Algorithm Doesn't Care
- 897124839
- 1月18日
- 讀畢需時 7 分鐘
已更新：6天前
Name：Ma Wei
Student number: 2341798
The sea breeze of Sanya has long since dispersed the shadow of that young boy, but the pain left by Liu Xuezhou seems never to have truly faded from the fabric of the internet. When that 15-year-old boy wrote in his ten-thousand-word suicide note, "Born light, returning clean," he was facing tens of thousands of malicious private messages from strangers. We thought that the loss of a vibrant life would be enough to awaken the online space. But three years have passed, and today, after the Liu Xuezhou case, we sorrowfully discover that not only has the tide of cyberbullying not subsided, but under the impetus of some invisible force, it has become even more ferocious and unpredictable.
A Random Nightmare
"I even doubted myself over this matter. Was I really being too nosy? But I'm certain it was just a casual remark to myself, not directed at anyone, let alone attacking anyone. I just thought it was wasteful."
Xiao Qiao (pseudonym), who lives in Xiamen, still doesn't dare open the message notifications on her social media. She's not an influencer, nor an opinion leader—just an ordinary working woman.
The nightmare began with a casual browse a few days ago. Xiao Qiao came across a video of a merchant packing goods for shipping. To prevent the package from getting damaged in transit, the merchant had wrapped the corners of the shipping box directly with brand-new sanitary pads. Out of instinctive regret, Xiao Qiao commented under the video: "Isn't this wasteful?"
Just several words, yet they detonated an incomprehensible wave of malice.That day, Xiao Qiao's phone exploded. Messages flooded into her comment section like a tidal wave. At first came rebuttals, which quickly escalated into insults and personal attacks. "What kind of saint are you pretending to be?" "They paid for it with their own money, what's it to you?" "We know you're poor"... These words shot at her like bullets. Some even clicked into her profile to attack her lifestyle habits.
My explanations, my responses—no one cared. They seemed unconscious, just attacking relentlessly. That overwhelming malice, as if I had committed some unforgivable crime.
The cyberbullying was like torrential rain, but even after the heavy rain stopped, the harm continued like drizzle—her heart always felt damp. To this day, she still finds it hard to recover. Whenever her phone notifications become slightly frequent, she experiences mechanical fear.
Cyberbullying Is Becoming Increasingly Frequent
Xiao Qiao's experience is not an isolated case. According to a China Youth Daily survey, among young people, as many as 65.3% of respondents said they had personally experienced or witnessed cyberbullying among friends around them. 71.9% of young respondents felt that cyberbullying was becoming more frequent.
Our investigation also shows that younger groups have a more sensitive and clearer perception of cyberbullying. We conducted a related survey based on Xiaohongshu (Little Red Book). In an "Anti-Cyberbullying Mutual Aid" group with 470 members, 80% were young people aged 18 to 32. In the "Initium Media" survey covering all age groups, the proportion of respondents who experienced cyberbullying was higher among those aged 26 to 35, with 512 people, accounting for 64.4% of the 795 victims. Among respondents aged 18 to 25, 283 people had experienced cyberbullying, accounting for 35.6% of victims.
This set of data directly refutes the wishful thinking that "cyberbullying is an isolated case"—in the current algorithmic environment, the vast majority of young people, due to their high-frequency use of social networks, are all exposed within the range of cyberbullying risks.
Cyberbullying has never been simply a few insults—62.8% of victims have suffered direct verbal attacks, 48.7% of victims face the risk of having their privacy exposed, 47.8% have had private conversations taken out of context and made public, and 37.9% are deeply troubled by false rumors. Cyberbullying is not just "cursing at people," but a combination punch that includes invasion of privacy and reputation destruction.
What deserves vigilance is long-term systematic cyberbullying. Although 62.1% of cyberbullying is "gust-like"—coming quickly and leaving quickly—19.9% of victims face continuous attacks for 2-4 weeks, 11.2% must endure harassment for 1-12 months, and 6.8% suffer cyberbullying for more than a year. This "long-term" harm is often overlooked by the public, but it causes the most severe psychological damage to victims and can easily lead to "social death."
In the Age of Algorithms, The Cost of Being Seen
Chu Yin, who provided expert legal opinions for the Liu Xuezhou case and is a famous debater on "U Can U Bibi," has firsthand experience with the spread of cyberbullying. As a verified account deeply mired in the vortex of cyberbullying for years, his observations point directly to the cruel truth of the algorithmic age:
Anyone can be a sacrificial object. You don't need to do anything wrong, or even take a stance. Just a common-sense question, once captured by the system and thrown into the emotional pool, can be dragged into the center of the arena and torn apart.
Behind this is the algorithm logic that prioritizes traffic above all, continuously spawning a vicious cycle of "cumulative radicalization," making "being seen" a heavy price that must be paid with dignity or even life.
