Going Viral- Why Truth is Boring and Bizarre Wins the Internet
The internet wasn’t the real world – until more and more people started living in it. When that number swells to 5.66 billion today, the unreal world begins to influence or even control the real world, resulting in the oddities and absurdities that we often encounter in both worlds nowadays. In case you haven’t figured it out yet, the lifeblood of a social media post isn’t its rock-solid logic or ironclad truthfulness. Nope! It’s all about how it tickles your feels, vibes with your tribe, and sometimes, how utterly bonkers it is. It’s like the internet is a party where the nerd with facts gets ignored, but the guy in a tinfoil hat yelling about alien overlords gets all the high-fives. It’s not just about fun and games. Sneaky propagandists have harnessed this phenomenon and to become superpowers on the internet.
The Paradox: Logic Loses, Lunacy Leads
Picture this: You’ve got two posts side by side. Post A: A meticulously researched thread on climate change stats, complete with graphs, sources presented in calm and sober language. It gets three likes from your aunt and a bot. Post B: A wild claim that “Potatoes are secret government spies because they have “eyes” everywhere!” This one explodes with shares, comments like “OMG, I KNEW IT!”, and even a remix video with dancing vegetables. It does happen in real life. Some believe that Elon Musk is an alien. Don’t roll your eyes. I actually have a personal friend in real life who believes it even though he has absolutely no evidence. The biggest insult to the universe of knowledge we call the internet is, thank to it, there are more people who believe that the earth is flat now than during Columbus’ time.
Why? Because humans aren’t robots programmed to process information logically all the time. We’re squishy predictably unpredictable emotional creatures! Psychologists call this the “emotional resonance” effect—posts that hit the right button sets your whole brain and body in one direction. Is it a fault of evolution? Perhaps, but that’s another topic. The thing is, our myth-driven brains date back to our childhood when our parents told us stories about monsters and bogeymen to scare us into behaving. As kids, we could resonate with other kids who received the same indoctrination. The myth went viral. Not only that, our young and creative minds extrapolated the myth with evil conspiracies that gave our friends goosebumps. We may not believe in monsters and bogeymen in adulthood but our minds have already been tuned to conspiracy theories. The vast majority of us haven’t grown out of that.
Studies (do verify in case of doubt) show that outrageous content triggers dopamine spikes, making us share (the gossip) before we even think about it. That’s why so many people take photos and videos at the scene of an accident. Witnessing it themselves gives them the joy of discovery. Sharing it makes them an “educator”. Imagine one person whispering into the ear of another person and the latter says “no way!”. His/her disbelief will almost guarantee that the story is going to get propagated. Every listener goes “no way” but before we realise that don’t believe means don’t share, the gossip has gone viral. From the word propagate, we get a bigger word – propaganda.
Propagandists: The Masters of Meme Manipulation
Now, enter the true villains of our story: Propagandists! These folks know very well that reporting the facts will only get them a viewership. To trigger revolutions, they need to work like DJs remixing reality into emotional earworms. Once they start spinning it, they get their audience dancing like they’re in a trance.
What do Qin Shi Huang and Mao Zedong have in common? Society is always shaped like a pyramid. The authority at the top can only be held on to by the masses. Qin Shi Huang burned books (which the majority couldn’t read) and buried Confucianists alive. Did the peasants feel disgusted? No. They cheered because they felt liberated, not realising that they had just been enslaved by a paranoid dictatorship. Mao was practically powerless after Liu Shao Qi acknowledged that it was his failed policies that resulted in tens of millions starving to death. How did Mao get back at Liu and replaced him? He did it by turning Chinese society upside down. Workers started giving orders to their supervisors. The weakest students were given power over the brightest students. Teachers had to attend detention class. Intellectuals were paraded on the streets by the uneducated. 破四旧 – 旧思想，旧文化，就风俗，旧习惯 was the mantra. Everything established had to be destroyed. Old relics, old schools, old temples. Everything had to be rebuilt from scratch using Mao Thought. At the peak of the Cultural Revolution, there were just a little over 10 million Red Guards holding 800 million Chinese people hostage. What a tiny minority managed to do.
Meanwhile, Liu Shao Qi had been faithfully following Mao’s instructions. He had no idea that he was the main target of the Cultural Revolution and the ludicrous propaganda against him was actually believed by large numbers of peasants. Things could go viral even at a time that communities shared a b/w TV. And TV was the most fascinating thing the people had back then. It’s influence was beyond powerful.
