Spoiled Beef: Why Online Conflict is a Long-Term Problem for Artists

Random Notes 24 Comments


Editor’s Note: This op/ed is authored by David Macias, Co-Founder and President of the music distribution and label services company Thirty Tigers. He is the author of the upcoming book Circulation: How Culture Moves in the Age of Algorithm to be released on January 14th, 2027.

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It’s hard not to notice a growing trend in our sawdust-covered corner of the world. Not long ago, fights on social media were fairly rare. It felt like something that happened around the music, and not instead of it. An artist got into it with a critic or a rival, fans argued about it for a week, then everyone moved on. Today, the fight often is the release. Artists pick fights, bait their comment sections, and stir up controversy with the same care they once devoted to their music. The conflict isn’t happening organically. They’re doing it on purpose.

It’s not hard to see why. A research team led by researchers William Brady (Northwestern) and Molly Crockett (Princeton) found that posts using angry, moralizing language get shared about 20 percent more often than more sedate posts.

We also now know platforms reward this kind of content on purpose, or at least do nothing to mitigate the outrage. Internal Facebook documents, made public by whistleblower Frances Haugen in 2021, showed that a 2018 project meant to boost interaction between friends and family wound up rewarding outrage and pushed more “conflict as content” to the top of people’s feeds. Whether Facebook consciously leaned into that strategy or not, it drove virality, so the new protocol stayed.

There’s a reason this works on us so reliably. Human attention didn’t evolve to reward what’s good for us. It evolved to keep us alive, and for most of human history, noticing a threat fast was the difference between surviving and not. A missed threat could cost you your life. The brain therefore got wired to weigh bad news, danger, and conflict more heavily than good news, safety, or harmony. This feature kept our ancestors alive on the savanna.

We are hardwired to respond more viscerally to conflict. The trouble is that the same wiring doesn’t know the difference between a real threat and a staged one on a phone screen, and so that 20 percent effect that researchers Brady and Crockett identified gets activated. A feud in a comment section lights up the same alarm system as a genuine danger, and the algorithm responds because the combatants and social media companies both want that 20 percent uptick, so they amplify the outrage, real or manufactured.

This has spawned its own genre of content where YouTubers punch people, scare people, or make advances to the significant others of unwitting participants in the “prank.” A 2026 study by Dr. Nicholas John (University of Manchester) and Dr. CJ Reynolds (University of Copenhagen) studied creators who stage conflict on purpose, then frame themselves as the one in the right.

They call the result “accountability entertainment”: content that looks like justice being served, but just stages a fight for an audience, with no real consequences once the camera’s off. The goal was never to fix anything. The goal was to be watched.

For an artist, this makes short-term sense. A song can take months to write, and breaking through the algorithmic mire is hard. A public feud lands, metastasizes, and gets pushed by the same algorithm that’s ignoring the song. If the goal is to be seen, conflict is just the cheapest, most logical thing you can make.

But the real numbers now show what conflict costs the artists doing it. A 2024 study from a collective of researchers from Dubai titled “Beyond the Filter: Impact of Popularity on the Mental Health of Social Media Influencers” found that creators who spend more time on social media report more anxiety and emotional exhaustion.

A larger 2025 survey by Creators 4 Mental Health, covering more than 500 creators, found 62 percent reporting burnout and 65 percent reporting anxiety or depression tied directly to their work. It didn’t get better over time, and in fact, it got worse the longer someone stayed in the business. Most troubling is that one in ten creators reported thinking about suicide, roughly double the rate of the general public.

I don’t mean to be dramatic about this last point, but I sincerely worry that self-harm may come from creators living in a state of perpetual conflict, either real or manufactured.

Sherry Turkle, the MIT psychologist, has spent decades studying what technology does to identity. In her book Alone Together, Turkle argues that social media pushes people toward a curated, performed version of themselves. It’s a version built for an audience, not a real one. That performance takes work to maintain, and it pulls people further from honest connection even as it looks like connection. A manufactured feud is a perfect example of what Turkle’s talking about.

It’s not really the artist; it’s a character built to get a reaction. Keeping that character alive, post after post, is exhausting in a way that’s different from simply being famous or having strong opinions. It’s the work of constantly performing a self that isn’t really you.

A 2023 report commissioned by the UK Musicians Union showed that musicians reported 30% negative mental wellbeing, with 42% reporting considering leaving the music industry altogether to protect their mental wellbeing. This compares to a reported rate of 22% in the general population, according to an NHS study conducted at the same time.

Though difficult working conditions and concerns about pay are cited (musicians are not the only ones who experience those, by the way), one can’t help but to wonder if the sustained cleavage between a curated self and the authentic self isn’t at least somewhat responsible for musicians reporting a 36% higher rate of incidence in mental health concerns.

And it’s not just artists paying for this. Audiences are paying too, just more quietly.

Researchers call it outrage fatigue. Researcher William Brady has found that the first time people see something outrageous, they genuinely want to act. But after repeated exposure, that impulse turns into exhaustion, then into checking out completely. That’s the same negativity-bias wiring from earlier, just running on the person scrolling instead of the person posting. An alarm system built for occasional real danger is left switched on by a social media feed that never runs out of things to be agitated about.

A 2026 survey of doomscrollers found that after long stretches of scrolling, less than three percent of people said they felt happy or content afterward, while more than half described feeling burned out, drained, or unable to focus. The audience isn’t being fed by this content. It’s being worn down by it, one scrape at a time.

The clinical name for the deeper version of this pattern is emotional numbing. It shows up in trauma research, because it’s the same wiring. When a person is exposed to threat over and over, whether real or manufactured, the brain protects itself by feeling less. Not just less anger or fear, but less of everything, including the joy that comes from hearing an artist’s music. They are less equipped to build the deep emotional connections that sustain long-term careers.

The system built to protect you from pain ends up taking the good stuff with it. The artist producing conflict is more anxious, more burned out, and less sure of their own worth. The audience consuming it is more fatigued, more checked out, and slowly less able to feel much of anything about what comes next, good or bad.

Nobody built this system to hurt everyone in it. It happened because a fight is easy to measure and a real relationship with a fan base isn’t, and our economy is structured for short-term gain, not long-term value. A numbed-out audience can’t be moved by much of anything, and an artist who spent everything fighting for attention often finds that, once they’ve got it, they’ve lost the thing they needed it for in the first place.

Something to think about for both artists and readers of Saving Country Music: next time you are engaging in or responding to a beef, understand that real damage is being done. Let us instead think about the great Dolly Parton, who told stories that emanated from telling the truth of her experience and community, and if she had an enemy in this world – well, that would be news to me.


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Pre-Order Circulation: How Culture Moves in the Age of Algorithm by David Macias.

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