"Being seen" was originally a universal value of the internet, but in the algorithm's traffic formula, it has mutated into a high-risk trap. The 15-year-old boy searching for his birth parents, Liu Xuezhou, whose simple plea "I want a home" was marked by the algorithm as a "point of controversy" and was labeled as an "ungrateful wretch" and "gold-digger" through manipulated public opinion. More than 2,000 malicious comments, through recommendation mechanisms, layered and accumulated, forming a public opinion storm of "cumulative radicalization"—each new insult gained higher exposure due to the amplification of previous traffic, each interaction feeding the algorithm's "bloodthirsty logic," ultimately pushing this young boy to the brink. For him, the cost of "being seen" was being completely torn apart in the emotional carnival dominated by algorithms.
Chu Yin believes that algorithms have eliminated rational bystanders, eliminated comprehensive voices, turning everyone into bloodthirsty gladiators. Psychological research has long confirmed that the interaction rate of radical emotions such as anger and mockery far exceeds that of rational expression—a moderate rational analysis may sink without a trace, while an extreme insult can gain thousands of likes. Algorithms precisely capture this traffic code and continuously reinforce radical signals through the "echo chamber effect": when you accidentally click on a critical video, the system immediately pushes more content of the same type with more intense language; when a certain viewpoint gains initial traffic, the algorithm prioritizes recommending more radical derivative comments, causing moderate voices to be quickly drowned out.
Under this mechanism of "traffic rewarding radicalism," the rationality of bystanders is continuously eroded. In order to gain the sense of existence of "being seen," many people actively join the radical camp, changing from "spectators" to "perpetrators." Each radical expression brings traffic feedback, which in turn spawns more extreme remarks, forming a closed loop of "cumulative radicalization."
Especially in the era of short video clips dominated by "traffic-only theory," those who capture emotions capture traffic. So, when rational expression cannot receive the favor of traffic, but radical remarks can gain algorithmic preference, the online space degenerates into an arena without rules. When emotion replaces content as the norm on the internet, when the cost of "being seen" becomes unbearably high, shouldn't we ask platforms: should algorithms serve people, or should people pay for traffic?
Algorithms Are Written by People, Why Can't They Be Changed?
Why did victim Xiao Qiao's simple phrase "isn't this wasteful" attract such great hatred, and what is the underlying logic behind it? Can platforms adjust algorithms to protect these victims? With these questions, we found Zhang Tao (pseudonym), an expert who worked at top internet companies such as ByteDance for many years and now focuses on new media algorithm research.
In the eyes of algorithms, there is no right or wrong view of waste versus conservation, nor a value judgment of good versus bad. Algorithms are just algorithms, with data performance as the only measurement standard.
Zhang Tao analyzed Xiao Qiao's case: sanitary pads are highly bound to women's topics and are themselves highly sensitive, high-traffic keywords on the internet, often accompanied by gender issues and emotional controversies. This leads to a vicious cycle: algorithmic mechanisms are unconsciously amplifying and breeding cyberbullying.
Can't this set of algorithms be changed? During the interview, Zhang Tao mentioned the two words "profit" and "cost" six times. Obviously, he wanted to tell us that algorithms have only one core driving force—profit.
We found Kuaishou platform's third-quarter 2025 financial report:
In the third quarter of 2025, Kuaishou's total revenue was 35.554 billion yuan.
The largest source of revenue was online marketing services, which reached 20.1 billion yuan in the third quarter, a year-on-year increase of 14%, accounting for nearly 60% of total revenue.
Live streaming business is the second largest revenue segment and also Kuaishou's traditional strength, with 9.6 billion yuan in revenue in the third quarter.
Online marketing and live streaming account for 83% of revenue. We must pay special attention to the fact that these two sectors are essentially attention businesses, both highly dependent on traffic in online services. To maintain this profit, to maintain this attention business, Kuaishou needs to maintain 416 million daily active users, which means keeping nearly half of Chinese internet users using Kuaishou every day. Maintaining such a huge data set obviously cannot be achieved through rationality and science, so algorithms must harvest emotional traffic.
Clearly, in the face of the reality driven by profit and data, capital will not bow its proud head—at least not for human lives. Without strong regulation, without penalties that make capital pay a sufficient price, never expect algorithms to voluntarily improve. In the eyes of capital, no matter how great the harm of cyberbullying, it cannot match the beauty of numbers on financial reports—just like behind Kuaishou's 35.5 billion quarterly revenue and 20.1 billion marketing income lies the entire secret of why algorithms refuse to change.
In the age of algorithms, cyberbullying no longer requires a reason, no longer requires you to actually do anything wrong. You only need to say one sentence that happens to touch the "emotional switch" set by the system, and you may be thrown into the abyss. This unpredictability may be the most terrifying thing.
The governance of cyberbullying is a game between people and greed, between people and technology. If we don't use regulation and law to set red lines for capital, then capital's fangs will continue to devour one Liu Xuezhou life after another with bloodthirsty algorithms, sacrificing one Xiao Qiao's dream after another.
Work Division
Ma Wei
Interview and filming of the protagonist Xiao Qiao’s story
Writing script
Editing and packaging of the final video
Writing of the final draft of investigative report
Lv Jiaxin
Preliminary research、Make a presentation PPT
Writing script
Filming of the segments featuring Chu Yin and Zhang Tao
Writing of the first draft investigative report
留言