Silicon Valley determines that human suffering is regrettable, especially when it interrupts an otherwise excellent quarterly engagement report.
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA. America’s technology industry has discovered an extraordinary new business model in which human beings are publicly humiliated, millions of strangers gather to watch, and the resulting engagement is treated as a triumph of digital connectivity.
How Viral Harassment Became an Engagement Metric
According to WIRED’s investigation, content targeting University of Florida student Maddie Kowalski accumulated more than 8.5 million views in less than a day. Her attorney criticized the financial incentives surrounding viral harassment.
Silicon Valley executives have spent two decades explaining that social media connects humanity. They neglected to mention that connecting humanity occasionally resembles connecting several million spectators to a public humiliation ceremony.
A product manager at a mid-sized social platform, who asked not to be identified because he was holding a very small cup of kombucha, described a figure like 8.5 million as “a really healthy day-one number.” “You usually have to pay for that kind of reach,” he said. “This one came organically.”
The Four-Step Business Model Behind Online Humiliation
Under the traditional business model, companies produced something useful, persuaded customers to purchase it and earned revenue. The modern social media model has simplified matters considerably. First, somebody suffers. Second, strangers argue about that suffering. Third, algorithms detect extraordinary levels of engagement. Fourth, advertisers are offered access to a particularly enthusiastic audience.
Advertisers, for their part, say they never intended to appear next to harassment, and they have brand-safety reports to prove it. The reports run forty pages and recommend that the advertiser consult the platform’s brand-safety team, which is the team that placed the ad there.
The victim receives the traditional Silicon Valley compensation package: a link to the reporting form. The reporting form, naturally, requires an account.
What the TAKE IT DOWN Act Requires From Online Platforms
Congress has, in fact, weighed in. The TAKE IT DOWN Act, signed into law on May 19, 2025, criminalizes the publication of nonconsensual intimate imagery, including AI-generated imagery, and requires online platforms to set up a process for removing it. The Federal Trade Commission began enforcing the removal requirement on May 19, 2026. A covered platform that receives a valid request must remove the content, along with known identical copies, within 48 hours.
People can report platforms that fail to comply, or that offer no removal process at all, at TakeItDown.ftc.gov. The FTC says violators may face civil penalties of $53,088 per violation. The law covers intimate imagery specifically, so it does nothing about the rumor mill, which continues to operate without a compliance department.
The technology to do this work is not in dispute. In September 2025, Google announced a partnership with StopNCII.org to use hashes, the digital fingerprints of intimate images, to proactively identify and remove content that violates its policy. A technology company can identify which brand of running shoes a consumer considered purchasing seventeen seconds ago. It can recommend videos based on the precise duration someone looked at a golden retriever. It can determine the optimal moment to advertise hemorrhoid medication. Yet identifying coordinated harassment apparently presents a technological challenge comparable to landing a submarine on Jupiter.
Community Guidelines, Congressional Hearings and the Safety Compromise
Platform executives frequently celebrate their commitment to building safe online communities. Safety, however, is a complex concept. Removing harmful content too quickly might reduce engagement. Removing it too slowly might produce congressional hearings.
The industry has therefore settled on the innovative compromise of publishing another community guidelines update. The guidelines will reaffirm that bullying is unacceptable, harassment is prohibited and violations may result in severe consequences. Assuming, of course, that those consequences do not negatively affect user growth.
A glossary of industry euphemisms would define harassment as “content with elevated engagement characteristics,” the phrase for something that is making money and making someone’s life worse at the same time.
A trust-and-safety team of eleven people serving several hundred million users would be described, in the industry, as lean. Its members would be described as passionate, and also as tired.
Five Humorous Observations About Social Media Engagement
- The software knows I looked at a golden retriever for four seconds, and now I get dog food ads until I die. But eight million people piling onto one college kid? That one slipped by. The dog it caught.
- Where’s the report button? Third menu, under the three dots, under “More,” under “Other.” They hid it right where they hide the cancel-my-subscription button.
- Forty-eight hours to take something down. These companies can deliver me a lamp in one day. At six in the morning. In the rain. But a takedown, that’s a process.
- Community guidelines are like a diet. Everybody’s committed, nobody’s stepped on the scale.
- “Engagement.” That’s what they call it when a human being is having the worst week of her life and the dashboard is all green.
Satire notice: This article satirizes online harassment, campus hypocrisy and institutional incentives, not victims of intimate-image abuse. Reported criminal charges do not establish guilt, and the exaggerated scenarios and invented sources here should not be mistaken for reported events. Written as an entirely human collaboration between two sentient beings: the world’s oldest tenured professor and a philosophy major turned dairy farmer.