Frank Parlato
The Measure of Success
Accountability culture is about generating outrage.
It requires black-and-white judgment: Actions are “right” or “wrong.” Someone is either a “victim” or “villain.”
Accountability culture focuses on punishing villains. Punishment is the goal.
It focuses on shaming. It favors destruction. It is a result-driven phenomenon.
Accountability culture bypasses traditional legal systems. It skips formal processes, such as investigations or trials. There is no cross-examination.
The evidence is a cell phone video, edited or truncated or not, with a one-sided interpretation.
Accountability culture is attacking the individual, reducing them to a caricature of their worst moment. Minor offenses, such as a heated argument or poorly chosen words, may lead to sudden accountability.
Incentives for Outrage: Views, Likes, and Revenue
Accountability culture can be rooted in a genuine desire to hold bad actors accountable for their actions. It can also be the result of someone exploiting a single mistake or misunderstanding caught on video.
The focus is on destroying the career, relationships, and mental health of the person being held to account.
Success is based on results. Removal from a job, business ruin, damaged reputations, social ostracization, and arrest are its goals. And public humiliation.
Prominent figures on TikTok, X, or YouTube act as enforcers. Their narratives frame how a situation is perceived.
Influencers, leveraging outrage to grow their platforms, may not be neutral arbiters. Incentives, such as views, likes, and revenue, help form decisions on who should be held to account.
Their audience is social media users, fueled by emotions, who form opinions without verifying facts. The anonymity of the internet allows users to demand accountability without accountability for their own actions or opinions.
Social Media: The Courtroom of the Internet
Social media is the stage where anyone can play judge, jury, and executioner. Anyone can participate, regardless of a personal stake in the issue.
Accountability culture is the desire to see others punished. It is watching a person “get what they deserve,” even if it has nothing to do with their lives.
A single post, tweet, or video can trigger a massive response within hours, reaching millions. Social media waxes with reaction. Platforms reward content that brings clicks, shares, and engagement. Sometimes, that engagement is enhanced.
Creating the Illusion of Massive Outrage
AI aids accountability culture. AI-powered tools generate and distribute mass messages, comments, or emails targeting individuals who are to be held accountable.
If only a handful of people (or even one) wish to hold someone accountable, AI bots can amplify their voices. AI can make it appear there is massive public outrage.
AI-powered bots can generate fake comments, likes, shares, and other engagements. Through mass likes, shares, and comments, AI tricks algorithms into amplifying the content, pushing it into trending topics and news feeds.
A small group (or even one person) can appear like an avalanche. AI can generate fake social media accounts, with profile pictures, bios, and activity. AI can generate thousands of bad reviews on Yelp, Google, or Amazon, or send hate messages to a target. AI can fuel the impression that they are widely despised.
Employers fearing accountability culture make decisions to appease the demands voiced by AI-generated content, misperceiving bots for humans.
The Feedback Loop of Hate
Humans who might have been neutral become involved because AI-generated engagement deceives them into thinking it’s the outrage of many people.
Assuming the AI outrage is genuinely human, real humans pile on, creating a feedback loop of real and fake outrage blending. Whether it is largely AI, supplemented with a few humans, or largely human, supplemented by AI, accountability culture offers the illusion of instant justice.
It operates without standards of evidence or context.
It reaps a harvest when individuals, companies, or authorities act out of fear of public backlash.
It is most successful when those held accountable feel overwhelmed by the condemnation of an army of anonymous strangers united in a consensus of hate.
It revels when companies fire employees based on fear of reputational damage.
Accountability culture targets employers, family members, or colleagues of the accused, punishing those with no involvement in the original incident through guilt by association.
Accountability culture is the magnification of and reveling in the human emotion of hate.
Frank Parlato is an investigative journalist, media strategist, publisher, and legal consultant.
Please leave a comment: Your opinion is important to us!
[…] his article Fear, Algorithms, Anonymity, and AI: Why ‘Accountability Culture’ Thrives Today, Parlato dissects “accountability culture,” highlighting its punitive nature and emotional […]
[…] misstep; it was a deliberate attack on the free press,” Luthmann declared in court filings. “Digital Cancel Culture King Danesh wanted to bully me into stopping my reporting on him and sent ‘ambulance chaser’ Nick […]
I like the analysis. But what does Danesh think ?
we could really use an EXAMPLE of AI-driven cancellation
Accountability culture should be used to target parties, lawyers, GAL’s, and judges who use things like the “silver bullet” for profit or gain of some sort.