Social media algorithms amplify the reach of incendiary, misinformation-filled, conspiracy theories, and users have no control over them
What you see in your feeds isn't up to you. What's at stake is no longer just missing a birthday. It's your sanity—and world peace.
Context & Ripple Effects
This WSJ argument lands at the end of a multi-year arc in which the debate over platform power kept changing shape. In 2018, Wired argued that as politicians accused search and social firms of censorship, the real problem was opaque algorithms recklessly amplifying harmful content — a framing that anticipated today's point that users simply cannot control what their feeds serve them.
The evidence base has since thickened: CNN reported in 2019 that Twitter was inserting tweets into feeds of users who don't follow the accounts, sometimes amplifying extremist rhetoric, and a 2020 study of roughly 200K US internet users found Facebook users read more polarized news the longer they stay on the service, with an impact five times greater for conservatives. The WSJ's claim that feed curation is out of users' hands is the through-line connecting those data points to real-world consequences.
First-order effects
- Users are directly affected right now: their feeds are curated by systems they neither see nor control, meaning exposure to incendiary and conspiratorial content is a default outcome of engagement-driven ranking rather than a choice.
- Platforms like Twitter and Facebook — already documented inserting unfollowed tweets into feeds and correlating usage time with polarized news consumption — now face the charge that amplification itself, not just moderation decisions, is the harm.
Second-order effects
- Political pressure shifts target: with the censorship accusation losing traction against the amplification critique, regulators and lawmakers have a cleaner case for demanding algorithmic transparency and user controls from the same firms.
- Advertisers and civic institutions become exposed parties — if feeds measurably push users toward more polarized news the longer they scroll, brand adjacency to conspiracy content becomes a measurable risk tied to ranking design, not just moderation lapses.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the durable fix moves from fact-checking individual posts to governing the recommendation layer itself — disclosure of ranking criteria, opt-outs from algorithmic feeds, or audits — making amplification a regulated function rather than a black box.
- The deeper structural shift is that 'new world disorder' framing from the earlier misinformation coverage matures into a governance question: societies deciding whether engagement-optimized distribution is compatible with a shared factual baseline, with platform design choices treated as policy levers.
The trend: Platform accountability is migrating from content-moderation fights toward the recommendation algorithms themselves, as evidence accumulates that amplification — not deletion — is where the societal damage is done.