Being pissed off is not proof that you changed anything. Sometimes it only means somebody else got more of your time
The Names Change. The Routine Doesn’t.
I honestly hate opening Facebook.
Recently, I nearly posted a harsh callout about it. I was tired of the outrage, the cancellation demands, the personal attacks, and the confidence people develop when a keyboard separates them from the person they are insulting. I decided against posting it. The next morning, instead of adding another angry post to the pile, I started looking at the pattern behind it.
Arguments about ICE enforcement and Flock cameras were part of what set me off, but this is not an article about whether every concern involving immigration enforcement, surveillance, privacy, or government power is valid. Those subjects deserve real scrutiny. What I wanted to examine was something more basic: when the outrage gets loud, what actually changes?
That distinction matters because the person posting and the platform hosting the argument do not necessarily need the same result. The person may want a boycott to hurt sales, a company to reverse a decision, a public figure removed, or a policy changed. The platform can still benefit if everybody keeps clicking, commenting, arguing, and coming back, even when none of those goals happen.
So before you tell me how furious everybody was, tell me what changed.
I also have to stop treating the feed itself as evidence of what “everyone” thinks. Facebook can show me a concentrated stream of the people most willing to post about an issue. It cannot tell me, by itself, how many people agree, how strongly they agree, or whether anybody changed behavior after posting. Visibility is evidence of visibility.
Online Backlash Is Not a Result
The last decade gives us plenty of examples where online backlash looked enormous, but the intended outcome was much harder to find.
In 2015, Starbucks became the center of a ridiculous culture-war argument over plain red holiday cups. Complaints and boycott calls spread online, but Starbucks still reported an 8 percent increase in global comparable-store sales for the fiscal quarter that included the holiday season. That does not tell us the controversy had zero effect. It tells us a loud controversy did not prevent a strong quarter. (Starbucks Q1 2016 results)
Goya is a stronger example because researchers were able to compare what happened online with actual purchasing behavior. In 2020, calls to boycott Goya Foods spread after its chief executive praised Donald Trump. Researchers found that boycott-related Twitter posts exceeded pro-Goya “buycott” posts by 75 percent. Yet national sales initially increased by about 22 percent before that bump faded. The position that dominated the Twitter conversation in the study was not the same thing as the outcome at the checkout. (Goya boycott study)
Then there was the pressure on Spotify over Joe Rogan. In 2022, Neil Young demanded that Spotify choose between his music and Rogan’s podcast over concerns about COVID-19 misinformation. Whatever else came from that controversy, Spotify did not remove Rogan. In 2024, it announced another multiyear agreement with him and expanded distribution of the show beyond Spotify. The specific outcome many people demanded did not happen. (Spotify 2024 partnership announcement)
These examples are not moral verdicts. Strong sales do not prove criticism was wrong. A company can make money and still deserve criticism. A person can survive a cancellation campaign and still deserve consequences for something they did.
But a trending hashtag is not a moral verdict either.
If somebody claims a campaign worked, I want to know what it was supposed to accomplish and what happened afterward. Showing me how many people were angry answers a different question.
What Measurable Impact Looks Like
Bud Light belongs in this article because its outcome was different.
After the 2023 backlash over the brand’s promotion with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney, Bud Light suffered a substantial sales decline. The Associated Press reported that U.S. retail sales were down 24 percent in the week ending June 3, 2023. That was measurable commercial damage, not merely an angry feed. (Associated Press on Bud Light sales)
That example matters because the standard has to survive evidence I may not personally like.
A boycott should be judged against purchasing behavior and the outcome it demanded. A campaign to remove someone should be judged against whether the person was removed. A policy campaign should be judged against the policy it tried to change. Awareness can be a legitimate goal, but awareness is not automatically persuasion, and persuasion is not automatically changed behavior.
Public pressure can work. The point is that your anger is not the evidence that it did.
Facebook Is Not Just Showing You the World
Facebook is not simply a window where I happen to observe everybody else arguing. Its feed is selected and ranked.
