Mind Control: Duncan Trussell On How Social Media Algorithms Weaponize Trauma
Duncan Trussell tells Theo Von why the horrifying stuff the algorithm feeds you is not an accident, and explains what it does to your brain.
It starts with the phone in your hand.
Duncan Trussell tells Theo Von why the horrifying stuff the algorithm feeds you is not an accident, and explains what it does to your brain.
— The Vigilant Fox 🦊 (@VigilantFox) July 11, 2026
It starts with the phone in your hand.
TRUSSELL: "All of us are staring into these hypno-rectangles. The algorithm, at least my… pic.twitter.com/bPMgRdUReZ
TRUSSELL: “All of us are staring into these hypno-rectangles. The algorithm, at least my algorithm, it’s showing me horrible things, people in the midst of psychotic episodes, people in the forest drinking their period blood.”
VON: “It’s crazy dude. They’re definitely scrambling our brains. Because you’ll see like, genocidal killings of children, right?”
VON: “But then immediately it’s like 40% off these ASICS. It starts to confuse your brain, because your brain takes the depth of one that’s so deep and one that means nothing at all, and puts them all in the same plane.”
Then Trussell takes it somewhere darker:
TRUSSELL: “Public assassinations create trauma. Cultural trauma.”
TRUSSELL: “Did you notice, the Charlie Kirk assassination, everyone saw it before they shut it down. All of us had to watch that s**t happen. This produces trauma. The trauma response opens you up to conditioning. It’s the same thing kidnappers use. It’s the same thing people who torture you use.
“They freak you the f**k out so that you disassociate. You don’t want to be there. You go into a sad, foggy place. And then in that place, they show you the ASICS commercial. In that place, they give you some propaganda. In that place, they give you a solution so this will never happen again. This is a known technique for mind-controlling people.”
TRUSSELL: “It’s not just a power dynamic shift, it’s a cultural dynamic shift. Because they inject that moment with however they want to shift the tide.”
VON: “Wow…”
TRUSSELL: “So, Instagram, or any social media, is kind of doing this, but low-level.”
VON: “Microdosing it.”
TRUSSELL: “Yeah.”
Once you see the sequence, you can’t unsee it.
Full episode:
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