the same protest, on the same app. And his feed had shown him the exact opposite. Crowds shoving barricades. Stones flying at police. “Anti-national” this, “paid protest” that. He was furious too. Just at the other side.
Same event. Same week. Same app. Two completely opposite truths.
And that’s when it hit me. Neither of us chose our side. Something else did.
The Feed Picks First, You Feel Second
Here’s the stupid little secret nobody tells you. The app doesn’t care what’s true. It cares what keeps your thumb moving.
So it runs a tiny experiment on you all day. It shows you something, watches what you do, and shows you more of whatever made you stop scrolling. Watch two student-side reels? Cool, here’s twenty more. The machine isn’t taking a side. It just noticed you slowed down, and slowing down is all it worships.
The catch is this. You think you’re choosing. You’re not. You only saw those twenty reels because it fed them to you first. Then it watches you watch them and goes “see, he loves this stuff,” and doubles down. Your clicking becomes proof. Round and round it goes, the bubble getting tighter each loop, until one random side of a messy event feels like the obvious, only, God-given truth.
Researchers have a fancy name for this. I’ll just call it what it is. A trap that thinks it’s a mirror.
Why the Angriest Clip Always Wins
Now here’s the part that makes it worse.
Not all reels are equal in the eyes of the machine. The calm, boring, “here are both sides” video? Dies quietly. The furious, heartbreaking, blood-boiling one? Travels like wildfire.
This isn’t a vibe, it’s measured. A big study looked at years of stuff spreading online and found false, emotional stuff was about 70% more likely to get shared than the plain truth. And the twist? It wasn’t bots doing it. It was us. Regular humans, forwarding the thing that made us gasp.
So think about what that means during a protest. The most extreme clip from each side, the one cruel enough or shocking enough to make you feel something, is exactly the one that gets pushed to millions. The nuance gets left to rot with 40 views. You and I don’t get the event. We get the most emotional 15 seconds of the event, on loop.
It’s Not the Algorithm. It’s the Angle.
Okay, time for me to be fair, because it’s too easy to just blame the machine.
The algorithm decides what you see. But what you feel about it? That’s the framing. Take one single clip of police and a crowd. Caption it “police brutally beat innocent students” and you’ll boil. Caption the same clip “mob tries to storm Parliament, police respond” and you’ll nod along. Same pixels. Opposite emotion. The words on top did the work, not the video.
And once you’ve picked a side, your brain quietly turns into your side’s lawyer. Anything that agrees with you feels obviously true. Anything that doesn’t feels fake, paid, or “just propaganda.” We don’t weigh evidence. We defend the team the feed signed us up for.
That’s the honest, uncomfortable bit. The machine handed us a pair of glasses. But we’re the ones who refuse to take them off.
Bonus Absurdity: The Protest Tourists
And then, in the middle of all this real anger, you get them.
The influencers. Showing up at the protest with a ring light. “Guys the energy here is INSANE.” A vlog about what they ate near the protest. A slow-mo of them looking sad in front of a crowd, nice lighting, trending audio. The protest becomes a backdrop. Their face becomes the point.
I’m not even fully making this up as a new thing. Remember when George Floyd was killed and 28 million people posted a black square on the same day? Some of them literally edited the black square so it matched their profile aesthetic. Bro. A black square. For a dead man. Colour-corrected.
There’s a simple test I use now. For a real movement, the cause is the point and the attention is the tool. For these guys it’s flipped. The cause is the tool and their attention is the point. Once you see it you can’t unsee it.
The Guy Nobody Googled
Somewhere in all this, a quote started doing the rounds.
“It is not left or right, it is about what is right and wrong.” — Sen. Cory Booker.
Beautiful. Deep. Black background, serious font, thousands of people reposting it and feeling like philosophers for three seconds.
One tiny question though. Who is Cory Booker?
You would have seen it, or nearly shared it, without the faintest clue. So I checked for you. He’s a US Senator. From New Jersey. In America. And yeah, he actually said something almost exactly like that, I’ll give him full marks, it’s a real quote, not one of the fake ones. He said it during a 25-hour marathon speech last year. About American politics. Their government, their mess, their moment. It had nothing, and I mean nothing, to do with NEET, Delhi, or one single Indian kid with a torn answer sheet.
But it sounded profound. So we grabbed it, ripped it out of its own country, and slapped it on our protest like a bumper sticker.
And here’s the actually funny part. Usually the quotes we share are at least fake. Half of Instagram is convinced Bhagat Singh and Einstein spent their whole lives writing captions for us. This time the quote is real. We just have no idea who said it, where, or why. We got it right by accident.
Now flip it around. Picture an angry crowd somewhere in New Jersey, fists up, and one guy climbs on a car and roars, “As the Honourable Education Minister of India once said…” The whole street would go, “the who of where?”
That’s us. Right now. Quoting a man we wouldn’t recognise on the road, in a fight he’s never heard of, because the typography slapped.
So What Do We Actually Do
I don’t have a clean fix. If I said “just be neutral” I’d sound like every boring uncle on Facebook.
But here’s the small thing I’m trying. Before I get angry about something I only saw on a feed, I ask one dumb question. Who chose this for me? Not who filmed it. Who decided it should land in front of my face, at this moment, framed this exact way. The answer is never “a neutral referee who wanted me to understand NEET.” The answer is a ranking system that just wanted me to stay 4 more seconds.
That question doesn’t make me right. It just makes me a little less sure I’m right. And honestly, on the internet in 2026, being a little less sure might be the most radical thing you can do.
The exam got leaked. Fine, that’s a real, serious, awful thing, and I’ll get into the actual mess of it in the next post. But the version of it living in your head? That was assembled for you. By a machine, from the angriest scraps, for reasons that have nothing to do with the truth.
You didn’t pick your side.
It picked you.
Coming Up Next
So far I’ve only picked on the phone. Next post I actually walk into the protest itself.
Why does a crowd make normal people do things they’d never do alone? Why does a fight about one exam suddenly turn into corruption, religion, and somehow Virat Kohli living in London? When the police swing a lathi, where exactly does the law draw the line, and is “chalo Parliament” really as innocent as the reels make it look? And that whole “the minister must resign” chant, is that justice, or just our ancient national hobby of wanting the biggest guy to fall?
I looked all of this up so you don’t have to. It gets messy. Stay tuned.
Rant over. Now tell me, honestly, did your feed show you one side too? Or am I the only one who got quietly radicalised by a phone?
A few things I mentioned aren’t made up, in case you want to check: the “false stuff spreads ~70% more, and it’s humans not bots” finding is from a big 2018 Science study by Vosoughi, Roy & Aral (MIT). The 28-million black squares was “Blackout Tuesday,” June 2020. And yes, Cory Booker really did say the left/right line, during his record-breaking ~25-hour US Senate speech in April 2025, about American politics. The rest is just me and my thumb.
Comments
Post a Comment