Twisted Media Perception Leads to Birth of “Digital Cults”

A Fall in Trust

As the media landscape’s shift from traditional mass media to the internet accelerates, we have reached an age when internet discourse is having a powerful impact on politics. One factor in that is the spread of “hostile media perception.”

Hostile media perception is a form of cognitive bias when partisan audiences are convinced that any media reports that contradict their beliefs are themselves biased. My company JX Press and Japanese election news site Senkyo Dot Com carry out a monthly survey of voter opinions, including a question gauging agreement with the statement, “Information reported by television and newspapers is generally untrustworthy.” In the February survey, a full 52% responded that they “strongly agree” or “somewhat agree.”

Agreement here is a strong indicator of hostile media perception. Just a few years ago, the percentage of voters who agreed hovered between 30% and around 40%. Now, the number has risen to over half.

Behind that rise seems to be an increase in wide-reaching influencers and politicians taking to social media and YouTube to criticize the mass media and spread exactly that idea. Indeed, a detailed analysis of the survey data shows that people with a strong tendency toward hostile media perception also tend to spend more time on sites like YouTube and X to find information about politics and society. That inevitably leads to their placing greater trust in the views of influencers who constantly bash the mainstream media, than in the media’s own reporting.

A New Media Era

These are days where anyone can become a content creator, an age of a million media channels. In the face of this creator diversity, traditional media has lost the overwhelming influence it once had in shaping public opinion.

Article 4 of Japan’s Broadcasting Act states that television broadcasts “must be politically fair,” but of course reporting is the product of human work, meaning that it is impossible to produce truly unbiased news reporting that all would call objective and impartial. And so, as we see this massive explosion in reporting sources, television stations feel forced to choose what they report based on perceived news value. That leaves an opening for viewers to spot what they feel is bias. This system has resulted in a situation where news is wide open to criticism, particularly that of arbitrariness in choosing what stories are considered newsworthy.

Even so, traditional media is built on institutional journalism, which is structured around verifying facts before reporting them. There can be no doubt that, in that particular point, it provides far superior reporting quality than all the countless influencers.

Compare that to the tendency of influencers to spread misinformation and misunderstanding, with many never offering up corrections or retractions. Still, when viewers tend to prefer consuming shared opinions over facts, no one seems to care much about this imbalance. And so we get this irrational growth in hostile media perception.

Recently, we have even seen influencers who intentionally use this psychological tendency for their own benefit.

They use headlines designed to appeal to hostile media perception, like “Telling you what the mass media won’t!” or “The unreported truth!” to spread baseless misinformation about topics of public concern, like the assassination of former Prime Minister Abe Shinzō, the coronavirus vaccine, or conspiracy theories about the Ministry of Finance. Another common thread is making posts that utterly lack factual basis, such as criticizing opposing politicians for comments they never made.

Worries About the Wider Impact

The unseen hand spreading this information is the platform algorithm, which only recommends posts that match the users’ existing opinions. Users end up part of a crowd trapped in a massive echo chamber. Then, when the influencers leading that crowd spread insidious attacks on those with other viewpoints, or on the media itself, the crowd rallies behind them in a greater frenzy. Truly, the term “dog whistle” is apt.

Mental health professional and academic Steven Hassan offers up a model of authoritarian control shared by many modern cults that he calls BITE, standing for Behavior, Information, Thought, and Emotion. Key elements are minimizing access to outside information and emotional control through a rejection of external criticism based on values that the group is good and outsiders are bad.

This model bears a striking resemblance to the methods of influencers who develop their business by targeting groups through hostile media perception and conspiracy theories. They create massive echo chambers within a digital information space, which naturally cuts off other information sources. They then control their crowd and use it to attack critics, ending up with what can only be called a “digital cult.”

Humans are prisoners of confirmation bias, the need to continue to believe what they already believe. These digital cults are born from a synergy of human psychology and technology, so there seems to be no end in sight to their continued growth. But we can take action to ensure we are not swallowed up ourselves.

The first step is to avoid consuming reports based on personal comfort and their proximity to our opinions, and then seek to separate fact from opinion and consider the information’s reliability when we use it. That would seem to be the decisive point.

(Originally published in Japanese on March 21, 2026. Banner photo © Pixta.)