The Automated Bullying Machine
Instagram Reels and the Perils of Being Cringe
Had a moment yesterday reading The Artist’s Way while thinking about watching a mutual on instagram get inundated with hate comments. Ended up writing this:
When I see people talk about internet brain-rot , I start to think it means something like “brain overload.” If you know who Baby Gronk and the Drip-King are, and you can make a decent judgement on which one has the most rizz, then you’ve allowed your pre-frontal cortex to amass such massive amounts of useless information it’s starting to smell bad. I kind of like to think of it as your brain getting fermented, like you could put it in a jar and start brewing kombucha. But I don’t think a 31-year-old keeping up with Gen-Z slang is all that serious a symptom of some kind of moral or personal decay (Dear God, I hope not). Truly, this might ignore the actually rotten things that people are nudged into doing online. I think if you were to point to someone who’s been damaged by their time spent online, you would be pointing at a person who would rather be cruel than cringe.
Cringe is an interesting phenomenon, because we’re all susceptible to it: both by being embarrassing, and experiencing secondhand embarrassment (For an excellent examination of cringe and how it relates to shame, I’d recommend Contrapoints’ excellent 2020 video essay). I’m not going to lie, last year, when I first saw Jake Novak’s infamous “I Want to be the Next SNL Cast Member” TikTok, I joined the pack of wolves that zealously tore into him. What was it that made him so ripe a target? Well, a number of things: He was a guy in his early 30s who carried immense Theatre Kid energy, a kind of powerful earnestness that feels uncomfortably positive. The very concept of Novak’s video also added to mix given it was literally “attention-seeking,” in a way that went beyond what we think of as “authentic.” Sure, we all put stuff out there in the hope that people will see it, but not all of us write open letters to Lorne Michaels in the hope to be cast on a sometimes-kind-of-funny-but-usually-unbearable comedy show. We may all be on Tik Tok but we (myself included) are nothing like this guy. In short, by putting himself out there in a way that made a number of us feel self-conscious about our own online presence, Novak had committed one of the most unforgivable sins of the internet: he had posted cringe.
The response-to-the-response of Jake Novak was kind of interesting to see. While Novak was insanely “cringey” to watch, many were also shocked at the levels of derision he was receiving. After a while, there was a general sense of: “You know, this was funny for a while but can we pump the brakes on this a bit?” Novak would later go on to write an op-ed detailing the abuse, which included emails that suggested he end his life.
I’m thinking of Novak because recently, someone I follow on Instagram posted a video that I remember seeing my feed and initially rolling my eyes at. Had I scrolled to the comments, I would have seen plenty of supportive ones, but then I also would have seen some that were remarkably less so. They start out saying things like “bring back bullying,” and then turn to “bring back bump stocks.” They were essentially threatening to kill this person because not only were they posting cringe, they were also posting queer. I thought of my own initial reaction and how I too thought the video was a bit “cringey,” but the level of hate this person was receiving was by any account disturbing. As someone who’s gotten hateful comments online, I know the sinking feeling one experiences when they receive a message that tells them they’d be happy to see them dead, but I can’t imagine getting that much at once.
The worst part about seeing these hateful comments pile up may be how unsurprising the response was, since this has kind of been my experience using Instagram’s Reels feature. And while only anecdotal, there appears to be a general consensus that Instagram’s Reels comment section is surprisingly negative. While the Wall Street Journal published a report talking about how Instagram’s Reels algorithm had inadvertently ended up connecting adult predators to children, The “dark side“ of Instagram Reels may actually be far more banal and widespread. This is in how Instagram reels are particularly good at promoting content that encourages derision. I have seen videos come up my For You page (because all platforms have a “For You” page now), with an unclear amount of likes, 20 comments, and over 5000 shares. If you’re sharing a video without commenting on it, for whatever reason, it likely means that don’t want the creator to see the comment you are making. It is not a good sign, but for Instagram of course, it means more engagement and more time spent on the app.
Of the videos I have seen that do get a lot of comments, it is not uncommon to see a comment with more likes than the post itself that’s mocking the original post. Of course, it’s easy to say that this is my own doing, and that I am only seeing this because of my own interactions with the platform, but I feel that would be letting the platform itself off the hook. Instagram is not some wild animal that I am poking with a stick, it is software that was designed to collect data and make money. This was not an act of God. A series of people with names and faces collectively decided that this would work — and continues to work — in this way.
While all platforms do this to some extent, they don’t always do it to the same extent. In the time that I spent on TikTok, I would occasionally come across something you could only describe as “cringe content” or a ridiculously bad take that was being dunked on. For the original creator who was getting roasted this was your video getting on “the wrong side of tiktok,” as if the video took a wrong turn and suddenly found itself in an unfriendly neighbourhood. The point is, the reason this phrase was being used is because at the time, it wasn’t all that common for it to happen. The reason TikTok was so successful so quickly was because of how well its algorithm could predict material users wanted to see (although of course, as Cory Doctorow so eloquently put, it is now in its period of enshittification). What Instagram appears to have done differently is that it places greater weight on the number of comments on a reel as well as its amount of shares in order to determine how high it is ranked in the algorithm. This means that a video with a high amount of shares but a low number of likes or comments (i.e. one that people are watching in private and snickering at to themselves) remains a highly ranked video in the algorithm. This is because the point is not to just have the user watch the video, it’s to have them interact with it as well. This should go without saying by now: more user interactions mean the platform can make better predictions on what will keep users on the platform for longer, and thus produce even more data. In the eyes of Instagram’s algorithm, a positive comment, a sarcastic comment, a hurtful comment, a threatening comment, a playful comment, and a hateful comment are all one and the same. As data, the platform renders their meanings and messages invisible.
