Maybe the Problem Isn't What We See Online.

Picture a livestream.

Two people are arguing. The comments are moving faster than anyone can read. Someone is laughing. Someone is insulting one of the participants. Someone else has apparently decided that this is an excellent moment to send a virtual rose.

A rose.

Traditionally, flowers have been used to express affection, appreciation, or an apology. In certain corners of the internet, they can now accompany a public argument between strangers.

Progress takes unexpected forms.

The livestream continues. The audience grows. Reactions accumulate. Digital gifts appear. Somewhere, a dashboard is recording engagement.

And perhaps the strangest part is that none of this feels particularly strange anymore.

We've become accustomed to people broadcasting their private lives, fighting with strangers, manufacturing controversy, and turning almost every imaginable human experience into something that can be watched, shared, and occasionally monetised.

Ten years ago, some of these behaviours might have seemed extraordinary. Today, they're content categories.

Which makes me wonder whether we've been asking the wrong question about the internet.

Maybe the problem isn't everything we're exposed to.

Maybe it's how quickly we learn to stop being surprised.

The internet didn't invent the circus. It gave the audience a ticket booth.

Human beings have always enjoyed spectacle.

Public arguments existed long before social media. So did gossip, humiliation, vanity, status anxiety, and people with an extraordinary ability to make fools of themselves in front of an audience.

The internet cannot claim credit for inventing any of these.

What it changed was the infrastructure.

Previously, your embarrassing behaviour might have entertained a few people in a restaurant. Now it can entertain half a million strangers before you've even had time to regret it.

Previously, a public argument ended when the participants went home. Now someone can record it, edit it, add subtitles, and publish it for an audience that wasn't even present.

Previously, spectators could laugh, applaud, or walk away.

Now they can like, comment, share, subscribe, donate, and sometimes pay to influence what happens next.

That's a fairly significant upgrade to the business model of human absurdity.

And it introduces a distinction worth understanding.

Technology hasn't necessarily made people more cruel. It has made certain expressions of cruelty easier to distribute, reward, and repeat.

That's not quite the same thing.

But the consequences can be just as serious.

When something happens often enough, it stops needing an explanation.

Think about how quickly our expectations of normal behaviour have changed.

We barely notice people photographing their food before eating it. We've accepted that holidays sometimes involve as much content production as relaxation. People announce relationships, document breakups, publish arguments, and occasionally deliver carefully rehearsed apologies from tastefully decorated living rooms.

Even apologies have developed a recognisable production format.

Neutral background. Serious expression. No unnecessary graphics. Possibly a grey sweatshirt to communicate emotional accountability.

A reasonably experienced art director could probably prepare the storyboard.

None of these behaviours is automatically harmful.

But they reveal something interesting about how digital culture develops.

A behaviour appears. People find it unusual. Others imitate it. Platforms make it easier to reproduce. Audiences become familiar with the format.

Eventually, something that once required an explanation simply becomes another thing people do.

I think of this as the normalisation of the format.

It's important not to confuse that with universal acceptance. Seeing something repeatedly doesn't mean we approve of it, and people respond differently to the same content.

But familiarity changes the context in which we encounter behaviour.

The first time you see someone publicly humiliating another person for attention, you might ask why it's happening.

The twentieth time, you might recognise the format before you've understood the situation.

And that shift matters.

Normal isn't necessarily what most people approve of. Sometimes it's simply what no longer surprises them.

Outrage is a surprisingly efficient distribution strategy.

There is a reason so much online content appears designed to provoke an emotional reaction.

Attention is limited. Competition for it is enormous. Strong emotions can help content stand out.

In 2023, researchers published a study in Nature Human Behaviour examining how emotional language influenced online news consumption.

They analysed more than 105,000 headline variations tested on Upworthy, representing approximately 370 million impressions.

Their finding was revealing: for a headline of average length, adding one negative word increased the click-through rate by approximately 2.3%.

That finding comes from a particular experimental environment. It doesn't mean that every negative headline performs better, or that readers enjoy everything they click.

But it demonstrates something important.

Negative language can have measurable commercial value.

Now imagine what happens when a publisher, creator, or platform focuses heavily on engagement.

Content that produces stronger reactions may be rewarded with more attention. Creators notice what performs. Some adapt their behaviour. Audiences become accustomed to the resulting formats.

And the cycle continues.

The critical detail is that engagement doesn't tell us why someone reacted.

A person might comment because they found something hilarious.

They might comment because they were furious.

They might share a video because they admired its creator.

Or they might share it to condemn what happened.

From a human perspective, these are entirely different experiences.

From the perspective of a simplified engagement report, they can look remarkably similar.

This is one of the industry's most uncomfortable contradictions.

We have become extraordinarily good at measuring human reactions without always understanding what those reactions mean.

