How media ecosystems decide which danger deserves your fear
It had been a while since I experienced a real algorithmic collision.
The last major one came after October 7, 2023. My personal Instagram account, which I use mostly to share pictures of my kids with distant family, became a relentless scroll of terrorists, hostages, mourning families, and devastation across Israel.
At the same time, my author account looked almost celebratory. That feed, shaped by the Black liberation movements explored in Reimagining the Revolution and beyond, filled with marches, raised fists, solidarity, and #FreePalestine.
Sometimes the same image appeared on both accounts. On one, it represented resistance and liberation. On the other, it appeared beneath a red filter and an ominous warning about antisemitism.
The two feeds were not simply offering different opinions. They were constructing different realities.
That is not entirely new. May 14, 1948, is celebrated by Israelis as Independence Day and remembered by Palestinians as the Nakba, or “catastrophe.” The same event can signify freedom to one people and dispossession to another.
What has changed is the machinery.
Algorithmic feeds do more than influence how we interpret facts. They determine which facts reach us, whose suffering becomes visible, who appears credible, and which threat feels most urgent. They shape the reality from which our opinions are formed.
That matters because disagreement can be debated. An existential threat demands action.
Which brings me to my most recent collision.
All morning, I had been seeing alerts about renewed U.S. bombing of Iran. My Instagram feeds mostly aligned: Trump was putting lives, regional stability, and the economy at risk because of ego, bravado, and an inept understanding of world affairs.
Then I went to get a haircut.
My stylist usually has Fox News playing in the salon. She often mutes it when I arrive, so I spent the next two hours watching the captions.
The programming followed a remarkably consistent sequence: Trump’s show of strength in Iran, assurances that rising prices would eventually ease, and then the real danger facing the country:
The Socialist Revolution.
Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani were framed through ominous graphics and warnings of national collapse. Field reporters pushed microphones toward unhoused New Yorkers, some visibly experiencing psychiatric crises and others sleeping beneath blankets on benches and in alleyways.
Their suffering was not presented as evidence of systems that had failed them. Their bodies became evidence of what socialism would supposedly do to the rest of the country.
That was the narrative maneuver.
A president had resumed bombing another nation while households were already feeling economic pressure. But within this media reality, the bombing became strength, the rising costs became temporary, and the true danger was relocated onto socialists, immigrants, and people sleeping outside.
War became protection.
Economic pain became patience.
Homelessness became ideology.
This is narrative threat displacement: fear generated by one source is reassigned to another in order to preserve the hero, protect the worldview, and keep the audience looking in the wrong direction.
The facts themselves do not have to disappear. The audience can still see the bombing, the prices, and the poverty. The narrative only has to determine what those facts mean, who caused them, and which one deserves fear.
That is why “just give people the facts” is rarely enough. By the time the disagreement begins, the deeper narrative work has already happened. People have been given different protagonists, different villains, and different chains of cause and effect.
The collision does not happen because two people interpreted the same danger differently.
It happens because they were never shown the same danger in the first place.
For organizations working in complex or high-stakes environments, this is the real communications challenge. You are not introducing your message into an empty space. You are entering a field where audiences may already have incompatible explanations for what is happening, who is responsible, and what is at stake.
COJA helps organizations identify those competing narratives, clarify the truth they need to hold, and build public-facing language that can travel across fragmented realities without flattening the complexity.
Book a call with us to learn more.
