The Olympics are but a shadow now as the world has resumed attention to the US political race inter alia. So the events I go on to address here may feel like an ancient history lesson. Nevertheless I believe the patterns of social media engagement with the recent games, by Christians and others, has much still to teach us about the continued work of the Algorithm of Outrage. In part I I outlined how I observe the algorithm shaping our engagement in the public square through social media. Here in part II I turn to observe it at work as the world followed the Paris Olympics.

The battle fronts of the games

Now to the three battles, which I’ll reflect on in reverse order of occurrence. Christians participated in all three; but of course only one was specifically "Christian” in its subject matter, dividing some Christians from other Christians, as well as from alleged opponents.

Rachael Gunn and the meme factory:

By the time this battlefront hit the dispatches, I was still recovering mentally from the previous two. So it received less of my attention. While noting various skirmishes accusing “Raygun” of political offences, the root grievance seemed to be around her substandard (in the eyes of many) competition performance, with no points awarded. And that’s the aspect that’s gained a continuing life of its own. The pack continued for nearly a fortnight to flood our feeds with memes, most of them featuring one of a few images of unappreciated poses clipped from her routine.

One sign of the algorithm’s success as I observe it was the seeming irresistibility of the ongoing meme war. I found myself in comment threads where my suggestion that, in light of Dr Gunn’s personal public statements of devastation at the public reaction, we might all give her a break, was met with defensive cries of our collective right to an opinion. And so the memes raged on, testament apparently to Dr Gunn’s offence against Australian pride (or something). Not quite the Aussie “fair go”. But very much the outrage of engagement.

Imane Khelif, Lin Yu-Ting, and the men of gallantry:

This battle also continued to rage well past its use-by, which in itself is ‘interesting’ given it’s now the subject of French criminal cyberbullying proceedings. I suppose what has continued to feed it is a continuing shared narrative of a righteous cause, occasioning righteous outrage. The dominantly, though not exclusively, male pack is bent on the gallant cause of defending the threatened rights of sport’s distressed and helpless damsels. They will fight and not rest until all that is not female in their ‘expert’ judgement is driven from the field. Their crusade continues through blogs, articles and podcasts, still drawing on the unverified certainties entrenched in the fray.

It’s again that immovable certainty, impervious to contrary evidence, even expert reference. In a matter of minutes or hours after Italian boxer Angela Carini’s withdrawal less than a minute into her fight with Algerian Imane Khelif, the social media universe lit up with “the truth” that Khelif had been “banned” from women’s boxing in 2023. Packs formed around the various versions of said truth, pack members declaring Khelif categorically “a man”, “intersex”, “transgender”, having XY chromosomes, or having the testosterone levels of a man. Each pack was equipped with its corpus of memes, articles or scientific papers, “proving” whichever case. These would be ready in any event of a counter claim being presented. Whatever the differences between the genetic certainties, all were agreed that this was a battle for women’s rights in sport.

Among the crumbs to attract the attention of the pack, was the action of Bulgarian boxer Svetlana Staneva, who made a public hand gesture signifying XX (female) chromosomes right after her loss to Lin Yu-ting, evidently implying that her opponent was not a woman. But this merely illustrates one of the risks to truth where a presumed cause is algorithm-driven, sans external verification. It becomes a version of Chinese Whispers on a gigantic scale. In no time at all, no doubt after the information had been shared and reshared in rapid-fire, the one instance of the hand gesture levelled at Yu-ting had become multiple instances levelled at Khelif by several, most or all of her opponents. This perversion of evidence created the widespread belief among the pack that Khelif’s fellow competitors were joined in mass protest against her legitimacy in the competition. As anyone who watched the fights could attest, the body language conveyed the very opposite. There were no ‘XX’ gestures against Khelif (and just one against Yu-ting). What was plentifully in evidence was warm affirming smiles and embraces. Whatever the pack believed its righteous mission to be, the affected women by and large were not evidently seeking protection from any of their competitors.

In other words here was entrenched social warfare, with SMIP (see part I) writ large. And true to the form of algorithm-induced entrenchment, the warriors were not for any turning, no matter how much evidence contrary to the narrative of the pack was presented. It was of no account that evidence of the XY chromosomes, allegedly found in tests taken by the two athletes, had not been provided by the organisation alleging it, nor that the organisation (the International Boxing Association (IBA)) has evidenced serious corruption for many years, is controlled by Russian oligarchs close to the Putin regime, and announced the alleged test results only after the same two athletes had defeated Russian competitors. Likewise it mattered not a wit that Khelif had been born female, lived her whole life as a woman, and competed as a woman in multiple championships over many years, with no more than an average win-loss ratio, against opponents several of whom were in this same Olympic competition. None of this and more beside mattered to the pack, where “facts” are sourced from the trusted corpus the feed has provided. The pack still “knew” that Khelif was “a man”.

