Atttention Is Now Political Power

Editor’s note: Over the past four installments, this series has examined how platforms manufacture influencers and how specific figures operate within that system. This is the piece the whole series has been building toward.

When something inflammatory goes viral, most people focus on who posted it. That’s the wrong place to look.

The person who posted it is real. The harm they cause is real. But they’re not the source of the problem — they’re a product of it. Focusing on them is like blaming the match for the fire while leaving the gas on.

The actual problem is the system those people operate inside. And until we understand how that system works, and how we participate in it, nothing changes.

You’ve Seen This a Hundred Times

Something happens. A crime. An incident. A moment of chaos. Within an hour — before police have confirmed anything, before a suspect is named, before the facts exist — someone with a large following posts a take. It’s alarming. It points a finger. It names a group. It spreads.

You’ve seen it. You probably reacted to it — even if just to be angry about it. Maybe you shared it to call it out. Maybe you quote-posted to push back. Maybe you just felt the spike of rage and kept scrolling.

Every one of those reactions registered as engagement. And engagement is exactly what the system was designed to produce — not by the person who posted, but by the platform that paid them for it.

Here’s a Specific Example

On March 1, 2026, a woman was stabbed and killed in a road rage incident on the Beltway outside Washington D.C. Within an hour, Laura Loomer — a far-right commentator with 1.8 million followers on X (formerly Twitter) — posted this:

“It could very well be another Islamic sleeper cell attack. The Beltway is flooded with Muslims.”

No confirmed suspect. No identified motive. No facts to support the claim. The post racked up 436,000 views.

For the record: the perpetrator was a U.S. State Department employee with no connection to the narrative Loomer was spinning.

Now watch how the system made that possible — and why it was never really about whether she was right.

Reach Becomes Credibility

1.8 million followers doesn’t mean she’s accurate. It means she’s effective. But those aren’t the same thing, and most people’s brains don’t make that distinction in the moment.

When a post with that kind of following appears in your feed, the scale itself lends the claim weight. We’re wired to interpret popularity as validity. The algorithm knows this. It’s part of why reach is so valuable — not just for distribution, but for persuasion.

The Algorithm Amplifies What Provokes

X’s algorithm — like every major platform’s algorithm — doesn’t measure truth. It measures engagement: clicks, shares, replies, time on screen.

Outrage generates all of those. Calm, verified reporting generates far fewer.

So when Loomer’s post triggered early engagement — people sharing it, people furious about it, and people quote-posting to push back — the algorithm read that signal and pushed the post to more feeds. 436,000 views isn’t the organic reach of 1.8 million followers choosing to engage. It’s what happens when an algorithm detects emotional heat and pours fuel on it.

She didn’t beat the system. She understood it. And so did your anger when you saw it.

What Works Gets Repeated

This is the part most people miss.

Loomer didn’t invent this. She refined it through repetition. Every post that performs teaches the poster what to do next. The algorithm rewards the behavior. The behavior gets repeated. The audience grows. The reach increases. The next inflammatory post lands even harder.

She is one of thousands of influencers, politicians, media personalities, and public figures running the same play — because the same system is rewarding all of them for it. Different names. Different targets. Same incentive structure. Same result.

Notice the language she used: “it could very well be.” Not a claim. Not a fact. A suggestion — legally deniable, emotionally loaded, and algorithmically optimized. That phrasing isn’t an accident. It’s what years of algorithmic feedback produces. The system trained her to say it exactly that way.

But Doesn’t She Still Bear Responsibility?

Yes. Absolutely. Loomer made a choice. She chose to post something inflammatory and unverified about a specific religious group within an hour of a tragedy. That choice has consequences, and she owns them.

But moral accountability and structural accountability are not the same thing. And only one of them changes behavior at scale.

Holding Loomer accountable doesn’t change the incentive structure that produced her. It doesn’t change the algorithm that rewarded her. It doesn’t change the fact that someone else will make the same calculation tomorrow — because the math still works in their favor.

You can condemn the individual and still demand structural change. In fact, if you only do the first one, you’re letting the system off the hook.

The Real Problem Isn’t Who’s Posting. It’s What They’re Being Rewarded For.

If Loomer disappeared tomorrow, someone else would fill the same role. Why? Because the incentives that created her are still there. The algorithm still rewards provocation over accuracy. Outrage still drives engagement. Engagement still drives revenue.

Now flip it. Imagine a platform where the algorithm was redesigned to slow the spread of unverified claims — where posts about breaking news were throttled until basic facts were confirmed, where inflammatory content was deprioritized rather than amplified. We know this is technically possible because platforms have deployed exactly these mechanisms selectively, during elections and other high-stakes moments, when the political pressure to do so was strong enough.

Under those conditions, Loomer’s post gets a fraction of the reach. The feedback loop weakens. The behavior that produced it becomes less rewarding. Over time, it becomes less common — not because people suddenly developed better values, but because the system stopped paying them for it.

Change the incentives, and you change the behavior. Leave them intact, and you’re playing whack-a-mole with bad actors forever.

This Is a Public Health Issue. Treat It Like One.

We regulate industries when their products cause measurable harm to the public. We regulate food safety, drug advertising, financial markets, and vehicle emissions. We do it because we’ve accepted that some corporate incentives, left unchecked, produce outcomes that hurt people.

Algorithmic amplification of misinformation and outrage causes measurable harm. It erodes shared reality. It incites fear and hostility toward specific groups. It distorts how people understand their communities, their safety, and their politics. The research on this is not ambiguous.

Tech companies won’t fix this voluntarily. The current system is working exactly as designed — for them. There is no financial incentive to change it from the inside.

That means the pressure has to be sustained and it has to come from outside. It means showing up consistently, not just when a post goes viral and people are briefly outraged about outrage. It means voting specifically and intentionally for candidates who are committed to regulating Big Tech and holding platforms accountable for their algorithmic design, not just for individual pieces of content.

Ask the candidates you support: what is your position on algorithmic accountability? If they don’t have an answer, that’s an answer.

The next time you see a post like Loomer’s, skip the outrage at the person. Ask the harder question: what system just paid them to post that, and what am I doing to change it?

That’s not a rhetorical question. It’s a ballot question.

This is part of an ongoing series examining how attention becomes power — and what it will take to change the system that makes it possible.