I don't know what caused it. I don't understand how it began. I just know it happened often enough. With time, more would have died.
If I had lived later on, I would have come across a video where a dude would explain that with enough time, enough people will have participated in the spread to the point where it would have became synonymous with humans. Who knows if he was right.
At least by the end of the first week I had a solid Idea of what I would do for the summer project. I would do it on a concept the government claims to have been watching over.
Soon enough on the ride home from school, I would see an interaction on an app where people post video content for views that didn't make sense. People were arguing in the comment section over whether a video should be taken down by its creator.
The video was of a kid, a kid that didn't care. He didn't care about the presumptions of the world, he didn't care if the content he was creating allowed the algorithm of the app to target the gays, predators, or both. The app allowed for videos perceived as controversial, even incendiary to circulate on its platform.
In the future, the government choose to try to take the app down due to them believing children were in danger of having their data used and sold by another foreign government. The government however didn't use the argument that the app facilitated a questionable algorithm. If they had actually cared about children being in danger they would have seen the obvious issues with the algorithm willing to push videos that could actually endanger children, instead of worrying if the child was being introduced to propaganda against their country in favor of foreign ones. If the government was actually paying attention to what children were doing on the app they would have gotten the results they wished for, though they can still use that premise of the algorithm for every social media platform in existence.
The creator had even believed that since he was a kid whatever videos he posted should be held with the standard that it shouldn't be able to be viewed as suggestive but he was wrong. Some humans triple down on things that are illogical.
At the end of the day the trend of users posting suggestive content played on, only continuing to generate cursed interactions.
Albeit, your gonna have to catch this stray because, there is a reason why the video was able to push through my algorithm in the first place, that being because I am gay.
While I never referred to myself like that really, it is still true.
However, I couldn't use that instance for the project but I could mention the dead kid as the premise for it though. While the two don't correlate, both were still manipulated. Even though one perceived himself as not being manipulated he kept doing things that only someone manipulated would do.