The Price of a Follow

I recently found myself paying closer attention to something Instagram has displayed for years. While looking through the accounts of several influencers who have built enormous audiences by demonizing Israel, excusing terrorism or recycling antisemitic narratives, I noticed the familiar line beneath their profiles showing which people I know also follow them. The feature itself was not new, but what I saw suddenly felt different. The names beneath those accounts were not anonymous strangers hidden somewhere in the digital universe. They were people I knew, including acquaintances, respected professionals and members of the Jewish community. They were not individuals I would ever suspect of harboring antisemitic views, nor did I imagine that they consciously intended to elevate people whose content routinely depicts Jews as villains, Israel as uniquely evil and terrorism as somehow understandable. Yet there they were, contributing to the growth of those accounts all the same.

This troubled me not because following someone necessarily means endorsing everything that person believes. It does not. Journalists follow people they disagree with. Researchers monitor extremists. Curious people expose themselves to ideas they reject. Any serious society depends upon a willingness to understand opposing viewpoints. But that explanation rests on an outdated understanding of media, one in which consuming information and distributing it were two separate acts. Reading a newspaper article did not cause that article to be placed before millions of other readers. Watching a television interview did not instruct the network to broadcast it more frequently. Curiosity was largely private. Social media has erased that distinction.

Today, every follow, share, comment and moment of engagement becomes part of a system that determines what millions of other people will see tomorrow. The algorithm does not ask whether you admire a creator, despise him or are merely watching out of disbelief. It registers only that you interacted. Your attention becomes data. That data becomes reach. Reach becomes influence, and influence becomes advertising revenue, sponsorships, media invitations, publishing contracts, speaking engagements and, ultimately, power. The digital economy has transformed attention itself into a commodity, and attention has become one of the world’s most valuable currencies.

Yet we have developed a sophisticated moral framework for how we spend our money and almost no comparable framework for how we spend our attention. Modern consumers research companies before making purchases. We boycott businesses whose values conflict with our own. We ask where products are manufactured, which political causes corporations support and whether our spending aligns with our principles. Entire movements have been built upon the conviction that every dollar we spend strengthens someone or something. At the same time, we continue to speak as though following an account were a passive, private decision with no consequences beyond our own screens.

That assumption is no longer tenable. Every major social-media platform is built upon a business model that converts human attention into financial value. The larger an audience becomes, the more attractive its creator is to advertisers, investors and media organizations. Popularity is no longer merely the result of influence; it has become one of its principal sources. A large following confers the appearance of authority. It tells journalists that a person is worth quoting, podcast hosts that the person is worth interviewing, corporations that the person is worth sponsoring and other users that the person must possess some degree of legitimacy. Algorithms interpret attention as importance, and importance attracts still more attention until voices that once occupied the fringes begin to shape the cultural mainstream.

That process should concern everyone, but Jews have particular reason to understand its dangers. Antisemitism rarely becomes dangerous overnight. Long before discrimination becomes policy, hatred first becomes fashionable. It enters polite society gradually, often disguised as intellectual curiosity, political sophistication or moral certainty. People do not awaken one morning and decide collectively to normalize prejudice. Instead, thousands of seemingly insignificant decisions slowly transform ideas once considered beyond the pale into ideas treated as respectable subjects for debate. The rhetoric becomes familiar before it becomes acceptable, and it becomes acceptable before it becomes actionable.

This is how normalization works. Extremists do not always become influential because they suddenly produce more persuasive arguments. They often become influential because ordinary people cease asking whether they should help amplify them. The audience may not agree with every claim, but it helps create the appearance that the speaker deserves an audience. Repetition then performs its own form of persuasion. An accusation seen once may appear outrageous. Seen hundreds of times, circulated by accounts with millions of followers, it begins to feel like part of the legitimate public conversation. The falsehood has not become truer. It has simply become more familiar.

None of this means that every person who follows a controversial account shares its worldview. Such a claim would be both unfair and intellectually dishonest. The issue is not automatic ideological agreement. It is whether we have fully appreciated the economic and cultural consequences of our participation. There is a meaningful difference between observing a dangerous movement and casually adding to the numbers that strengthen its influence. Social-media platforms have blurred that distinction so thoroughly that many users no longer realize it exists.

We have spent years teaching our children to think critically about what they consume. We warn them about misinformation, manipulation and the dangers of believing everything they encounter online. Perhaps we must now teach them to think just as critically about what they amplify. Every additional follower helps build an audience. Every larger audience produces greater visibility. Every increase in visibility strengthens a creator’s ability to shape the public conversation. The individual contribution may feel insignificant, but the system is built from millions of such contributions.

What is most remarkable is how invisible this form of support has become. Few people would knowingly donate money to an influencer who profits from spreading hostility toward Jews. Few would volunteer to promote that person’s work, assist in attracting sponsors or persuade media outlets to treat the person as culturally important. Yet countless well-intentioned people perform the digital equivalent every day while telling themselves that a follow is simply a follow. In the current economy, it is not. A following is an asset, and every person who joins it adds value.

The internet has fundamentally altered the relationship between ordinary citizens and influence. Earlier generations lived in a world in which wealth built institutions and gatekeepers largely determined which voices entered the mainstream. We inhabit a world in which attention builds influence and the algorithm has replaced the editor. Its only consistent standard is engagement. It does not distinguish truth from falsehood, decency from depravity or curiosity from conviction. It rewards whatever keeps people watching.

That reality places a new moral responsibility on all of us. The next time we choose to follow someone, the question cannot merely be whether we find the content interesting, provocative or entertaining. We should also ask whether we are comfortable helping to build the audience, credibility and influence that our attention now creates. In the twenty-first century, attention is no longer passive consumption. It is capital, and like every form of capital, it strengthens whatever we choose to invest in.