by Tobin Smith
Why? It’s the digital Hot Pot. When social media’s hyper-targeting is combined with Fox News’s emotionally powerful white tribal identity porn content, these social media platforms create a killer digital Hot Pot tribal identity amplifying monster.
Here is why I use the Hot Pot metaphor. In the old pre-internet days, it used to take decades to create a wild-eyed foam-at-the-mouth hyperpartisan—you know—that crazy uncle who sees a conspiracy behind everything and won’t shut up about it. Today that radicalization process takes only a few years—or even months. The reason is the emotional manipulation power of social media’s emotion vulnerability assessment and content targeting algorithms.
Their algorithms redistribute and remonetize Fox News tribal identity porn by identifying the most powerful Fox News white tribal identity content and then placing it in the newsfeed of the most emotionally vulnerable users they have identified via likes/clicks/shares on the Facebook or YouTube or Twitter app.
In Facebook and Google/YouTube’s case, they know exactly which segment of Fox News white tribal identity porn is engaging best in real time across two hundred forty million Americans. This hyper-targeting is one of the intended consequences of this so-called surveillance capitalism industry. But this emotional predation on social media platforms produced consequences that their twenty-something-aged founders never thought about while they were coding their algorithms (can you say “Russian trolls” or “social media addiction?”). And they perform this emotional predation with zero cost for the content and zero liability for any of the unintended consequences—even when a white supremacist radicalized by online hate groups commits mass murder livestreamed on his Facebook page for the entire world to see.
Just like digital Planet Fox, the intent of social media is to activate your engagement time with images or videos that they know you are most vulnerable to engage with. They know this because you showed them exactly what kind of visual content you are most emotionally engaged and vulnerable to: Every click and like and share is just another data point hoovered up into their engagement assessment and targeting machine.
How do they all get away with this?
NEW TECHNOLOGY AND REGULATIONS DRIVE NEWS MEDIA GRIFTS
Yes, dear friend, in addition to the very intended consequences of the Reagan White House’s decision to end TV’s thirty-five-year political content regulatory framework in 1986 (the FCC’s Fairness Doctrine, which we will get to)—the small Section 230 of the ironically named 1996 “Communications Decency Act” (CDA) created the most emotionally powerful and destructive white tribal identity spiral since 1930s Germany. Yes, I dare say it—it’s an indisputable fact. Thank God digital social media platforms were not available to Nazi propaganda head Joseph Goebbels (pronounced Gerbels, soft G).
Fox News’s founders had no idea what social media was or would become. Murdoch bought MySpace, but it had no emotional engagement surveillance engine. But when the CDA stipulated that web platforms cannot be held liable for the content they host and algorithmically retarget and weaponize—one of the unintended consequences was the creation of the 100 percent digital Fox moral panic spiral. There would be no Foxhole spiral without the audience multiplier effect of emotionally weaponized social media. Even if the content social media redistributes is patently deceptive and dupes one hundred million people every month with carefully orchestrated white tribal partisan propaganda—zero liability!
A book publisher and author can be sued for libel if they knowingly make a false claim about someone or some company—they can be sued for “irreparable harm and emotional damages.” But if that irreparable harm and very real emotional damage came from social media distribution, no dice—Facebook is allowed to monetize as much fear and hate porn as they possibly can—so they do.
The white tribal panic spiral is an amazing business model—and understanding amazing business models is how I have made my primary living for decades. First off, like I said, there’s no content cost for social media platforms to access, activate, and amplify their partisan audience’s emotions. But a white tribal identity cable network like Fox News gets paid $1 to $2 a month per cable subscriber by the cable or satellite TV distributor!
I nicknamed Fox News’s fixed-outcome opinion segment format the Foxhole spiral for a reason: The Foxhole spiral is a very powerful psychological technique that I first learned about when I started hosting live Fox shows for the network. I’ll get into the entire tribal warfare playbook in a bit—but first you must understand this: When these white tribal identity segments got posted to social media and streamed to over one hundred million viewers a month—and achieved more than 1.2 billion engagements a year—the original FNC tribal activation and amplification playbook spiraled out of control. It really was like a pressure-cooking Hot Pot had been created on every digital screen: Just dump in the partisan rage, insults, fears, and resentment and eventually out pops another tribalized hyperpartisan brain braised in a toxic emotional stew at very high pressure for three-plus hours a day. Like one of my favorite cultural and political commentators Peggy Noonan writes:
It is just such an air of extremeness on the field now, and it reflects a larger sense of societal alienation. We have the fierce teamism of the lonely, who find fellowship in their online fighting group and will say anything for its approval. There are the angry who find relief in politics because they can funnel their rage there, into that external thing, instead of examining closer and more uncomfortable causes. There are the people who cannot consider God and religion and have to put that energy somewhere . . . America isn’t making fewer of the lonely, angry and unaffiliated, it’s making more every day.