Disgust and delight can look suspiciously alike on a dashboard.

We've even found ways to monetise insecurity.

Consider NGL, an anonymous messaging application that became popular with younger users.

In 2024, the US Federal Trade Commission brought a case against the company and its founders.

According to the FTC, NGL sent automatically generated messages that appeared to come from real people. Some were provocative or unsettling. The application then encouraged users to purchase subscriptions that supposedly helped reveal the identities of the senders.

The agencies alleged that the promised identification features were misleading. NGL and its founders reached a settlement requiring payments totalling $4.5 million to resolve the agencies' charges.

Think about the mechanism.

You receive an anonymous message.

You start wondering who sent it.

A friend? A classmate? Someone who dislikes you? Someone who secretly admires you?

Then you're invited to pay for an answer.

Except, according to the regulators, the person behind the message might not have existed at all.

This is an interesting development in the history of marketing.

The beauty industry has long sold products around appearance. Productivity companies sell the promise of making better use of our time. Social media companies sell access to audiences.

Here, regulators alleged that an application had helped create the uncertainty it was offering to resolve.

A rather elegant business model, provided we temporarily remove ethics from the business plan.

But the case illustrates a broader issue.

Digital products aren't always passive channels through which human behaviour flows.

Their design can actively shape the emotions, expectations, and decisions of the people using them.

And when insecurity becomes commercially useful, we should be interested in who's manufacturing it.

When humiliation becomes entertainment, who's responsible for the audience?

In August 2025, French livestreamer Raphaël Graven, known as Jean Pormanove, died during a lengthy broadcast on the streaming platform Kick.

He had previously appeared in streams involving repeated humiliation and apparent abuse.

The case triggered public outrage, regulatory scrutiny, and questions about the responsibilities of livestreaming platforms.

There is an important factual distinction: medical findings did not establish that physical assaults caused Graven's death. The circumstances and responsibilities surrounding the broadcasts were subjects of investigation.

But even without making unsupported claims about the cause of death, the case raises a profoundly uncomfortable question.

What happens when another person's humiliation becomes an entertainment format?

The traditional explanation is that the audience simply watches.

But interactive entertainment can complicate that distinction.

Viewers may donate money, send messages, encourage particular behaviour, or help circulate clips to much larger audiences.

Not every viewer participates in abuse, and responsibility must be distinguished between perpetrators, organisers, platforms, and spectators.

Still, the underlying question deserves attention.

At what point does an audience stop being merely an audience?

This applies beyond livestreaming.

When a humiliating video is shared thousands of times, people can contribute to the circulation of harm even when their stated intention is condemnation.

Someone records a teenager being bullied.

Others share it to express outrage.

More people watch.

The victim becomes recognisable to strangers who had nothing to do with the original incident.

The people sharing the video may believe they're raising awareness. Sometimes public documentation really is necessary to expose wrongdoing.

But there is a difference between documenting harm and distributing someone's humiliation as entertainment.

Not everything that deserves public attention requires public exposure of the person who was harmed.

And perhaps that distinction needs to become part of our digital literacy.

The strange thing about modern life is how professionally we now perform it.

The normalisation of spectacle doesn't stop at extreme behaviour.

It also affects ordinary life.

We increasingly encounter personal experiences presented through the language of branding.

A holiday needs a visual identity.

A relationship needs an announcement.

A birthday needs a content strategy.

A new job requires a photograph, preferably beside a window, accompanied by a reflection on the power of resilience and personal growth.

Sometimes I wonder whether people are living their lives or preparing quarterly reports about them.

I work in communication, so I recognise the machinery.

A seemingly spontaneous photograph can involve lighting, styling, careful framing, editing, and several discarded versions.

None of that is inherently dishonest. Photography and advertising have always involved selection and presentation.

The problem begins when exceptional production is interpreted as ordinary reality.

Young people are particularly exposed to this distinction because social acceptance and identity formation are already significant parts of adolescence.

Imagine comparing your everyday life, including all its uncertainties, with someone else's carefully selected highlights.

You're studying for an exam. They're apparently running three businesses, travelling internationally, and finding time to maintain spectacular abdominal muscles.

You're wondering what to do after university.

They've just bought a Lamborghini.

Or perhaps rented one for forty minutes.

Instagram rarely provides the supporting documentation.

The result can be an unusual kind of pressure: the feeling that a perfectly ordinary life is somehow inadequate because it lacks the visual evidence of exceptional success.

But an experience doesn't become more valuable because it photographs well.

And a person doesn't become less successful because their achievements aren't interesting enough for an algorithm.

The interesting thing is that we know much of what we see is curated.

And we still compare.

The people we're most worried about aren't necessarily the problem.

This is where discussions about young people and technology often become lazy.

