The Spectacle of Misinformation: When Emotion Hijacks Reality

A Monocoli shading himself with his giant foot. Misinformation has come a long way.

Two thousand years ago, Aristotle argued that a city should be no bigger than the distance a messenger’s voice could carry, so every word could be heard, understood, and passed on without distortion.

He based his reasoning on the belief that the quality of a society’s politics and public life ultimately depends on a shared understanding of truth. When everyone agrees on a common set of facts, it builds trust and allows for meaningful dialogue and deliberation. Without this, conversations devolve into chaos and crucial decisions are guided by dangerous delusions.

Today, we’ve reversed that equation. We’ve traded clarity for reach and integrity for virality. The result is a flood of misinformation that corrodes trust and fractures the common bonds that hold us together.

In a system where misinformation spreads faster than truth, how do we rebuild trust and recover the common ground we’ve lost? Where would we even begin?

Systems & Spectacle

Misinformation is far from a new phenomenon. Long before the internet, humans were already well-versed in spreading false exaggerated stories. In his Naturalis Historia, Pliny the Elder famously described a race of mythical peoples he called the Monocoli, who supposedly had a single massive foot used as a sunshade. These tales quickly became staples of medieval lore and art, even influencing classics like the Chronicles of Narnia, highlighting our enduring fascination with and vulnerability to fantastical narratives.

While perhaps not as whimsical as Pliny’s monopods, today’s misinformation is no less gripping. With the rise of social media and the blackbox algorithms that drive them, misinformation has found a new and faster channel.

This dynamic plays directly into our psychology and survival instincts. By preying on the human need for belonging and certainty, these systems exploit our pattern-seeking minds and tribal instincts, all with the aim of driving engagement.

They stoke fear of missing out, reduce complex realities into us-versus-them threats, and weaponize our tendency to connect dots, even when no pattern exists, to seed conspiracy. And it’s working all too well. In a study of the 2020 U.S. presidential election, researchers found misinformation on Facebook received six times more clicks than factual news.

Our cultural habits around consuming information have also shifted dramatically. We are increasingly drawn to sensationalism, favoring immediate emotional impact over thoughtful reflection. Authentic experiences are often replaced by content designed to captivate, rather than inform. This shift changes not only what we consume, but how we process reality itself.

French philosopher, Guy Debord captured this shift with his concept of “the spectacle,” where reality is gradually reduced to a series of images and appearances, and looking right matters more than being right. By exploiting both our evolutionary wiring and our cultural conditioning towards spectacle, social media and the algorithms that power them have perfected the recipe for engagement and attention.

Emotional Contagion by Design

If today’s social media is designed to reward engagement over accuracy, then modern misinformation is the ultimate form of engagement bait. It is a form of performative information***,*** crafted solely to appear urgent, trigger emotions, and spread rapidly in a spectacle-driven world where appearances often stand in for reality. While its opposite, substantive information, is rooted by facts, requiring nuance, evidence-based reasoning, and time to be understood, performative information thrives by taking advantage of the system’s predilection for strong emotional responses and virality.

The core engine of performative information is emotional contagion. It is meticulously crafted to be shocking and outrageous because these emotions are the most viral. While substantive information requires cognitive effort, performative information operates on a primal level. This is why a simple, emotionally charged image or a dramatic, out-of-context video can travel further than a detailed, fact-checked report. When opinion or speculation provokes a strong reaction, it can pass as fact, erasing the line between belief and truth.

Ultimately, pure performative information is a contradiction to the fundamental purpose of knowledge, which is to create a shared, accurate understanding of the world. Instead, it creates a shared emotional experience, a sense of belonging, or a validation of a pre-existing bias. It’s not about what is true, but what feels true, or more accurately, what feels good to be seen believing. It’s a trade of tribal belonging, not a transfer of facts.

Reshaping How We Create, Convey, and Consume Information

If the triumph of performative information is a symptom of a system built to prioritize engagement above all else, any viable and long-term solution must not only debunk lies, but fundamentally reshape how we create, convey, and consume information.

Part of the solution is structural. We need to change how platforms reward content and creators. Those who consistently produce accurate, nuanced, high-quality work should have their voices amplified, not buried. That means better visibility in feeds, higher ad revenue shares, and direct support in the form of grants, bonuses, or credibility-based incentives. We also need to draw a bright line between fact and opinion so one can never be mistaken for the other. Here AI can help by flagging content designed purely to provoke and limiting its spread until it has been verified.

But rules and algorithms alone will not solve the problem. We also have to adapt how substantive content is conveyed. Truth does not have to be dry. It can be engaging and even entertaining. The ancient Greeks understood this. Aristophanes used comedy and parody to challenge power and invite reflection. Today, storytellers and satirists like Stephen Colbert and John Oliver carry that tradition forward and make complex issues memorable without sacrificing accuracy. Humor, narrative, and even memes can package truth in ways that resonate without distorting it.

The final, and perhaps hardest, part to rewire is ourselves. Anger, fear, and outrage are the fuel misinformation burns. These emotions hijack judgment, narrow our thinking, and push us to share before we verify. To combat this, we need to cultivate a form of emotional literacy, that is the ability to spot those triggers, understand why they’re firing, and control the response. This skill is as critical as fact-checking and should be nurtured and taught as urgently as reading or math. People who can master it grow up less vulnerable to manipulation, better at filtering emotional spectacle from signal, and more deliberate in how they engage with the world.

So What?

The fight against misinformation is not only about fixing systems. It is about building a culture and set of values that can reward substance over spectacle, it’s about redesigning systems with structural incentives to reward depth not spectacle, and it’s about learning to manage our frontline emotions in a world designed to hijack us at every turn. That is how we keep our shared conversations honest, our communities resilient, and our democracy strong. As Aristotle knew long ago, a city’s strength rests on trust. Trust begins with truth.

But what if those who hold power have long since turned their backs on truth?