6  Belief

How do people come to believe what they believe about the world?

NoteLearning Objectives
  • Distinguish agenda-setting from framing.
  • Describe the shift from human gatekeeping to algorithmic engagement and its consequences.
  • Apply a “manufacturing consent” lens to platform-era media.

What did you learn about the world this week, and who decided it was worth your attention? Most of what any of us knows about the world arrived through someone else’s selection— an editor, an algorithm, a friend’s repost— and that selection is not neutral. Belief is produced, not just discovered. Whoever controls the agenda and the frame controls a large part of what is thinkable.

6.1 From Gatekeepers to Platforms

For most of the twentieth century, a small number of editors and broadcasters decided what was newsworthy. That concentration had its own distortions: the gatekeepers were overwhelmingly white, male, and answerable to advertisers, and the range of stories they considered fit to print was narrow. But the system was at least legible: you could see who was making the decision.

Platforms replaced those gatekeepers with engagement-maximizing algorithms, and the concentration did not go away—it changed shape. The business model is older than the web. The penny press emerged in New York in the 1830s, when publishers realized that a one-cent newspaper could not sustain itself on subscriptions but could attract a large enough readership to sell advertising at a profit. The New York Sun was not selling information to readers; it was selling readers to advertisers. In the 1890s, the circulation war between William Randolph Hearst’s Journal and Joseph Pulitzer’s World showed what the model produces under pressure: crime, scandal, nationalist outrage, and stories written to provoke drove circulation, and each escalation forced a matching response. Neither publisher set out to destabilize democratic discourse; they just wanted to sell newspapers. Inflammatory journalism was the predictable output of two rational businesses responding to the same incentives (Campbell 2011; Nasaw 2000).

Interactive media makes the same logic more precise. Behavioral data lets advertisers target individuals rather than demographics, and the recommendation algorithm knows far more precisely than any editor what will hold your attention for the next few minutes. Because outrage, fear, and social comparison generate stronger engagement signals than accurate information, a platform that maximizes engagement will always amplify inflammatory distortion over mere facts (Wu 2016).

6.2 Framing and Agenda

Agenda-setting and framing are the two levers on what becomes thinkable. Agenda-setting is the choice of what gets discussed at all: media may not tell you what to think, but they tell you what to think about, and absence from the agenda is a form of power. Framing is the choice of how an issue is defined, which determines which answers seem reasonable. “Screen time” frames a social problem as a personal discipline problem; “attention extraction” frames the same phenomenon as an industry practice. “AI safety” frames the question as one of engineering; “corporate accountability” frames it as one of power. The reframe changes the feasible policy menu, which is why so much political argument is fought over words before it is fought over anything else.

John Kenneth Galbraith called this the dependence effect: advertising manufactures the wants that production then satisfies (Galbraith 1998). And representation changes what is thinkable. When Nichelle Nichols considered leaving Star Trek, Martin Luther King Jr. reportedly told her to stay, because her character Uhura was one of the few images of a Black woman in a position of authority on television; Whoopi Goldberg has said she saw herself in that image, and Mae Jemison has said it shaped her path toward becoming an astronaut. The Rooney Rule, which requires NFL teams to interview minority candidates, is the minimal-institutional version of the same idea: you cannot become what you cannot imagine, and you cannot imagine what is never shown.

6.4 The Ideology of the Future

The most consequential frame circulating in the technology industry right now is not about the present at all. The philosopher Émile Torres named a cluster of overlapping ideologies— transhumanism, rationalism, effective altruism, longtermism, and others— TESCREAL (Torres and Gebru 2024). Their shared premise is that the scale of the future is so vast that almost any present sacrifice can be justified if it plausibly improves long-run outcomes. If trillions of people could live across star systems over millions of years, then a donation that slightly reduces the probability of human extinction is worth more than a donation that cures a child of malaria today.

The arithmetic is straightforward given the premise; the problem is that the premise— that we can make meaningful probability estimates about civilization-scale outcomes centuries out— is speculation wearing the mathematical clothing of rigor. The deeper problem is structural. If the future swamps present obligations, then whoever controls the trajectory of the future has more moral authority than any present institution or democratic process. This is the framing that lets the already-powerful describe themselves as trustees of civilization, accountable to no present constituency, and justify present disruption and displacement as the price of a future whose beneficiaries do not yet exist. It is the same rhetorical structure as other forms of extraction, and it is most credible when the people making the argument are also bearing the sacrifice— which is rarely how it is deployed.

