The Graph of Controversy

Social media and woke culture made ‘offence’ mainstream. Compared to ten years ago, the need to choose your words carefully is significantly higher.

This caution for safe articulation is not restricted to celebrities. You could make comments on gender, skin, race, or caste, and they were considered jokes. Now think of making the same comments and you can imagine how much the world has changed.^[1]

This essay doesn’t debate what’s right or wrong but is about a pattern I noticed on social media whenever a person says something they are not supposed to.^[2]

I will tap into different phases of controversy and what it means to us as consumers on social media. This is only a thesis based on my observations. Feel free to disagree, criticize, or correct. I am always open to hearing opposing/different POVS.

Trigger:

It’s the inception of the controversy. This ranges from questions, incidents, accidents, events, etc. In most cases, it’s either a comment made by a popular person or a tragic incident.

The wave of outrage and debate:

This is outrage in its truest form. A trigger occurs, creating a chain reaction among a small segment of people - who genuinely get offended and voice their opinions.

The outrage creates an opportunity for counterstatements. The small segment expands with people providing multiple POVs, facts, references to previous events, etc.

The debate continues until one of two things happens:

• Folks share their opinions until there is no more to share, and the debate dies down on its own.

• Or it reaches a point of virality, and it takes off.

The point of virality:

This is where things get messy. It’s a point of spike. The outrage breaks the threshold of the first segment who genuinely took offence and keeps reaching a massive audience who had no idea about the trigger or were not directly linked to the genre of the trigger.

The recent Latent controversy reached people who didn’t know about the show, Ranveer, or Samay. Or Narayana Murthy’s comments reaching people who don’t even work in corporates.

The point of virality is different for different controversies. Some become a sensation in an hour, some slowly pick up, and some amplify when a celebrity takes a stand, and so on.

Once the controversy leaves the point of virality and reaches a large audience, it’s all chaos. I call it the wave of opinions.

The wave of Opinions:

This is the scariest place as a consumer on social media. Because your feed will have an opinion overload. Almost everything people share is with reference to a clip without knowing (or not wanting to know) the full story. Most content lacks context and its intentions are questionable.

This is when people dig into facts buried years ago. The stories no one knew take the limelight. People also make exaggerated statements to the extent they don’t make sense to one segment but create immense sharability for another. Some demand extreme actions too.

Everybody wants a piece of ‘the topic of the day.’ It is not purely about the trigger anymore. It’s no more about the genuine outrage and debate we noticed in the curve’s inception. The controversy has now become a platform for people to share a version of their opinion, irrespective of its direct connection to the trigger.

This includes me too. There is a reason I am publishing this essay now and not a few weeks later. I know the readers will draw parallels better than ever.

The point of Saturation:

Like all trends, even controversies reach their peak during the wave of opinions and die down to the point of saturation. At this point, we have listened to all versions and perspectives to have existed.

We move away from current controversy and start inclining towards a new topic of the day. Maybe a cricket match, a new Bollywood couple rumor, I don’t know.

Eventually the graph reaches point zero and occasionally keeps popping up when events like court hearings or similar controversies happen.

The graph might make more sense now:

What’s the point of this essay?

No point, honestly. It’s only an observation that made sense to me and seemed interesting enough to form a thesis. As a consumer on social media, it’s nice to have an awareness of our position in the graph to not get influenced by half-cooked content.

I don’t know if that’s even possible. We have our backstories, leading to inclinations. The algorithm is smart enough to show what we want to see.

I got to sign off with a disclaimer. I am not supporting or against any controversy. I mentioned names only to make the explanation easier.

The essay only shows you an Eagle’s eye view of how I think controversies take shape on social media. It might make sense or feel like an absolute bullshit. Either way, don’t take me seriously. I am just a guy on the internet.

Love,
Vikra.

Footnotes

[1] An example of this is when Vikrant Massey called a woman ‘vertically challenged’ on the Untriggered podcast.

[2] ‘Not supposed to’ is subjective and personal. In this context, it means statements you know people might take offence to. Example, jokes on religion.

[3] I generated the image using Claude 3.7. I drew the image on tissue paper and asked AI to turn my drawing into an image. I specified colours and font. Interesting use case if you’re too lazy to prompt. Another way: Upload the essay and ask AI to visually represent the essay.