Ashleigh Crause : 20 July 2025 21:07
Stop scrolling for a moment and look around you. Every meme, every viral video, every outrage-fueled hashtag, are you sure you chose them? Or did they choose you?
We like to think we’re immune to manipulation, that our beliefs and behaviours are our own. But the reality is far more uncomfortable: the internet has become humanity’s largest psychological experiment, a vast, borderless Petri dish where social contagion is not just possible, but engineered, weaponized, and relentless.
Decades ago, rumours and fads spread slowly, like ripples in a pond. Today, the internet is an ocean in perpetual storm. Within minutes, a lie can outrun the truth. A trend can leap from one side of the globe to the other, infecting millions, warping perceptions, and igniting outrage before breakfast.
Social contagion isn’t a metaphor. It’s the new law of online existence. Ideas, good or bad, spread like viruses, and the platforms we inhabit are their ideal breeding grounds.
What was once local gossip or idle speculation now metastasizes into global moral panics and digital cults. Online, ideologies don’t just trend, they recruit, indoctrinate, and radicalize.
Consider how fringe beliefs, pseudo-science, and identity movements achieve cult-like status overnight. “We’re the good ones, they’re the enemy.” Dissenters are shamed, exiled, or silenced. Nuance vanishes. Loyalty is policed not by priests, but by influencers and mobs with retweet buttons.
You are not just seeing what your friends share. You are seeing what algorithms decide will make you feel, angry, validated, afraid, righteous. Every notification, trending topic, and recommendation is tailored to hijack your attention and exploit your psychology:
This is no accident. The platforms profit from conflict, confusion, and conformity. They have turned age-old tools of social engineering, peer pressure, shaming, repetition, into algorithms, deployed at scale.
In this environment, rumours become “truth” before facts can catch up. Conspiracy theories, viral hoaxes, identity fads, and manufactured outrage spiral out of control. Yesterday’s speculation is today’s sacred dogma, challenge it, and risk cancellation.
We are witnessing the birth of online cults: belief systems that demand allegiance, punish dissent, and promise belonging. The rituals are hashtags; the sermons are threads; the heretics are ratioed, blocked, or banned.
Every time you see a story spread like wildfire, a new identity explodes in popularity, or a rumour morph into “fact” overnight, ask yourself:
Are you thinking for yourself, or is the hive mind thinking for you?
In the digital age, the greatest danger isn’t losing your privacy. It’s losing your mind, and never realizing it happened.
Ashleigh Crause