One headline. Two feeds. A father and son who haven't spoken in four months.
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BREAKING · AP WIRE · NATIONAL · MEMPHIS TN · DEVELOPING STORY · OFFICER INVOLVED SHOOTING
AP Wire · National · 11:47 AM
"OFFICER SHOOTS MAN DURING TRAFFIC STOP IN MEMPHIS. VICTIM UNARMED."
Police say the man reached toward the center console. The family says he was complying with instructions. Body camera footage has not been released. The investigation is ongoing.
47 wordsNo body cam yetBoth men see this
This is everything anyone knows right now. This is all of it.
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Ray's feedDad · 58
Blue Lives · 1.3M views
"Reached for the console. Officer had under 2 seconds. This is what training is for."
62K ❤ · 18K shares
Law Enforcement Today
"98% of police encounters end without force. Media only shows the other 2%."
34K ❤ · 9K shares
Conservative Tribune · Trending
"Why do people keep reaching for things during traffic stops. Simple compliance saves lives."
91K ❤ · 41K shares
Police Officers Association
"The media has already convicted this officer before a single fact is established."
44K ❤ · 22K shares
By 3 PM he has a verdict. The body cam isn't out.
Darius's feedSon · 24
Say Their Names · 2.4M
"Unarmed. Complying. Dead. The system is working exactly as designed. Say his name."
148K ❤ · 73K shares
The Root · Shared 55K
"Black men are 3× more likely to be killed by police. This is not random. This is structure."
88K ❤ · 44K shares
Justice Now · Trending
"Body cam withheld for 'review.' Ask yourself why they always wait before showing it."
52K ❤ · 31K shares
Civil Rights Now
"Silence from the people who claim to love you is its own kind of violence."
96K ❤ · 51K shares
By 3 PM he has a verdict. The body cam isn't out.
Same 47 words. Four hours of different evidence. By 8 PM they won't be arguing about the shooting.
Question 01 of 04
Four hours of feed. Before one fact was confirmed. What did it actually do?
‹ Messages
Darius
iMessage
Today 8:43 PM
iMessage · End-to-End Encrypted
The last message said "unarmed," not "racist." It was never opened.
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Question 02 of 04
Darius said "unarmed." Ray heard "race." What happened between those two words?
How the feed wrote the fight before it started.
Four hours. Five steps. All documented.
1
At 11:47 AM both men read 47 identical words. For one brief window they share the same facts. The algorithm has four hours to end that.This is the only moment of shared reality they'll have all day.
2
Ray's engagement history routes him into content that frames the shooting as procedurally justified. His cortisol rises. His confirmation bias activates. He becomes physiologically less open to challenge before saying a word to anyone.Pre-conversational emotional priming — Bail, Princeton, 2021
3
Darius's history routes him into content that frames the shooting as systemic. Same process. Same hours. Two completely separate evidentiary universes built in parallel from the same 47 words.Filter bubble effect — Pariser, 2011 · Replicated PNAS, 2022
4
When they text at 8:43 PM, neither man is talking about the shooting anymore. They're each defending the reality their feed spent all day building. Any challenge to that reality arrives as a personal attack — because the feed made it one.Identity-protective cognition — Kahan, Yale, 2016
5
Ray reads "unarmed" and his brain autocompletes it into the argument he was pre-loaded to destroy. He stops reading. The next text — the one that could have saved it — is never opened. The algorithm wrote his response before Darius sent a word.Meta internal research, 2021: anger = 6× engagement of neutral content
What the internal research found
6×
Anger multiplierOutrage-triggering posts generate 6× longer engagement than neutral content. Meta's own research confirmed this — and the algorithm was tuned to exploit it.
4hrs
Pre-loading windowThe average person forms a confident opinion on a breaking political event within 4 hours of seeing the first post — before any official information is available.
83%
Confirmation rateUnder emotional priming, ambiguous evidence is interpreted as confirming the prior belief 83% of the time. The body cam footage had no chance.
78%
Reconciliation rateIn estranged families that eventually reconciled after a political rupture, 78% cited one person acknowledging the fight wasn't really about what they said it was.
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Question 03 of 04
The body cam dropped two weeks later. It was ambiguous. Both men said it proved them right. Why?
Since you opened this page
0
people pre-loaded with a verdict before a single fact was confirmed
Every one thinks they figured it out on their own.
Every one will have a conversation tonight.
Some of those conversations will be the last ones.
The app doesn't know their names. It doesn't need to.
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Question 04 of 04
Ray and Darius haven't spoken in four months. What would actually fix this?
Your score
—
01The algorithm didn't pick a side.
02It picked both sides — and made sure they'd never compare notes.
03Ray and Darius aren't enemies. They're outputs.
04The system needed them angry, separate, and returning tomorrow.
05It got exactly that.
I'm not here to tell you who was right.
I'm here to show you the machine that made sure you'd never agree.
The mechanism is the story.
A MOONV1LLAIN EXPERIENCE
MOONV1LLAIN
Thank you for participating. Don't let a machine break your relationships.