Enough people believed Liu was the one who gave up on treating their children’s deafness. The real doctors had all been sacked. Many people believed that Mao’s divine philosophy could inspire and spin off a new form of medicine and cultivate a new generation of previously untrained “healers” who could work miracles and let their children hear/speak. Liu Shao Qi was portrayed as backward and counter revolutionary. He had to go. You can read the rest on your own. All this happened in the late 1960s. Can it happen again in such a connected world as ours in 2026? You bet. There is no real internet in China. Censorship is the ultimate weapon for propaganda. Even in the absence of censorship outside China, many Sinophiles attributed Tu You You‘s discovery of artemisinin during the Vietnam War (which won her a Nobel Prize in 2015) to Mao’s great wisdom. That’s even though back then, Tu was a budding scientist very much under the radar of the Red Guards when she did her research. The lateness of the Nobel Committee’s recognition gave plenty of ammunition for Sinophiles to attack Western disdain even though the project was supposed to be a secret and Tu’s lowly status meant that her role in the project was suppressed even in China. Even when The received the Nobel Prize, she attributed her success to Mao.
Or consider election meddlers in the West. They don’t post “Vote for X because of Y policy.” It may be true, but it won’t go viral. Instead, they drop bombs like “Candidate Z eats babies!” The bizarreness doesn’t make it believable but “no way” often leads to sharing with the rhetorical question “Can you believe this?!” Unbelievable? That’s how things go viral. And before you know it, it’s bouncing everywhere in the echo chamber while logic languishes outside. Yes, some people believe that Hillary Clinton runs a secret organisation that sexually abuses children inside a family restaurant. This has led to violence from average believers who neither deranged nor mentally challenged. Of course, many of these believers are anti-Clinton to begin with – just like many Sinophiles – millions of them, believe that NASA never put any astronauts and China would be the first country to do it. It doesn’t matter if the US repeats the feat right now. They will still think that it’s a hoax. Judging from some of the posts on social media from otherwise normal Sinophiles, only China is capable of it and ethnic Chinese people who don’t believe it are a disgrace to their ancestors.
During the COVID pandemic, my ex-barber said that the virus was created by the evil Americans and told every one of his customers not to take any American vaccine because it contains chips that will control our minds. Truth? Zero. Emotional appeal? Massive! It played on fears of control, resonated with distrust in the West congealed by hours spent on Chinese social media. Even outside the great firewall, Chinese students studying in America paid through their noses for flights and quarantine in order to take the “trusted” Sinovac vaccine back home even though an enormous amount of data has shown that Sinovac is less efficacious. The myths go viral, spreading faster than the virus. Meanwhile, the propagandists laughed all the way to the influence bank, watching divisions deepen while shares in their companies skyrocketed. The graph below indicates the spike share price of Yiling Pharmaceuticals when 连花清瘟 Lian Hua Qing Wen promoted by 钟南山 Zhong Nan Shan during COVID. The herbal concoction turned out to be ineffective in studies outside China. Imagine the folks who had bought Yiling shares back then. In a way, minds have been controlled, but certainly not by the “evil West”.
Throw propaganda at a bunch of people who already have confirmation bias and the narrative will cut like hot knife through butter. As an independent-minded individual, all this may not affect me – except that it can. How? I remember a little Chinese girl comparing NATO with Cao Cao, Ukraine as Jingzhou, Russia and Putin as Wu and Sun Quan and Zelensky as Liu Cong. It seemed very impressive – that’s because the majority of people don’t know much about the Three Kingdoms and this obviously staged piece of propaganda supporting Russia’s invasion capitalised on the ignorance of the masses. I can write books, make videos on the Three Kingdoms to expose the flaws in little girl’s statements, but heck, people would rather go viral with the little girl and her specious arguments. As someone dealing with honest media, what determines what goes viral can affect how well I perform. What do I do? Slam my competitors with childish rants? I’m of course above that, but if that’s the only way to go viral, my future in the industry may be doomed.
My friend Jack, dressed like an emperor, decreed that in 2026, everyone much focus on the positive things. Excellent advice there. What is so positive about the madness? There are a few ways that I have already benefited trading on the Chinese market. It’s risky and speculative but you invest in something that has the potential to go viral (in an illogical way) then dump it when it has gone viral. Even Warren Buffett knows that his methods don’t apply in the Chinese market.
We live in a world of yin and yang. Neither is good in excess. There must always be a balance. Positive energy is not about hiding one’s head in the sand. We must know what and when to avoid things that have gone viral. The truth is just the truth. It’s what’s really the case and what really happens. It doesn’t matter if it’s positive nor negative. I act and position myself accordingly. That is the only form of “control” I have over the madness of the crowds.