Adults observe teenagers spending time on social platforms and conclude that an entire generation has forgotten how to communicate, think critically, or build relationships.

It's a wonderfully convenient explanation.

It also removes nearly all responsibility from the people designing the products.

In advertising, technology, and media, professionals invest enormous resources into understanding what captures human attention.

We optimise engagement, retention, conversion, and return visits.

Then we go home and tell teenagers to stop looking at their phones.

From an industry perspective, the contradiction is impressive.

Research also suggests that the reality is more complicated than the familiar narrative of a generation damaged by social media.

In a 2025 Pew Research Center survey of American teenagers, 74% said social media made them feel more connected to their friends. Sixty-three percent said the platforms provided a space to express their creativity.

At the same time, 39% reported feeling overwhelmed by drama, and 45% believed they spent too much time on social media.

These experiences coexist.

Social media can provide friendship, creativity, learning, and community while also exposing users to pressure, comparison, harassment, and harmful content.

Not everyone experiences it in the same way.

And younger users aren't simply passive victims of technology.

Many understand online culture exceptionally well.

What they may not always see is the commercial architecture behind the experience.

They know how to use the product.

But do they know how the product uses their attention?

That's a different kind of literacy.

And adults could probably benefit from it too.

We're starting to question the design, not just the content.

Something important is changing in how governments and regulators approach social platforms.

For years, much of the debate focused on individual pieces of content.

Should this video be removed? Should that account be banned? Is a particular post misleading or harmful?

Those questions remain important.

But increasingly, regulators are examining how platforms themselves are designed.

In February 2026, the European Commission published preliminary findings suggesting that TikTok's design could breach the Digital Services Act.

The concerns included features such as infinite scrolling, autoplay, notifications, and highly personalised recommendations.

The Commission argued that TikTok had not adequately assessed and mitigated certain risks of compulsive use. The findings were preliminary and did not prejudge the final outcome of the investigation.

The significance is bigger than one platform.

It reflects a shift from asking whether particular content is harmful to examining whether product design creates foreseeable risks.

That is where the conversation needs to go.

Because a platform is not just an empty room where users happen to meet.

It's an environment.

Someone decides how recommendations work, how reactions are counted, which behaviours qualify for monetisation, how reports are handled, and what users see next.

These are product decisions.

And product decisions have consequences.

We don't need to demand an internet where nobody disagrees, nobody says anything offensive, and every livestream resembles a public-service announcement.

That would be both unrealistic and incredibly dull.

But there is a meaningful difference between allowing human expression and designing systems that may financially reward harmful behaviour.

The challenge is to preserve openness while taking responsibility for the incentives built into the environment.

Perhaps we need better measures of success.

Imagine a platform reporting its performance differently.

Alongside viewing time and engagement, it measures how quickly credible harassment reports are resolved.

Alongside creator revenue, it reports how effectively monetisation rules are enforced when users are targeted or humiliated.

Alongside growth, it measures whether users can control recommendations and leave without being pulled back by unnecessary notifications.

These aren't perfect measures. They require transparent definitions, independent scrutiny, and safeguards against gaming the numbers.

But at least they ask a more meaningful question than whether people spent another seven minutes scrolling.

The same principle applies to media.

A story that exposes abuse may be enormously valuable even if it attracts a modest audience.

A video that humiliates a teenager may generate extraordinary traffic while creating little public value.

Both might perform well on an engagement chart.

Only one deserves to be called a success.

This is something communication professionals, including those of us who work in advertising, should be willing to discuss.

Attention is valuable. It's the foundation of much of our industry.

But attention is not automatically a contribution to society.

And the ability to make something popular shouldn't be confused with a reason to make it popular.

We have developed increasingly sophisticated methods for capturing human attention.

Perhaps the next competitive advantage will come from understanding when that attention should not be exploited.

The most worrying part isn't what we're watching.

It's tempting to finish this discussion by declaring that society is becoming less empathetic, less intelligent, or less civilised.

I don't think the evidence supports such a sweeping conclusion.

Every generation has worried about the cultural habits of the generation that follows.

And people have always been fascinated by spectacle.

The difference today is the extraordinary speed at which behaviour can move from the margins of culture into everyday visibility.

A strange idea becomes a trend.

A trend becomes a format.

A format develops a business model.

And eventually, what once seemed extraordinary becomes familiar enough that nobody thinks to question it.

Not because everyone approves.

Sometimes simply because everyone has seen it before.

We should be careful about what we allow that familiarity to do to our judgement.

There is nothing inherently wrong with being entertained, fascinated, or occasionally horrified by the internet.

But familiarity should never become our only test of acceptability.

Because the really worrying moment isn't necessarily when something disturbing goes viral.

It's when something disturbing no longer needs to go viral to feel completely ordinary.