65 Ryan Schocket, “This Woman Tweeted About Having Coffee Every Day with Her Husband—the Internet Tore Her Apart,” BuzzFeed, October 24, 2022, https://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanschocket2/woman-backlash-for-coffee-husband-tweet.

66 Joon Ian Wong, Dave Gershgorn, and Mike Murphy, “Facebook Is Trying to Get Rid of Bias in Trending News by Getting Rid of Humans,” Quartz, August 26, 2016, https://qz.com/768122/facebook-fires-human-editors-moves-to-algorithm-for-trending-topics.

67 Hannah Ritchie, “Read All About It: The Biggest Fake News Stories of 2016,” CNBC, December 30, 2016, https://www.cnbc.com/2016/12/30/read-all-about-it-the-biggest-fake-news-stories-of-2016.html.

68 Olivia Solon, “In Firing Human Editors, Facebook Has Lost the Fight Against Fake News,” The Guardian, August 29, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/29/facebook-trending-news-editors-fake-news-stories.

69 Boorstin, The Image.

70 Edward Bernays, Crystallizing Public Opinion (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1923), 171.

71 Boorstin, The Image, 10.

72 Brian Welk and Rosemary Rossi, “Bean Dad Makes His 9-Year-Old Struggle to Open Can of Beans for 6 Hours, Infuriates Twitter: ‘Self-Absorbed A–Hat,’” The Wrap, January 3, 2021, https://www.thewrap.com/bean-dad-9-year-old-open-can-6-hours-infuriates-twitter.

73 Israel ישראל (@Israel), “Things that shouldn’t be trending on @Twitter: ‘The Jews’ @TwitterSafety do your job,” Twitter, May 16, 2023, 5:02 a.m., https://twitter.com/Israel/status/1658397528398737408.

74 Sarah Mervosh and Emily S. Rueb, “Fuller Picture Emerges of Viral Video of Native American Man and Catholic Students,” New York Times, January 20, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/20/us/nathan-phillips-covington.html.

75 Joshua Rothman, “How to Escape Pseudo-events in America: The Lessons of Covington,” New Yorker, 2019, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/what-the-covington-saga-reveals-about-our-media-landscape.

CHAPTER 3: GURUS, BESTIES, AND PROPAGANDISTS

1 Jason Horowitz and Taylor Lorenz, “Khaby Lame, the Everyman of the Internet,” New York Times, June 2, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/02/style/khaby-lame-tiktok.html.

2 Thirst traps are provocative images or videos in which the creator is trying to appear attractive or enticing.

3 Clare Malone, “The Gospel of Candace Owens,” New Yorker, April 22, 2023, https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-communications/the-gospel-of-candace-owens.

4 While there are many journalistic profiles of MrBeast, his frequently updated Wikipedia page provides the most up-to-date summary of his content and philanthropic efforts. “MrBeast,” Wikipedia, last modified September 8, 2023, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MrBeast.

5 “I Helped 2000 Amputees Walk Again,” video posted to YouTube by Beast Philanthropy, May 7, 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5PvwYZQtT8.

6 Keffals became known in part for successfully trolling her ideological opponents, posting things like “I’ve always wanted to ratio…” and then pointing followers to a quote-tweeted post or other mention of a prominent media figure, politician, or corporate target whom she felt had done something stupid or malicious. Her followers would then go and comment on the post or reply to the poster. The term ratio refers to the number of comments relative to likes on a social media post; a post with many more comments than likes often indicates to observers that the person got a lot of flak and little support for what they expressed. Taylor Lorenz, “The Trans Twitch Star Delivering News to a Legion of LGBTQ Teens,” Washington Post, June 26, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/26/keffals-trans-twitch-streaming-news.

7 Sinan Aral, Lev Muchnik, and Arun Sundararajan, “Distinguishing Influence-Based Contagion from Homophily-Driven Diffusion in Dynamic Networks,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 106, no. 51 (2009): 21544–21549, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0908800106.