Now lest it be thought that the picture I’ve painted is all “one-sided”, the politics of the fray were observable in the behaviour of those defending the two athletes, as well. We too evidenced the work of the Algorithm of Outrage. For instance in one of my own comment threads, I observed something of a pile-on for the defence, when someone asked what were genuine open questions of professional enquiry as to Khelif’s genetic history. Right there again is SMIP at work, building polarisation between packs, by harnessing outrage all round.

French art and the New Crusades:

And now to the first battle of Paris 2024. The other battles (above) may have gathered larger armies. But what this one perhaps lacked in reach, it made up for - if largely among Christians - in frayed relationships and loss of trust.  This was the week the algorithms came to church; though they placed nothing in the collection and had nothing to confess. I detect the work of the Algorithm of Outrage on Facebook, in at least the following ways:

Immediacy & virality -

I wasn’t among those who watched the ceremony at the time. And thanks to the outrage, few of us can now review the footage. But what I do know is that the alleged Last Supper segment took up but a few seconds of a dramatic performance of several hours. In the absence of video footage, all the “evidence” we have is a couple of still frames from those seconds. As still pictures, they can readily be gazed at and poured over in detail, and have been by millions since. Immediacy meant this gazing began very quickly after the event. (Measured I imagine in seconds or minutes; though that’s hard to verify). 

Though hypotheticals of the “what might have been” kind are of limited value, it’s hard to imagine such a scenario producing such immediate and such viral reactions of outrage as those that took shape on Facebook, had such a performance occurred in an earlier time. The world would have required surely at least a few days to get the news that something controversial may have happened in those few seconds. That should have allowed the facts of the case to be verified before conclusions were widely drawn and before a movement of outrage could build. Thanks however to the rapid feed of global outrage, clarifications of fact (notably the public interview with the artistic director) had to wait. By that stage the outrage had had a full day to gather steam. The effect has been that a great volume of corporate Christian outrage had taken rapid shape, all on the strength of a visual impression of a few seconds.

The pack & the entrenched crusade

In other words, “the pack” took shape with the speed characteristic of the Algorithm. By the time of the broadcast interview the next day, there was already a well established corpus of information shared within the very big circle, rendering external verification entirely unnecessary to the pack. That corpus secured, cemented and confirmed the great political gotcha of the moment. Within just a few hours the report spread through the oversized Christian pack that “the French” had “admitted” to intentionally sticking it to the Christian community of the world through the so-called Last Supper tableau, and had “apologised” for doing so. It didn’t matter that statements from French officials (in French, would you believe?) had needed to be translated, almost certainly using AI models. The outraged pack had “the facts”. And this particular gotcha (“We got’em! They’ve admitted it!” - a very popular cry of triumph whenever the pack announces any political gotcha) stood ready as the pack’s answer to any and all suggestions that caution in judgement might be warranted. “They’ve admitted it and apologised” was now established fact to the baying pack.

The gotcha was well and truly cemented as fact to the dominantly English-speaking Christian outrage pack by the time - several days later - any carefully translated-and-verified English transcript of the artistic director’s response made it into circulation. All far far too late to beat the algorithm. Too late to suggest caution across a language barrier. Far too late to suggest careful research and enquiry to establish confidence as to what occurred.

As I observed in part I, what most “saddened and alarmed me … [was] the widespread over-confident entrenchment in the collective rage” and an “apparent inability or unwillingness to modify belief, or even suspend judgement, in light of new information”. This was most clear as the artistic director’s explanation of his design and inspiration from a noted painting in a French gallery, depicting the god Dionysus and a Bacchanalian feast from Greek mythology, started filtering through the news channels. Outraged Christians variously either dismissed it as fabricated damage control, or looked for ways to harmonise it with the now “established” “fact” that it really was, in part or whole, (still) the Last Supper.

The algorithm stoked counter-outrage from those of us who rejected this reasoning as embarrassing to the church and damaging to the gospel. Memes and comments in this counter-pack hurled barbs about ignorance and uneducation in art history. Those lines of attack were likewise unkind and unhelpful, and I’ve little doubt also fed by the algorithm of outrage. But that said, from my point of view what was confounding wasn’t so much simple ignorance (my own knowledge of art history is also subzero) as apparent wilful ignorance, the unwillingness to modify belief through being better informed.

