The Twenty-Five Hour News Cycle

An unfortunate side effect of the modern social media landscape is the expectation of endless content and instant coverage. The TikTok algorithm has a penchant for picking up on your interest in something gripping, then delivering several more videos about the same subject to your feed, adding an overwhelming sense of immediacy and ubiquity to a story.

Having been regularly posting current events content to TikTok and other platforms for years, I've seen countless times where someone has commented on a video of mine asking why I didn't cover a given topic, usually whatever topic just hit the wider trends that day.

While I never thought to actually keep track of the "why" in these cases, anecdotally they usually boil down to one of these:

• The topic is so new that they're asking on a video that came out before the topic
• I decided it wasn't a good fit for my newsletter (or I just didn’t know)
• The topic is nonsense or a conspiracy theory

While we already had the 24-hour news cycle, we've somehow managed to create a scenario where that’s still not enough. We need more hours per hour to cover all of the things people have been whipped up into thinking is a "five-alarm fire."

It’s always five alarms.

The problem this creates is we find ourselves having actual, material, significant things worth discussing and sharing which get drowned out by the far flashier could-be-a-TV-plot stories. We saw this during the TikTok outage where suddenly everyone was tech researcher and "knew" exactly what happened, posting authoritatively that "TikTok was bought by Meta" and all the data was transferred to Meta's servers and also the "algorithm changed" (a popular refrain because its completely ambiguous and personal) and also Facebook “now has an account“ (it was years old).

For my own sanity, I‘ve approached my work with the intention of not being a moment-to-moment "we've got breaking news right now," channel. I don't do what I do because I want to scare people into never looking away. I do it because I want to communicate events to people in a way that is consumable and informative.

Unfortunately, I haven’t always been able to maintain that mindset. Stories crop up that I feel I should really "be posting about right now.” I hear those comments in my head asking “why I haven't covered some subject” or “why I've been silent on some issue,” as if that has become the expectation: talk about everything, or you're not talking about anything.

The weird part is that most of the time people don't actually want a video or discussion on a subject. There's a curious layer to this that I've noticed since being on the receiving end of tens of thousands of comments a week: many folks just want to appear as though they got there first.

I don't just mean people who comment, "first!“ I mean people who hear about something novel, do no further research, and run to the comments of the next video on their feed to share the same sentiment as if they're Paul Revere getting the word out. This behavior has become so normalized through algorithmic feeds on social media creating near-literal echo chambers of people repeating the same line that today's viral video stated.

A few days ago it was "Meta bought TikTok," only for Trump to take office and directly state they're figuring out who they want to try to get to purchase it.

Sometimes is a quip or phrase, such as the "if its just a Roman salute, then you do it!" which can now be found in every comment section about Elon's nazi salute.

Sometimes its not completely bad, such as a recent case where a video went viral talking about Facebook Messenger's invasive data collection. Half of my comment sections were people going, "you should be concerned about Facebook Messenger, because it does XYZ," where "XYZ" got more and more incorrect as the day went on and the game of telephone continued. At least that came with a reasonable action associated. Deleting Facebook Messenger is indeed a good idea.

All of this would be Cool and Good if they were just memes. Memes spread, that's what memes are. But most of the time it's not a gag or a meme: it's incorrect policy interpretations, rumor, or hysteria spreading like wildfire.

I try real hard to push back against the constant sense of immediacy created by nonstop feeds of information. I try to collect what I think would be at the cross section of relevance to my audience and my ability to speak on a subject, and I deliver those once or twice a week.

99.5% of the time, there is nothing to be done in response to learning about something from a headline. Letting them pile up a bit and skimming through for what is important is perfectly okay. Looking away for a bit is not a moral failing. Looking away for a little longer can be a good way to keep yourself grounded.

Just remember: if you saw it in the comments section of a social media site, that is not a source. That is somehow worse than hearing it from some random guy named Dave at your local bar. At least Dave is probably real.