Personality Tests and the Downfall of Democracy
In 2001, I found a way to make personality tests go viral. In 2016, they were used to swing an election.
1. Trolling for fun and profit
Seventeen years ago, weblogs and social networks — what we’d eventually know as social media — were beginning to emerge. Giving everybody the ability to publish was still revolutionary, but not everybody was ready to create their own content from scratch. Writing a whole blog post, or uploading an original photo, was a high barrier to entry: an article could take hours or days, and not everybody had the skills or technology to take a beautiful digital photograph.
Memes were a neat solution: you clicked a few buttons, and suddenly had customized content to share on your blog. Correspondingly, weblogs began to fill up with dumb Cosmopolitan-style personality tests: What kind of girlfriend are you? Which Care Bear are you? Infuriated by the banality, I created a sort of parody, Which horrible affliction are you?, that deliberately trolled the blogosphere by allowing bloggers to declare themselves to be rickets or plague — and almost instantly became the most shared content online. I told the whole story in We Are the Monkeys of Rum.