When one of your tweets goes viral, did you premeditate that?
When one of your tweets goes viral, did you premeditate that?
When one of your tweets goes viral, did you premeditate that?
You wanted it to go viral.
You tried to make it go viral.
It went viral.
You share culpability if, in going viral, it causes harm in some way.
Did you cause it to go viral?
After all, you tweeted ten thousand other times, and although you wanted each of them to go viral, and you tried to make each of them go viral, none of them actually went viral.
Clearly, it’s quite bizarre to insist that you caused that one viral tweet of yours to go viral.
Some might respond, “Yeah, but there’s all this evidence that you conspired with lots of like-minded people to get your tweet to go viral. That shows that you and your cabal of conspirators are master manipulators who planned for twenty years (or whatever) for your idea to go viral and affect the narrative.”
Well, for your tweet that does (finally!) go viral, if you were to have detailed knowledge of who retweeted it, you’d find that a lot of your close cadre of followers retweeted it, more than usual. Among those, Doug, who has more followers than you, retweeted it, and it happened that Joe Rogan saw it, but didn’t retweet it. Your follower Susie who retweeted it got retweeted by a fairly large account, and that retweet was also seen by Rogan, but this time it somehow spurred him to retweet it. The rest is history.
Get in the weeds on how the virality happened, and it will be a story of mostly fellow travelers with loads of overlapping connections and many shared aims. It will look like a conspiracy.
In a sense it was a conspiracy, but not necessarily even in the sense of a formal group that sees themselves as a group.
Some subsets of the retweeters behind the your viral tweet might actually interact via DMs or email or in the real world. They might even have discussed purposely trying to align their messaging so as to augment the chances of a viral tweet on their shared vision.
And some of the accounts retweeting it might themselves represent a cabal, or institute, passing on the tweet because it serves their interests.
There are, then, lots of conspiracies. Some tight knit ones, and many crisscrossing loose-knit fractious and temporary ones.
What there was not was a preplanned conspiracy to cause that viral tweet that day.
Not by you. And not by some conspiracy that includes you.
All those involved are culpable to varying extents for it going viral, but to understand what caused it to go viral, one must look more broadly.
Joe Rogan has a big role in the particular billiard ball steps involved that day, but the real explanation for why it went viral isn’t the weeds of specific folks who retweeted it.
Rather, the real explanation concerns what the network was already “ready” to want to hear about and was excited to talk about.
You didn’t cause it to go viral.
You and your tight or loose conspiracies didn’t cause it to go viral.
What caused it to go viral is that the network was already poised to want to talk next about THAT.
And you bear no responsibility for the network being so poised. You and your conspirators didn’t cause that either.
That’s the nature of the spread of ideas in politics. Sure, there are cabals. Loads and loads of them. But the ideas that stream through aren’t controlled by some cabal. No cabal decides what we’re all going to get cult-like about next.