Profit-Driven Media Feed the Trolls and Drag Us All Down
The buzziest “news” story this week involves a Twitter spat between Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg and professional misogynist/grifter Andrew Tate. Most people reading this will probably have seen the tweets in question, but it’s about as dumb as you would expect any interaction involving Tate to be. The narcissistic internet celebrity and staunch opponent of reading targeted Thunberg boasting about his luxury car collection and their “enormous” carbon emissions. Thunberg responded by suggesting Tate had a small penis and telling him to get a life.
To no one’s surprise, this interaction immediately went viral. Bourgeois media churned out stories celebrating Thunberg’s takedown of the obnoxious Tate. “Greta Thunberg one-ups Andrew Tate on Twitter” The Hill wrote. “Greta Thunberg Humiliates Andrew Tate After ‘Enormous Emissions’ Boast” Forbes declared. “Greta Thunberg Doesn’t Care About Andrew Tate’s Cars — But Has an Idea of What They’re Overcompensating For” Rolling Stone opined. Tate of course milked the interaction for all it was worth on Twitter and used it to further boost his profile.
There are multiple things that make this whole affair so depressing, starting with what it says about the priorities of the capitalist media, both traditional and social. Driven by the incentive to maximize profits and avoid offending advertisers, bourgeois media have always had a tendency to target the lowest common denominator. But with the rise of cable news channels and the 24-hour news cycle, followed by the Internet, social media, and more options than ever competing for audience’s attention, that trend has only accelerated. Stories that media devote the most coverage to tend to be those that provoke the strongest emotional reactions and are easy to have an opinion on: celebrity gossip, natural disasters, mass shootings, political tribalism, and polarizing figures like Donald Trump.
That profit-driven media environment also feeds professional trolls, who know how to manipulate the media’s thirst for ratings and clicks by deliberately stoking controversy and outrage. For all the hand-wringing about internet trolls, such figures predate the internet. Rush Limbaugh was perhaps the template for the modern right-wing bomb thrower. Limbaugh contributed nothing positive to society. His talent was in “triggering the libs”, throwing out red meat for conservative listeners, and garnering maximum attention and profits for doing so. The entire right-wing noise machine was built on that model—culminating with the presidency of Trump, who cut out the middleman as both politician and outrage-generating media personality in one. Tate is part of that tradition, but also mixes in elements of more recent personalities: the ostentatious displays of wealth of Dan Bilzerian, the “guidance” to wayward young men of Jordan Peterson.
Greta Thunberg rose to public prominence for the opposite reason. Her unwavering commitment is in drawing public attention to arguably the greatest crisis facing humanity, the global climate emergency. Over and over she tries to bring the conversation back to the need to lower carbon emissions and address the climate crisis. Unfortunately, politicians and media would rather fixate on Thunberg herself than her message. When Hulu released a documentary about Thunberg called I Am Greta back in the fall of 2020, I wrote the following on Facebook:
I don't have much interest in this I Am Greta documentary. The appeal of Greta Thunberg was the urgency she conveyed in the need to take action on the climate crisis. But the media would rather talk about Thunberg herself, because that's easier and less threatening to vested interests than discussing action to solve the existential problem she's talking about.
Thunberg's whole stance is that governments should "listen to scientists" and take serious action. Well, they're not doing that and they're not going to so long as it threatens corporate profits. Look at all the ghouls from the fossil fuel industry that Joe Biden is staffing his administration with. Look at Justin Trudeau spending billions on pipelines while claiming to care about the environment. The question that well-meaning activists like Thunberg have to answer becomes: Now what? What do you do when politicians refuse to take the action that is needed to tackle this existential threat to humanity? What do you do when the main obstacle is the economic system we live under, capitalism?
Well, at that point you start to draw revolutionary conclusions. Let me know when Hulu releases a documentary on that.
To her credit, Thunberg has moved towards criticisms of capitalism itself as the main obstacle to serious climate action, though her ideas remain somewhat broad and ill-defined. Of course, anyone who takes the correct position that only the socialist transformation of society can end the threat of climate change will find positive media coverage and requests from politicians for photo ops drying up quickly.
The bourgeois media is happy to celebrate Thunberg herself purely based on her image. A teenage girl urging the world to take action on the climate crisis is a feel-good story. What’s not a feel-good story is the refusal of politicians to take serious concrete action on that front, and media relying on advertisers that include the 100 corporations responsible for 71% of global carbon emissions. Capitalism is based on the maximization of private profit above all else. The world economy still runs on fossil fuels. Climate crisis or no climate crisis, there is too much money to be made from the exploitation of those resources for governments to make the necessary investments in sustainable energy. So Justin Trudeau will happily pose for photos with Thunberg, while spending billions of dollars in public money to buy a pipeline climate activists have called a “carbon bomb” that will only further exacerbate the crisis.
This brings us back to the online tiff between Thunberg and Tate, which garnered more media attention than anything I’ve heard about Thunberg in a long time. This is the kind of story the media loves: a public spat with almost zero intellectual content between polarizing media personalities (the fact that calling for action on climate change could be “controversial” is another issue, but I digress), perfectly geared towards political tribalism where each side can cheer on their favourite.
Many are applauding Thunberg’s “takedown” of Tate. Let’s get one thing straight: I’m happy to see anyone take down a douchebag like Tate who brags about how much pollution his luxury cars create. But Thunberg’s response isn’t particularly interesting; it’s the most basic schoolyard taunt. The real problem is that an eloquent young woman, known for drawing attention to the most urgent and serious issue we’ve ever faced, gets more public attention when she accuses an obnoxious internet grifter of having a small dick.
These kinds of idiotic exchanges are what the corporate media thrives on and what social media algorithms, which bury so many more important posts, spread far and wide. They’re the ones that get the clicks and ratings and likes and retweets, and therefore maximize revenue for media companies and grifters like Tate. I get it: these things are easy to have an opinion on. Cheering on a public figure we like against one we hate gets the dopamine flowing. But in light of existential threats such as the climate crisis, precisely the reason Thunberg became well known in the first place, it’s so sad to see what gets the bulk of our attention. It’s the same phenomenon I mentioned regarding the culture wars.
I acknowledge that by writing these posts, I’m part of the problem. But I had to comment on the kind of idiocy the media encourages. Driven by the profit motive, traditional and social media have an incentive to focus on content that keeps us distracted from real problems. Fixating on these grifters and non-stories makes us all dumber. Scam artists, trolls, and demagogues like Trump, Elon Musk, and Andrew Tate thrive on public attention. The media is happy to give it to them. By doing so, they give the trolls more power and influence, which drags even the best of us down to their level and leaves everyone wallowing in the muck.
Update: Since this post was published, Andrew Tate and his brother have been arrested in Romania as part of a human trafficking and rape investigation. Apparently the prominent appearance, in Tate’s video response to Thunberg, of two boxes of pizza from a local shop tipped off police about his location.