8 Talcott Parsons, “On the Concept of Influence,” Public Opinion Quarterly 27, no. 1 (1963): 37–62, https://doi.org/10.1086/267148.

9 Cartwright’s formula in its academic construction specified an agent, O, who was exerting influence; a method of exerting influence; and the agent subjected to the influence, which he labeled P. Agent O → does something → to Agent P. I use the term target here for clarity. Cartwright uses agent to describe both the person being influenced and the person doing the influencing. While Cartwright’s formula for how influence works is simple, he acknowledges that the reality is often more complex: “Breaking down the process of influence in this way does violence to its essential nature, for above all influence is a social relationship. Influence cannot be properly understood by treating the properties of O or of P in isolation.” Dorwin Cartwright, “Influence, Leadership, Control,” in Handbook of Organizations (RLE: Organizations), ed. James G. March (Routledge, 2013), 1–47.

10 Chloe Sorvino, “Could MrBeast Be the First YouTuber Billionaire?,” Forbes, November 30, 2022, https://www.forbes.com/sites/chloesorvino/2022/11/30/could-mrbeast-be-the-first-youtuber-billionaire.

11 Alan Neves et al., “Quantifying Complementarity Among Strategies for Influencers’ Detection on Twitter,” Procedia Computer Science 51 (2015): 2435–2444, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.procs.2015.05.428.

12 Jon Ronson, “How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life,” New York Times, February 12, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/magazine/how-one-stupid-tweet-ruined-justine-saccos-life.html.

13 Cartwright, “Influence, Leadership, Control,” 1–47.

14 Jesse Singal, “The Strange Tale of Social Autopsy, the Anti-harassment Start-up That Descended into Gamergate Trutherism,” Intelligencer, April 18, 2016, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/04/how-social-autopsy-fell-for-gamergate-trutherism.html. Owens, who herself had been the target of real-world bullying, achieved some visibility as a side story during Gamergate. She was the founder of an effort called Social Autopsy, which launched a Kickstarter to catalog the abuses of trolls and bullies by deanonymizing them and making their words easily discoverable. This effort caused its own online blowup, as both Gamergate and anti-Gamergate participants, as well as antiharassment advocates (including two of the women who had been a sustained focus of Gamergate attacks), pointed out the ways it would be abused, leading Owens to accuse them of targeting her.

15 Jakob Nielsen, “The 90-9-1 Rule for Participation Inequality in Social Media and Online Communities,” Nielsen Norman Group, October 8, 2006, https://www.nngroup.com/articles/participation-inequality.

16 Shannon C. McGregor, “Social Media as Public Opinion: How Journalists Use Social Media to Represent Public Opinion,” Journalism: Theory, Practice & Criticism 20, no. 8 (May 9, 2019): 1070–1086, https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884919845458. McGregor points this out and additionally highlights the fact that social media participants are not reflective of the public, despite the fact that media considers social media majorities as a sort of unofficial poll and uses commentary from participants as vox populi opinions.

17 Renée DiResta, “Election-Fraud Rumors Are Always the Same,” The Atlantic, December 15, 2022, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/11/arizona-election-voting-machines-fraud-conspiracy-tv-tropes/672100.

18 Aumyo Hassan and Sarah J. Barber, “The Effects of Repetition Frequency on the Illusory Truth Effect,” Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications 6, no. 1 (May 13, 2021), https://doi.org/10.1186/s41235-021-00301-5.

19 Eytan Bakshy et al., “Everyone’s an Influencer: Quantifying Influence on Twitter,” Proceedings of the Fourth ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining, Hong Kong, February 9, 2011, https://doi.org/10.1145/1935826.1935845.

20 Jeff Guo, “The Bonkers Seth Rich Conspiracy Theory, Explained,” Vox, May 24, 2017, https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/5/24/15685560/seth-rich-conspiracy-theory-explained-fox-news-hannity.

21 Damon Centola, “Influencers, Backfire Effects, and the Power of the Periphery,” Personal