Tikvah
Editors’ Pick

December 9, 2025

Nick Fuentes’s Manufactured Virality

“The most troubling part is how quickly major institutions treated the artificial signal as authentic.”

Journalists tend to spend a lot of time on social media, especially on X or its imitators, and are thus susceptible to having their perceptions of what opinions are popular skewed by these platforms. Drawing on crucial research done by the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), Colin Wright explains how deliberate distortion of online metrics helped Nick Fuentes achieve notoriety: 

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