In its present form and stage, the whole Foxhole tribal amplification spiral is clearly an emotionally predatory business. The American Foxocracy is a $10 billion a year business model based solely on the fact that evolution failed to prepare our reptilian caveman brain to binge watch white tribal identity porn that activates and monetizes white tribal fear and hatred—and the $140 billion emotion surveillance and hyper-targeting social media industry then retargets and remonetizes that fear and hate to an audience thirty times bigger than Fox’s cable audience.
That it literally has changed the outcome of American presidential elections and destroyed millions of family and friend relationships should no longer be surprising—because the whole activating and amplifying white tribal identity grift was the big idea of Fox News from the beginning.
The reason why America is becoming more lonely, angry, and unaffiliated every day is because the business model of activating and converting fearful white Americans into hyper-partisan tribalized zealots is now a $10 billion industry.
As the New York Times reports in its Planet Fox report, this is the same grift that has toppled two democratic governments in the UK and Australia and clearly destabilized the American form of bipartisan adversarial democracy.
In fact, to me, after researching the psychological damage of the Foxhole spiral and how it spun out of control, Fox News 3.0 (the conversion to Trump TV in 2016) feels analogous to a nuclear power plant accident. When Fox News’s emotionally powerful and psychologically toxic content became a 24/7 Donald Trump infomercial and went from reaching a few hundred thousand people per day in 2000 to engaging one hundred million people per month in 2019 via social media distribution and redistribution, it was like a massive tribal identity activation and partisan identity amplification bomb exploded within the psyche of America. Making more tribally activated and angry Americans is the explicit business model of Planet Fox. After twenty-five years of practice, Fox News’s radioactive right-wing partisan brain dust is now being absorbed into the emotional brains of one hundred million people per month for the sole purpose of monetizing the attention of their angry, lonely, and disaffected victims with ads and content licensing fees.
What did we think was going to happen to millions of Americans who consume white tribal activation and amplification fear/hate/blame and resentment pornogra
phy daily—that we were going to have fewer lonely, angry, and tribally activated Americans? Look—free online sex porn is now reported to have tens of millions of addicts worldwide and addiction recovery centers everywhere—and nobody watches three-plus hours a day of that stuff.
If we had an emotional Geiger counter implanted in every digital device and TV in America, we would get readings that would indicate “unhealthy levels of emotional radiation and damage” in tens of millions of Americans. It’s already happened in Australia and the UK where other parts of the Murdoch white tribal identity porn empire are thriving.
That level of emotional mayhem and social dysfunction is stunning. But that is not all: In America in 2019 we have millions of Fox News viewers who are without question psychologically addicted to the regular jolts of powerful pleasure neurochemicals that they get in the rigged Fox News “opinion-debate” programming.
Are you still skeptical that Fox News rigs its “fair and balanced” opinion debate programming? Well I performed in two thousand of those segments over fourteen years—here is exactly how it really works.
First, the cold open (i.e., the prerecorded opening) hooks the viewer/streamer’s attention and then builds interest with an image and narrative that is basically this: Your world looks like it’s either ending or at least gravely threatened by whatever tribal monster is underneath your bed and getting the highest engagement as measured by the Planet Fox digital surveillance and two-minute ratings of the cable network. The viewer now wants to get revenge for the latest left-wing apostasy or cultural desecration.
Then after that existential fight-or-flight bomb is thrown, miraculously, those negative emotions are replaced with the sweet revenge of a tribal victory—or at least hope that a tribal victory is close. That tribal victory feels glorious—and it activates your brain’s feel-good chemistry set.
It’s the swing and range of emotions from impending threat of doom and then a real glimmer of hope that is the Foxhole spiral which hooks the viewers’ attention, gains their interest, creates desire for a tribal victory, and activates the involuntary reflex of self-esteem-building chemicals with a righteous tribal victory.
Every seven or eight minutes you are made fearful and then made surer of the righteousness of your white conservative team, and it feels great to see and hear evidence that makes your team the winner and superior to your tribal enemy. As social scientist Crispin Sartwell shares in his recent Wall Street Journal article, detesting your political enemies is an immensely satisfying feeling. Why? Sartwell writes, “Because the compensatory pleasures of hatred—in particular its enhancement of self-esteem—are underrated. Hatred is self-congratulatory. It involves expressing superiority to its objects, and patting yourself on the back for not being them. When you declare your opponents to be obviously evil and stupid, you are congratulating not only yourself but the people who agree with you for being intelligent and good.”
For the chronically lonely, it feels great to be on the digital battlefield with your tribal blood brothers; the Foxhole camaraderie is invigorating.
And by tribal extension, it feels even greater to win when, in your real life outside the digital Foxocracy bubble, things aren’t so great. When there is not much winning in real life, many people come to Fox News to feed their lost sense of pride and accomplishment by watching their tribe winning onscreen. No one knows better than Fox News that tribal hatred enhances the viewers’ self-esteem. Tribal hatred is self-congratulatory—and the more proof the viewers see and hear of how “stupid and retarded” their tribal enemy is, the more self-congratulatory it feels to be proud members of the righteous tribe.
