Are we being radicalized, or finally seeing clearly?
The algorithm didn't radicalize me. Reality did.
Content warning: this essay contains disturbing stories that you likely already read out in the news or on a social media post.
. . .
Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque developed Cubism by depicting objects and people from multiple viewpoints. Sometimes they placed eyes on one side of the head, or facing different directions. Using fragmented forms and multiple perspectives, plus colors and shapes to convey emotion, Cubism provided a nonliteral but more “real” reality.
In this way, Cubist artists sought to show how people actually perceive and understand the world. The videos being shared over the internet and social media depicting ICE raids and genocide in Gaza essentially do the same.
While these videos don't convey the larger context like a news article does, they show us the micro, human experience of the larger story. Like Cubism, this triggers an emotional response that allows viewers to come to their own interpretations. Vibes, if you will—which, despite what groupthink and the scientific method say, are still valid.
Some might argue that these videos serve as just anecdotal evidence, which is often discredited since one person's experience might not represent broader patterns. However, anecdotal evidence relayed on social media often reveals trends before mainstream media covers them. (Fact-checking takes time. I had a Tiny Story published at NYT and I couldn’t believe how extensively they fact checked it!)
Last year, Pew Research reported that 54% of Americans get their news from social media. After a day of grinding, siloed in our nuclear families where we don every hat, we're often too tired to read articles. We need the bangers just to stay awake.
So we look to social media for someone to give us the brief, funny, brilliant, terrifying cliff notes. The pettier the better.
Like this one of the recent post-Iran-bombing press conference, shared by amay.a100 on Threads:
Apart from the comedy, many videos I’m watching—of ICE abductions, of genocide in Gaza—are not reflected with the same scope, urgency, and emotional intensity in the stories that legacy media are reporting. When I glance from my NYT app to Instagram or Threads, it’s hard to believe they’re covering the same thing, even if they are.
The New York Times (sorry, I keep picking on you) reads like stoic pearl-clutching mixed with ads for $50,000 side tables. Meanwhile, Instagram shows me the U.S. as an unrecognizable police state where ICE forces a shackled migrant woman to give birth to a dead child on a concrete floor with cockroaches before prison guards who do nothing, followed by audio recordings of emergency calls from ICE detention centers. (Shoutout to WIRED who reported the story.)
Yo, legacy media, wassup? Are you worried that showing the ugly part might dissuade people from buying those $50,000 side tables?
“But that’s not the reality,” one of my split personalities tells me. “That’s just the algorithm.”
The algorithm does create different realities. Mine shows news of Alabama using a Black woman's uterus as an incubator after she was brain dead, while my husband served up videos of 2020 BLM protestors destroying property in Portland. How come I never saw those? how come he never sees what I see?
P.S.: Algorithm architect Mark Z(f)uckerberg knows what kind of beast he created. No surprise he’s building a self-sustaining war bunker in Hawaii.
Am I being radicalized by the algorithm, or just finally seeing clearly?
The logical part of my brain searches for receipts. It discovers that:
ICE is arresting an average of 750 migrants a day
ICE arrested 2,200 migrants in one single day
ICE superiors have been told that if they don’t reach the 3,000 daily arrest quota, they’ll be fired
At least 7 American citizen children were deported with their undocumented mothers
Between 2015 and 2020, ICE deported 70 American citizens
A detention facility in Alaska known for horrible, inhumane conditions recently received 41 migrants who were subjected to pepper spray, denied access to attorneys, and experienced long lockdowns. (Send them as far from their lawyers and families as you can, right?)
I’m gonna flex a Heather Cox Richardson and just link all my sources at the bottom, in case you don’t believe me.
“Okay, so that actually is reality,” the other voice in my head counters.
The news legacy media is not reporting with the same oomph that matches what I am seeing and feeling in my body. (Oh, how the body knows things the mind does not.)
Many of us are seeing this disconnect. When the tone doesn’t match the horror of the content, it feels dissociative. Almost as if legacy media is complicit in our own numbing and dehumanization.
We turn to sources that reflect the urgency and tonal truth we’re witnessing, people like
, , , and WIRED Magazine.
My true “radicalization” began during Trump 1.0 when squashed testicle Stephen Miller (thank you for that, Stephen Colbert) started separating and deporting migrant parents from children with no plan for reunification. You may recall the pictures of children in actual cages. That was not AI.
At the time, my children were three and five. As a mother who had been previously married to a Venezuelan immigrant, and a gosh-darn human, I couldn't separate myself from the anguish of migrant women who could "hear their children crying out at night" even after separation.
I couldn't sleep. I donated to RAICES, made protest signs, wrote songs at 1:30 AM. My dad and I formed a band called "Yard Signs" and performed my protest songs at the Alaska Folk Festival (which you can watch here). One of those songs was titled “Other People’s Children,” a play on the book of the same name I read while obtaining my master’s in education, and a tongue-in-cheek reminder that there is no such thing.
Now, watching videos of migrant children being torn from foster families to be deported, I guess I’m becoming radicalized again.
The algorithm didn't radicalize me—reality did.
🖤, Summer
P.S. For spicy, unfiltered cultural commentary that zooms out while also digging deep, please become a free or paid subscriber. Preferably paid - it’s $5.
Sources:
https://www.wlrn.org/immigration/2025-06-13/florida-democrats-blast-dcf-turning-honduran-foster-child-to-ice
https://alaskapublic.org/news/politics/2025-06-23/alaska-holds-migrants-in-punitive-conditions-violating-ice-standards-lawyers-say
https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/news-platform-fact-sheet/
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/ice-arrests-record-number-immigrants-single-day-rcna210817
https://www.wired.com/story/ice-detention-center-911-emergencies/
https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-21-487
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/children-who-are-u-s-citizens-deported-along-with-foreign-born-mothers-attorneys-say
https://summerkoester.com/2019/06/26/other-peoples-children/
For more, check out:
Greta Was Right: The "Normal" Ones Are Acting Pretty Strange
At a 2018 TED talk, climate activist Greta Thunberg said, “I think in many ways that we autistic are the normal ones and the rest of the people are pretty strange. Especially when it comes to the sustainability crisis, where everyone keeps saying that climate change is an existential threat and the most important issue of all, and yet they just carry on…
Tl;dr…but…Depends on the person, of course. And in imo, if one watches Network News and worse, believes what they say, they’d have a problem. On the other hand, most people can't do exhausting research and spend their lives investigating, so they go for the comfortable next choice. Network News, LOL.
Summer, these stats and the info here are horrible. I read about the horrors daily but when you put it in one itemized agenda like this, it's even worse. And re the algo's- I guess they do selectify us and keep showing the same things. But at times stuff is so horrific, I wonder if it's not real, or is it? No matter what, when it gets this bad, we know it is BAD. And it is. Thanks for posting this, and btw- congratulations on having your Tiny Story in the NYT!!!! PS, the most notable remark from Greta (to me) was at the last -for her- environmental summit she attended, they took apart all the edicts that were worthwhile and came up w. gobbledygook. Her comment at the podium was her final comment, "Blah, blah, blah."