While Meta and Instagram have faced these kinds of scandals before and always make the same promise to “do better,” the ugly truth is that they can’t. With all the hype around AI, you simply can’t rely on AI alone to effectively moderate user behaviour because AI can only repeat patterns, not imagine something new. This is something semiologists have claimed is key to language comprehension. A human being’s ability to imagine, is what allows us to process and interpret language. Contrary to what the AI gurus may be saying, language comprehension is not just pattern recognition, it is something more. In order for a message to be fully understood, it must be read by an actual person who is aware of the context in which it is being made. On the part of a platform’s moderator who may be unfamiliar with the context, determining it can require a great deal of labour, something that many of these tech companies are already trying to cut down on.
As a result, the message to the users of these platforms (especially those who are queer or non-white) is pretty clear. Did you post a take so bad that you ended up becoming the main character of Twitter? Did someone take a screenshot of your Tinder profile and roast you? Are you a trans person who posted a selfie that ended up “inviting” a torrent of violent, hateful comments?
“You’re on your own, kid; and no one is coming to save you.”
The thing is, for those of us online, very few of us can claim to be innocent of participating in something like this at some point. We’ve all laughed at someone’s misfortune, we all know the pleasure of schaudenfraude, and we all love to see some asshole get dunked on in the retweets. What comes next though, is the creeping realization that the more you share online (as these platforms all encourage us to do), the more you start to realize that it is only a matter of time before you yourself are put in the stocks of the global village and pelted with the day’s refuse. It’s happened to me, and if at any point you decide there’s something you want to share with the world (a song, a poem, a drawing, an idea), it can happen to you too.
The internet is an abundance of irony and a dearth of empathy because it’s pretty much the only way you can withstand its onslaught of feeling. When your feed puts a goofy shitpost next to a video of a father carrying one of their child’s limbs, you can’t help but view both of them through the same nullifying gaze of the platform. They are two completely different things, and yet, on here, they are simply just posts. In some ways, it is horrifying that we can view the suffering of others from this cold, comfortable distance, and yet we know that if we were to feel true empathy for everything that we saw when we stared into The Portal we would melt like Peter Outerbridge at the end of Saw VI. It’s a survival mechanism because it keeps us safe from the thing we hate more than anything else: our shame.
This is the reasoning behind those who choose being cruel over being cringe, and it results in a community where cruelty becomes valourized and vulnerability is mercilessly exploited; but don’t listen to anyone who tells you this is all “human nature,” this by design. As humans, we have just as much capacity to be kind as we do brutal, the difference is these platforms can extract more data out of us if we are the latter and not the former. This is the enrage-to-engage, conflict-as-content, incentivized-interaction approach to what Jathan Sadowski calls “data-driven capitalism,” and it works. It works really, really well.
Contrary to what you may think, this is not a rejection of shame. I think shame gets a bit of a bad rap, and we actually need it more than we may think. If the difference between guilt and shame respectively is “I did a bad thing” vs. “I am a bad person”, then guilt without shame means “I did a bad thing but I am not a bad person,” or “I am not defined by every single one of my actions.” Now, this can be helpful for people to take responsibility for their actions, but it’s also good at doing the exact opposite. For example, expanding on Harry Frankfurt’s theory on bullshit and lying: a liar has enough shame to know that truth and falsity are real and separate, and that they are actively hiding the truth, as well as hiding that they are lying. A bullshitter — unburdened by shame — pays no regard to what is true or false because their goal is to manipulate. They feel no shame because they have no empathy, and if you want to feel empathy for others, you will have to feel at least some shame. I don’t make the rules.
There’s a story in Anthony Veasna So’s Afterparties where an obnoxious character who has openly cheated to win a raffle looks back at the disapproving crowd and snaps:
“Let me tell you the difference between winning and losing… It’s shame! Losers have shame and winners don’t. You think you’re gonna make me feel bad about changing the game?… Fuck that.”
Shame can compel us to hurt others, but it can also prevent us from acting in our own interest since it leaves us convinced we don’t deserve to. This leaves the ones who refuse to feel shame free to do as they please. Fuck that.
The commenters seem to forget that we don’t need to “bring back bullying” (which ironically enough appears to have started in response to the harassment of #GamerGate) because it never went away. If anything, what Instagram Reels and platforms like it have done with bullying is automate, incentivize, and monetize it. The same algorithmic protocols that connect predators with underage children (as in the WSJ report) is the same one that connects marginalized people to bigots. This is my fundamental problem with algorithmically determined content: it makes seeking out anything too easy.
We’re human beings. We’re not perfect, and we’re not all condemned to suffer because some of us have laughed while watching an awkward wedding video or made a pithy snide comment. Plenty of us laugh at cringey awkward content or good jabs and roasts. That is not the problem. The problem is how these things get fed to us over and over to the point where not only do we see this kind of behaviour as commonplace (and above all, abundant), we also become so terrified of being the next target of derision that we let the worst possible people decide what is celebrated and what is mocked, letting those without shame cast stone after stone after stone.
There is plenty of material out there that is deserving of mockery and scorn, in fact, a lot of what people describe as bullying actually comes in pretty handy when it’s targeted towards people in power. A better solution would be if platforms stopped making money off of algorithms that provide a slew of tailor-made targets ripe for tailor-made mockery, which — as I mentioned before — would be too costly in terms of the labour required to effectively moderate while continuing to see growth in profit. This is why ultimately, I think algorithmically delivered content is simply not worth its human cost. It preys on our worst instincts, centralizes power, and wants us to keep fighting so can it charge us admission to watch ourselves fight.
The wrong people are being bullied, and the wrong people are being shamed, but it’s not just the bigots in the comment section. Those most deserving of our contempt are the ones who made themselves obscene fortunes by telling those same people: “Here, this is For You. Here’s another.”