Thread by @matt_vanswol

For years, I thought I was reading the news.

I have never been more wrong.

I was reading carefully crafted, completely fictional stories.

They choose the heroes.
They scripted the villains.
..and I bought it.

Let me show you the playbook that tricked me for years... 🧵

Step 1: The Casting Call

This is perhaps the most insidious of all the steps... where editors decide which story is even WORTH telling you.

It’s how “the story” starts before a word is written or a show is filmed. A story is picked because it's a “stand in” for a larger point.

It’s the case that can be elevated into a SYMBOL, a parable, a shorthand for a much larger narrative they want to reinforce.

...and here we are, thinking it was news, just a single story representative of a larger trend

It's not.

The “casting” comes BEFORE the script, and once the casting is done, the rest of the story almost writes itself.

Step 2: Framing the Character

Once the media decides WHICH story to tell, the next move is deciding how to frame the CHARACTERS inside it.

This is where the adjectives, labels, and identifiers and HEADLINES do the heavy lifting.

A white criminal? The headline screams the race.
A black criminal? Suddenly the race vanishes.
A trans shooter? Pronouns become sacred.
A conservative shooter? Politics are bolded in line 1.

They’re NOT neutral words.

Every single word in the headline is a brushstroke on the script they are trying to get you to believe.

...and bit by bit, they color in who you’re supposed to cheer for and who you’re supposed to hate

It's DESIGNED to be subtle.

You're supposed to miss its intentionality.

Even when the entire time, it's slowly changing your beliefs.

Step 3: Villains & Victims

Once the characters are framed, they must now assign sympathy and blame. This becomes the story’s most useful tool: EMOTION

It's the lighting and the soundtrack... that beautiful soft light for the "heroes", and the harsh light for their villains.

It's emotional manipulation.

It's that gaslighting backstory of a hard life that spins you round fast enough to forget that...oh wait...who is the good guy here?

By the end of Step 3, you don’t just know the story...

...you know how to FEEL about the story

You know who to feel bad for, who to fear, and which policy you’re meant to carry away from the narrative.

This is the insidious twist:

The emotions are installed BEFORE the evidence is complete, so when the facts arrive later (or more likely... are corrected or never do), the narrative doesn’t move.

The story already did its dirtiest work.

Step 4: Authority Laundering

You’ve been told how to feel.
Now they have to make it stick.

So in come the "experts"... sprinkled into the story to give credence to the emotions you are feeling.

"It's not just you who are feeling this way... ALL the experts say this is wrong too, YOU ARE NOT ALONE!"

Outlet A quotes a “experts say...” line
Outlet B quotes Outlet A.
A fact-checker quotes both.

...and then, oh my, would you look at this... it's EVERYWHERE!

Surely not everyone can be wrong, all at once? Surely they wouldn't all collude to tell me something false?

Surely not...

but yet... by the end of Step 4, yesterday’s emotion has hardened into "the truth".

Not because they proved it... but because they CREDENTIALED it, copied it, and blasted it everywhere.

The same line.

Repeated in a thousand different places.

The truth has been buried under an avalanche sources.

Step 5: Silencing Dissenters (the final step)

Once the story has been credentialed and repeated... the next step is to fortify the story from dissenters.

The dissenters are always the carriers of "misinformation" and a wave of “explainers,” “debunks,” and "fact-checks," flood your feed.

The dissenting expert? “Controversial.”
The dissenting data? “Cherry-picked.”
The dissenting questions? “Conspiracy theories”

All of a sudden, "no evidence to the contrary” quietly becomes “no evidence we accept or show you.”

By the end of Step 5, the narrative doesn’t just feel like truth, it feels OFFICIAL.

Not because it beat the alternatives in the evaluation of daylight...

...but because the alternatives NEVER EVEN MADE IT INTO THE DAYLIGHT!

The truth didn’t lose the argument, it WAS NEVER SEEN.

I hope this helps.

It’s been almost impossible to explain any of this to anyone who has not lived inside the media echo chamber the way I did.

You can’t describe that echo to someone who’s still inside the room.

There are millions of smart, kind, amazing people... many of them are your dear friends, even your family, that are caught in this rip current of information system that quietly points them in one direction and rewards them for staying pointed there.

The system is sooooo good at what it does: it flatter those who agree, it filters those who don't, and it gives you the feeling of being informed... while subtly choosing what you’re allowed to see.

I’m not saying this to dunk on anyone, if anyone is the idiot here, it was me.

But once you step outside, even that tiny, tiny amount ...you start noticing the cracks.

You get on X and slowly Steps 1-5 become real for you.

Then, you can’t unsee it.

You stop outsourcing your opinions to the experts.

You slow down. You notice what’s missing. You choose truth over the tribe, even when it costs you to do so.

If you’re still inside the echo-chamber, I get it.

It’s warm in there.

People you trust live there.

Leaving can be lonely at first.

But on the other side is something so beautiful>

It's truth.

It's using your own mind, your own eyes, your own standards to find it.

Once you get out, you see it everywhere...

...and I for one, am never, EVER going back