6.5 Privacy as Framing

Privacy is not a single natural right; it is a contest over who gets to be private and who is watched. Erving Goffman described social life as a performance with a front stage and a back stage (Goffman 1959). The back stage is where contradictions get worked out and the next performance is prepared, and a society without back stages is not one in which people become more authentic; it is one in which performance becomes continuous and exhausting. The chilling effect is measurable: after Edward Snowden’s 2013 revelations (Snowden 2020), researchers documented a drop in Google searches for sensitive topics, not because people became less curious but because curiosity began to require calculation.

Surveillance rewires the people it surveils. The East German Stasi employed roughly 90,000 officers and a network of about 180,000 informal informants to watch a country of 16 million people, a ratio never matched before or since (Funder 2011). The Stasi had to coerce its informants; in the modern surveillance economy, we pay subscription fees for the privilege of being surveilled. The social location of privacy has always been uneven. The first American legal argument for a right to privacy, made by Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis in 1890, emerged from the needs of the prominent to be protected from gossip, not from the needs of the powerless to be protected from the state (Browne 2015). “Nothing to hide” is an argument made by people who have never needed a back stage.

The asymmetry is clearest in financial secrecy. Switzerland’s banking-secrecy law of 1934 was enacted partly to protect Jewish depositors from the Nazis; within years it was protecting wealth hidden from its owners’ own governments, and then the loot of the Nazis themselves (Shaxson 2012). Gabriel Zucman estimates roughly $7.6 trillion sits in offshore accounts, costing governments about $200 billion a year in lost tax revenue (Zucman 2015). The Panama and Pandora Papers revealed the scale, but the system is legal because the wealthy have the influence to keep it legal.

The principle that threads through the cases is simple: privacy for persons, transparency for institutions. India’s Right to Information Act of 2005 gave citizens the right to demand government documents, born from village activists trying to verify whether public-works money was actually spent. South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission inverted the logic of settlement, offering amnesty in exchange for full public disclosure. The European right to be forgotten protects the person whose private medical condition was published, and also the politician who wants voters to forget a corruption conviction. The same instrument serves both, and privacy law cannot always tell them apart.

6.6 Fragmentation and Panic

The popular story about platforms is that they sort people into sealed filter bubbles that never encounter disagreement. The empirical picture is more mixed than the alarm suggests: people do encounter opposing views, and the larger problem may be a shared but distorted diet rather than total separation. Rigor requires acknowledging that uncertainty rather than overclaiming it.

The same caution applies to the most common panic about what platforms do to communities. The evidence from disasters points in the opposite direction from the myth. Researchers including Enrico Quarantelli and Rebecca Solnit found that in the aftermath of earthquakes, floods, and fires, ordinary people overwhelmingly respond with cooperation and mutual aid, not barbarism (Solnit 2009; Quarantelli 1998). The “elite panic” story—looting, chaos, the need for armed control— is largely an artifact of authorities and media, who report the rare exception as the rule. Selection bias manufactures mistrust, and mistrust is a belief like any other: produced by someone, for someone, under particular incentives.

NoteTakeaway

Belief is produced, not just discovered. Whoever controls the agenda and the frame controls a large part of what is thinkable. Platforms changed the economics of that production, and with it, the politics.

6.7 Exercises

Framing audit.
Find one story covered two ways (e.g., “misinformation” versus “platform accountability”). List the frames and metaphors, and note who is cast as the agent and who as the victim.
Agenda check.
Compare what a news outlet and a social-media feed surfaced about the same event. What was on the agenda, and what was conspicuously absent? Who benefits from that absence?
Propaganda filters today.
Take a tech-policy controversy. Walk through Herman and Chomsky’s five filters as updated for platforms, and identify which are most active in this case.
Manufacturing a panic.
Take a moral panic (e.g., kids and screens, “AI will end humanity”). Trace how news coverage and platform feeds frame it: which experts get quoted, what metaphors recur, who is cast as the villain. How does the framing amplify the alarm while suppressing the evidence?
Redesign the gatekeeper.
If you had to replace engagement maximization with a different editorial principle, what would it be? Name the new distortions it would introduce.
Privacy frame swap.
Take a surveillance story (ad targeting, workplace monitoring, a data breach) and retell it once from the “personal privacy” frame and once from the “power and institutions” frame. Who is the agent and who is the victim in each version?
Representation audit.
Pick a domain where one kind of person is overwhelmingly represented (an executive suite, a cast list, a dataset of “successful” people). What becomes thinkable when that changes, and what is the minimal intervention (like the Rooney Rule) that gets the change started?