Activism That Became a Format

This is the uncomfortable episode, and I want to be upfront about one thing.

Denouncing abuse publicly is right. Civil battles have always been won this way, by making noise when silence benefited someone. Nothing I write here questions that.

The point is something else, and it's about what happens when the denunciation meets a machine that rewards it.

The difference between denouncing and making content out of the denunciation

There are two gestures that look identical but are not.

The first is documenting a fact and making it public so that someone intervenes. It has an external goal, and when the goal is achieved, the gesture exhausts itself.

The second is producing content starting from that fact. It has an internal goal, that is, attention, and it never exhausts itself, because attention is not a finish line, it's a flow that needs to be fed.

The first gesture asks you to see it through. The second asks you to move on.

How a cause starts choosing itself

Here is the mechanism, and it's the same that governs any creator, in any sector.

If you publish something and get a huge response, you've learned something. You didn't learn it rationally, you learned it the way you learn habits. Next time you will tend to repeat what worked.

If what worked is indignation, you will lean toward indignation. If a live confrontation worked, you will lean toward live confrontation. Not because you are dishonest, but because the platform has just told you, with very clear numbers, which version of you deserves to exist.

At that point, something happens that almost nobody notices. You are no longer the one who chooses the cause. It is the format that worked that demands a new cause, every week, that resembles it.

The format is hungry. And a weekly hunger cannot be satisfied with the right causes; you satisfy it with the available ones.

Why it's a problem for the cause, not for the person

The damage does not fall on whoever produces the content. It falls on the battle.

When denunciation becomes recurring spectacle, the audience gets used to it. The same intensity applied every week stops signaling gravity and becomes background noise, the normal tone of that channel. The serious case and the trivial case arrive with the same face, the same music, the same anger.

And when everything is an emergency, nothing is anymore. That is the exact cost of having turned urgency into a schedule.

There is a second cost, more insidious. A format needs an antagonist, every time. When the designated antagonist is not enough to fill the episode, the perimeter expands. To neighbors. To those who didn't speak enough. To those who spoke badly. To the whole city. Not out of malice, but because the episode must last.

How to recognize it from the outside

One need not read anyone's mind. Just look at two things, both verifiable.

The first: what happens when the goal is achieved. If after the authorities' intervention the content stops, the goal was external. If after the intervention the content continues and seeks a new target within the same perimeter, the goal was the content.

The second: whether the perimeter shrinks or expands. A healthy denunciation aims at a precise responsibility and maintains it. A format tends to expand, because the precise responsibility exhausts quickly and the audience remains.

Neither of these signals says whether a person is in good faith. They only say which of the two logics is driving, and good faith does not protect from the logic. Anyone who has discovered, once, how powerful it is to be heard ends up in it.

The useful question, therefore, is not who is sincere. It's much simpler. Does this content serve to achieve a result, or does it serve to get the next episode?

It applies to activists. It applies to newspapers. It applies, without discounts, to anyone writing a column.

Signal & Noise is a column on how digital communication really works, between algorithms, platforms, and online reputation. It is written by Calogero Bono, who works with these machines every day.