The danger of reducing the US invasion of Venezuela to a 60-second video

For Juárez, the main driver of digital disruption is disintermediation. Basically, each of us is now our own media. “That’s what these platforms sold us: You choose what you want to be informed about and you stay in a bubble. You look for information that confirms what you already knew or thought. If you think what happened in Venezuela was good, you will seek information that supports that, and vice versa. This creates an environment where we only hear what we want to hear.”

According to the Digital News Report 2025The migration to digital platforms, particularly among younger generations, is becoming increasingly evident: 16% of respondents said they frequently turn to TikTok for news. The figure for WhatsApp was 19 percent, Facebook 36 percent and YouTube 30 percent.

Beyond the algorithm

Polarization does not need a malicious algorithm to disrupt the public conversation; it’s an inevitable consequence of the basic design of social platforms. By emulating environments that emphasize certain forms of connection and dialogue, a persistent loop emerges where emotional content is most visible and ultimately shapes the very architecture of the network. These are not users actively seeking conflict or platforms designed with malicious intent, but rather the result of a rewarding emotional response following measured analysis.

For Petter Törnberg, who worked on the study, “this toxicity is an unintended consequence of the structure of posts and followers. The act of sharing content is often impulsive and deeply partisan; users react to anger or scandal, propagating a narrative that, in turn, shapes their own digital environment. This feedback loop between emotional action and network structure creates an ecosystem where toxicity becomes the organic norm. Ultimately, the mere existence of basic functions such as forwarding and liking seems to be enough to generate these negative results, transforming networks into echo chambers that feed off our own reactive psychology.

“I believe that digital platforms can continue to be a space of resistance and solutions. But to avoid becoming echo chambers, there must be a real intention of dialogue. And that doesn’t always happen when we are going through a very difficult time,” says an anonymous Venezuelan source who spoke to WIRED. “When our emotional wounds override reason, it is very difficult to understand the perspective of others. For this to be possible, we must first identify and understand the wound, and sometimes we fail to find the equanimity necessary to engage in dialogue. However, this dialogue must inevitably take place.”

“We are currently experiencing great polarization between Venezuelans inside and outside the country because of this event, which I personally consider a violent act of foreign intervention. I can understand the joy of those who celebrate the imprisonment of Nicolas Maduro as a moment of justice. But at the same time, I am against foreign intervention, against Donald Trump and against the fact that they are taking our resources,” explains this Venezuelan source. “We have done everything; we have made every possible effort. We are in this situation because we are cornered and vulnerable to American imperialism, but also to Russia and China. Power has led us to this situation of extreme vulnerability. Digital platforms, however, can be spaces of resistance.”

Too much information; Too little attention

Due to information overload, our attention span, which is a limited resource, is overstretched, Juárez explains: “There comes a time when we stop and say, ‘That’s it, that’s what I’m thinking.’ We generally invest as little psychological energy as possible and use shortcuts to arrive at our conclusions: I saw the video, I saw the quote, I saw the tweet, and that’s it; I finished. We simplify because simplification serves as an antidote to saturation. When we are drowning in information, we feel disoriented and anxious. The level of this anxiety depends on our proximity to an event. This desire to take a certain point of view wins out when we have to weigh the many real implications of a situation.

“My main concern is that we have lost the ability to discern what is false and what is true. We are willing to accept prefabricated stories. If we lose this ability as citizens, we also lose our capacity for action,” says Juárez. “What we are seeing in Venezuela is not the last episode of a story, it is the beginning of a dynamic that will not stop there. »

This story was originally published on WIRED in spanish and was translated from Spanish by John Newton.