In a 2021 engineering explanation of News Feed ranking, Meta described a system that predicts interactions such as likes, comments, and shares, while also using surveys and other signals intended to measure whether content was meaningful or worth someone’s time. That is important because it would be inaccurate to say Facebook ranks everything by anger alone. But it is equally inaccurate to pretend the feed is neutral. Meta makes decisions about what gets shown, in what order, and to whom. (Meta News Feed ranking)
The problem is that engagement is not the same thing as value.
I can interact with something because I appreciate it. I can also interact because I think it is dishonest, insulting, or dangerously wrong. I can open the comments, write a response, return when somebody replies, and spend twenty minutes arguing with a post I wish I had never seen. My intention may be rejection, but my behavior is still attention and interaction.
The social rewards around that behavior matter too. Research published in Science Advances in 2021 found that positive social feedback reinforced future expressions of moral outrage and that people adjusted their expression to the norms of their social networks. That does not mean everyone expressing outrage is secretly faking it. It means people can learn that a certain kind of expression gets rewarded and do more of it. (Science Advances outrage study)
That is the design problem I care about. Anger existed before Facebook. Tribalism existed before smartphones. The technology does not have to create those instincts from nothing to make them more valuable as content. A system only has to learn that certain expressions reliably keep people reacting.
A 2025 study in PNAS Nexus found another uncomfortable gap. Researchers comparing Twitter’s engagement-based ranking with a chronological baseline found amplification of emotionally charged and politically hostile content. Users did not actually prefer the political posts selected by the engagement-based ranking system. (PNAS Nexus ranking study)
That research was conducted on Twitter, not Facebook, and the platforms are not interchangeable. But the mechanism is relevant: what keeps people reacting is not necessarily what they would deliberately choose to receive more of.
That is why I think platforms deserve real responsibility for the environments they create. Users supply the words. Platforms decide how those words are selected, ranked, and recommended, and they design the systems through which engagement is rewarded.
The Platform Can Win Even When Your Campaign Loses
The business side of this is simple enough to understand without pretending we can calculate the dollar value of every angry comment.
Meta reported roughly $196.2 billion in advertising revenue in 2025 out of about $201 billion in total revenue. That does not tell us how much money came from outrage, and I am not going to invent a number the evidence does not provide. It establishes something simpler: Meta is overwhelmingly an advertising business, and attention on its platforms has commercial value. (Meta 2025 results)
That creates a basic difference in incentives. You may want an apology. You may want a boycott to hurt. You may want somebody fired. You may want a policy changed. You may spend an evening arguing, persuade nobody, and move the issue no closer to the outcome you wanted.
The platform does not have to wait for your campaign to succeed before your continued participation has value to its business.
That is what I mean when I say your outrage can become part of their business model. I am not claiming Facebook invented every disagreement or that people would all get along if the algorithm disappeared. I am saying the platform can benefit from attention even when the people generating that attention accomplish none of what they intended.
That forces me to ask a different set of questions when I feel myself getting dragged into the next argument.
Did I learn anything? Did I contribute useful evidence? Did I help somebody understand the issue? Did I move a specific effort forward? Or did I spend an hour announcing my position to people who already knew it?
Being right about something does not automatically make every use of my time worthwhile.
The Algorithm Does Not Get All the Blame
The evidence also complicates the easiest version of this argument. A large Facebook and Instagram experiment conducted around the 2020 U.S. election replaced the normal ranked feeds for consenting users with chronological feeds. The change substantially altered what people saw and reduced time spent on the platforms, but researchers did not detect significant changes in political polarization or key political attitudes during the three-month study. (Facebook and Instagram chronological feed study)
A chronological feed did not magically make people reasonable.
That matters because it keeps the argument where it belongs. Platform design matters, but human behavior does not disappear behind the algorithm. A ranking system is not an excuse for inventing facts, insulting strangers, or demanding punishment before understanding what happened.
People still own what they choose to say.
Platforms still own the systems they build to distribute it and the incentives those systems create.
Both can be true at once.
I also have to be careful about what I infer from the feed. When a controversy disappears from my feed, that does not prove everyone involved stopped caring. I do not see every conversation, donation, meeting, phone call, or action somebody takes away from Facebook. The feed is a selected presentation, not a complete record of another person’s convictions.