If you watch Fox News and you don’t understand that the opinion-debate segments are rigged (with a few exceptions) and the left-wing antagonists are nothing more than props in a carefully produced and choreographed performance, your motivated reasoning—let’s call it your right-wing tribally motivated cognition—is very strong. (By the time you finish this book you will know the exact formula for rigged outcome opinion segments.)
What is motivated cognition? It’s super important to this story. It is one of our innate and involuntary human reflexes. It’s when we become so “tribalized” or hyper-partisan about anything that we only cognitively engage with tribally approved content. More importantly, our brains also are hardwired to not cognitively process content that does not square with accepted tribal ideology and orthodoxy. Understand this if you are someone who watches thousands of hours of Tribal TV: motivated cognition is the primary psychological ingredient that powers the Fox News white tribal partisan grift.
Cognitive psychologists tell us motivated cognition is the act of innately deciding what you want to believe and then using your cognitive reasoning power to build a case in your mind that proves your belief.
Why do we do this?
Cognitive science teaches us via social experiments that humans primarily use our unique ability to reason in order to figure out how best to ingratiate and integrate ourselves into our chosen tribe. Turns out our ability to band together and work together for shared goals (like kill those pesky Vikings who kept invading my native Scottish home in the old days) was a primary weapon of survival.
But we might as well call this cognitive phenomenon “motivated ignorance.”
In 2019 not much has changed in our brains from our caveman ancestors. We still primarily use our brain to keep in good standing with our selected tribe—not so much for protection now but to feel the warm emotions of belonging to a like-minded tribe. We also want to avoid the pain of cognitive dissonance (the extreme discomfort felt when those who hold core beliefs are presented with evidence that disproves those beliefs). For the tribalized Fox News viewer or proud Deplorable, new contrary evidence simply cannot be processed or accepted—it does not pass through your cognitive dissonance force field.
This drive to feel a part of a tribe and our need for a “shared non-dissonant reality” is especially virulent when it comes to shared values/hatreds/scores to settle with other tribes—that is, partisan politics.
Key Point: Cognitive and social science is pretty clear; our innate need for a shared tribal reality is not only the main source of dysfunction in politics; it’s also the psychological key to $3 billion of Fox News’s revenues.
It is our innate “fundamental need for a shared reality with other people” that cognitive and social scientists research and describe all too often that overshadows incentives to weigh evidence or to be objective when it comes to political discussions. These experts also point to an even more basic incentive for not processing information dissonant to the tribal belief system; it takes a lot more energy. Our brains already consume twenty-plus percent of our daily energy—evolution taught us to use our noggins for more important things like finding a mate and defending our family members.
This dark truth: Our innate “need for shared reality” and the powerful associated cognitive dissonance that supports it lies at the heart of all partisan politics, “alternative facts,” and the drive to discount otherwise objective facts as “fake news.”
In fact, our brains are hardwired to automatically have an easier time remembering information that fits our worldviews. We’re much quicker to recognize information that confirms what we already know (confirmation bias), which makes us blind to facts that discount it. We have an innate drive to avoid painful cognitive dissonance and an inner need for confirmation bias that seeks to reinforce previously held beliefs and opinions.
After all, one partisan’s cognitively dissonant TV program is another partisan’s twenty-four-hour confirmation bias tribal spa, right?
All Fox News and the Foxhole spiral has to do to accomplish its magic is move you into the tribal partisan camp—and then Fox News owns not only your brain stem; they own your psyche.
IT’S NOT JUST THE FEEL-GOOD NEUROCHEMICAL RUSH THAT’S ADDICTING
What I found most interesting in researching this book is many chronically lonely and emotionally
isolated viewers are also addicted to their imagined sense of human connection and the perceived camaraderie they get from “fighting the good fight” against the “Libocracy” with their fellow hyperpartisan comrades-in-arms.
I have a chapter coming on the addictive power of emotional bonding and connection. But before the internet, right-wing partisans could not reach out and share the tribal victories and begrudge the tribal heresies inflicted on them by the left-wing “others” with so many people.
Many of these Foxhole addicts feel they are actively and not just vicariously participating in a culture war by watching their partisan blood brothers and sisters on Fox News and Foxnews.com fighting the righteous and heroic fight on their TV screen or digital device against the hated liberals/libtards/socialists who they viscerally feel:
Attack and threaten their virtue.
Disrespect their culture.
Are trying to take away their way of making a living.
Disparage their inerrant Evangelical Bible.
Insult their immortal savior Jesus Christ.
And, of course, are manically driven to confiscate the guns that they own, in part, as an insurance policy against the coming civil war they are told a hundred times each week by conservative media is coming to America “soon.”
In short, millions of people have developed “Fox News brain,” and it feels like no one in America really gives a shit. Compare this with the definition of video gaming disorder from the World Health Organization—which says the serious problem of “video gaming disorder” is a “pattern of behavior characterized by:
impaired control over gaming time (check).
increasing priority to gaming over other activities (check).