In other words, it’s not at all hard to understand Christians eyeing that still image and initially concluding it depicted the Last Supper. What’s much harder to grasp is the intransigence in the face of the artists’ professional explanations and assurances. Or alternatively, it’s very easy to understand both phenomena, through observing as I’ve sought to do here the profound ways social media algorithms manipulate us all to be outrage-driven.

Where now, and what next …

It’s difficult not to conclude that, in the eyes of a great number of Christians, the artistic director was lying. In several conversations I had with mature Christian friends I’d generally trust, there seemed to me to be a self-contradiction. (“He wasn’t lying, but ……. he lied”.) That is to say, listening to several of my friends, the natural end point of the reasoning was that indeed Thomas Jolly lied to the world. Is it possible that this is so? Logically, yes it is of course. But it troubles me greatly that Christians would make this judgement of anyone, and I find it difficult to imagine such a leader in the world of art being half so unprofessional so publicly. Why would we not believe him?

And I’m very much left with the sense that, to the minds of a great many Christians, it is an established fact of history that the Paris opening ceremony parodied the Last Supper (whether the event itself, the Da Vinci painting, or both) in a calculated way; maliciously so in the view of a significant subset. Undoubtedly a complex matrix of factors has brought this about. But it seems undeniable to me that social media algorithms played one significant role. Either way, this does not bode well for trust between people groups (Christians among them) in the ongoing life of planet earth; and not only online.

Thanks to the high temperature in social media’s Olympic commentary room in pursuit of a cause that’s divided Christians, trust within the online Christian community took a hit, it seems to me. I hope it’s one we’ll recover from. If we can’t do that, the future’s looking rocky from where I sit. I can’t imagine that social media won’t toss in many more bones for us to fight over. That’s how the algorithm does its job for its masters.

May I venture some biblical reflections for the age of algorithms  …

In the face of immediacy and virality — It’s not for nothing that good consumer laws, such as those we have in Australia, enshrine a “cool-off period”. This has proven its worth countless times for the cause of a just society, where yesterday’s rush of blood needn’t blight today’s or tomorrow’s security or relationships. And what’s true for the marketplace of stuff is true for the social marketplace. Before we commit to the outrage the algorithm dangles in our faces, there’s much wisdom in a cool off period. The Bible’s wisdom literature offers us much for life on the road, or at the keyboard. Prov 18:17 for instance cautions us against leaping to judgement on first impressions or the first account of events. Hearing another voice, another account, perhaps especially that of the judged, may well provide us context from which to judge wisely and fairly. Instant reactions, especially in judgement, are ill suited to finite people in a complex and fallen world. How might a cooling off policy have made us more patient listeners to our French ‘hosts’ before drawing conclusions?

Before signing up to the pack — The algorithm may tantalise us with a circle of information that coheres well internally. Why complicate it with the distractions of external verification or alternative information? Well for Christians who take the Scriptures as a blueprint for living and a source of Truth, the Bible - often not prominent in an algorithm’s information corpus - may direct us away from outrage toward the supremacy of love for God and neighbour. For instance it’s harder to stay with the outrage if one has consulted the Letter of James (Jas 3:3-12; Jas 1:19-20), which warns us of what carnage may be wreaked by an unwatched or unbridled tongue (or keyboard), and of letting anger lead us. We might ponder how the case of the opening ceremony may have played out among believers who’ve resolved not to speak too soon.

Before the algorithm entrenches us in outrage — I reflected earlier on my own behaviour in cases where I’ve followed the algorithm into outraged talk too readily. How I (and others I’ve observed) double down in our outraged position in preference to backing down where new information challenges our framing. What I think drives that often instinctive doubling down behaviour is the spectre of public shame, the humiliation of being seen to “lose the war” after leading the charge. The Gospel’s message of love and redemption is a fine antidote to such pride. It tells us of the One we trust who has already borne all our shame and humiliation (Isa 53). It tells me I am not my public record, whether of success or failure, triumph or shame, freeing me to glory in Christ alone (Phil 3:1-11). May the gospel free us from the entrenchment of being “right”.

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The social media future, the bits of it that I can make out at least, offers us a substantial increase in the activity of at least two major and already active players, Russian interference and AI penetration. If we the social media-using masses, the Christian subset included, can’t find ways to resist the algorithm’s drive to war, how ever will we filter true from false when AI really takes over?