I can judge the claim in front of me. I can ask whether the demanded outcome happened. I can criticize people who treat disagreement like permission to become abusive. I do not need to pretend I can read their minds to make the stronger case.
I Want a Publishing Home, Not Another Place to Perform
Eventually, all of this becomes a question about what I can actually control. I cannot redesign Facebook around my priorities. I cannot decide how Meta ranks its feed, what another person posts, or what argument the algorithm decides to put in front of me tomorrow.
I can decide where my work lives.
That is part of why I built Bonumark Stream.
I did not start building it because one Facebook argument annoyed me. The ownership problem existed long before this article. I wanted the convenience of a social post without making a social platform the permanent home of my thoughts, photos, links, project updates, and everyday writing.
My longer work belongs on JimLunsford.com. My personal stream belongs on JimLunsford.net, which runs Bonumark Stream. Those sites have different jobs, but the principle underneath them is the same: the work has a home I control.
A photo of Milo does not need to become an engagement strategy. A note about a run does not need to be packaged around a controversy. A project update should be worth publishing because I want a record of the work, not because I found the perfect way to make strangers angry enough to interact with it.
I still want readers. I still share things elsewhere when it makes sense. Ownership is not a clever excuse to pretend an audience does not matter.
The difference is that I want social platforms to be distribution, not the foundation. If one of them changes its algorithm, buries a link, suspends an account, or simply becomes someplace I no longer want to spend much time, the original work still exists where I put it.
When I publish on my own site, a post does not stop belonging in the archive because the internet moved on to a different argument. It can be quiet. It can be useful to ten people instead of ten thousand. It can simply document something that mattered to me. The publishing decision does not have to be justified by the reaction it generates.
That is the part of the system I can change.
What Bonumark Stream Is, and What It Is Not
Bonumark Stream is a self-hosted microblog CMS for publishing short-form content on a site the owner controls. It is intentionally built around one publisher rather than a central platform full of people competing for attention. (Bonumark Stream)
The owner controls the domain, database, media, identity, presentation, archive, exports, and hosting environment. The system supports the things I actually want from short-form publishing: posts, notes, links, photos, drafts, scheduling, comments, likes, feeds, imports, exports, and a real archive.
That does not mean I think comments or likes are inherently bad. Bonumark includes both. Interaction is not the enemy.
The distinction is that interaction does not have to become the authority deciding what deserves to be seen.
I am also testing optional ActivityPub federation so a Bonumark site can connect to the broader fediverse while remaining the owner’s publishing home. The Following view in the v0.8.0 release candidate is chronological rather than engagement-ranked. That choice is deliberate, but I am not pretending chronology solves human behavior. A chronological feed can still contain bad information, hostility, and nonsense.
Federation also does not give me control over somebody else’s platform. If a Bonumark post reaches a remote service, that service still controls its own presentation and behavior. Ownership of my source does not mean ownership of every place the source may travel.
Bonumark is not another Facebook. It is not designed to become a giant multi-author social network. It is not a guarantee of reach, agreement, or attention. It will not make somebody smarter, calmer, or less likely to post bullshit.
It is also not maintenance-free independence. Self-hosting means backups, updates, hosting, and responsibility. I consider that a fair trade because the result is a publishing home I control, but it is still a trade.
I am not building software that fixes people. I am building software around a different set of priorities.
Care Enough to Look for Results
The question I started with is still the one I think matters most: what actually changed?
Not every post has to change anything. People can joke, complain, share a picture, argue about sports, talk about politics, or say they had a shitty day. I am not trying to turn every sentence on the internet into a measurable public-service project.
But if you say you are holding a company accountable, forcing change, canceling somebody, changing policy, or organizing a boycott, then the result matters.
Name the objective. Look at the evidence. Follow what happens after the attention moves somewhere else. If the result supports the claim, say so. If it does not, stop treating volume as victory.
Before giving another platform an hour of your life because it put something infuriating in front of you, ask whether that hour is serving anything you care about.
You do not have to stop caring.
You do have to stop treating your anger as proof that you accomplished something.
I would rather put more of that energy into work I can point to, publishing I control, and things that still exist after the feed moves on.