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.

My content was more viral for two reasons:

1. People really did prefer to post pre-made content than go through the time and effort of creating their own.
2. I trolled hard. A potential answer in Which evil criminal are you? was President Truman for dropping the atomic bomb. The resulting, often outrage-driven, conversation across blogs and Livejournal helped spread my links better than the content itself.

Over time, social media switched to concentrate on Twitter and Facebook, and my own interest waned in favor of other projects. The site was sold for a modest sum and we all moved on with our lives. Today, I support media startups that have the potential to create a more informed, inclusive, and empathetic society through Matter.

In particular, because modern social networks didn’t allow you to post HTML, building an adequate sharing mechanism for personality tests became more complicated. For real customization, you would…