# why everyone suddenly hates messi: a propaganda breakdown
**作者**: rosie
**日期**: 2026-07-20T19:52:06.000Z
**来源**: [https://x.com/therosieum/status/2079293289593741393](https://x.com/therosieum/status/2079293289593741393)
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in december 2022 the whole planet celebrated messi lifting the world cup. this summer everyone is calling him a cheat and a villain (well, mostly people who never watch football and teenagers).
i've watched football my whole life (so this is a sensitive topic to me), and i shape narratives for a living. marketing, positioning, making people feel things about things. i know what it costs to move public opinion, what the work looks like from the inside. this article is a breakdown: how these campaigns start, how they spread, why they work on your brain, and why the next one will run much faster.
## stage one: the flip
four years ago, almost the entire football world wanted messi to win the world cup. when he finally did, it felt like the perfect ending to one of the greatest careers the sport has ever seen.
four years later, social media has somehow turned him into the villain.
between then and now, almost nothing on the pitch really changed. the officiating is largely the same, the squad is mostly the same players, and messi is still the same guy playing the same football. almost every variable stayed constant, yet public opinion completely flipped.
the only thing that really changed was the distribution layer: the algorithms behind instagram and tiktok, and whatever decided that messi-as-villain edits perform better this cycle than messi-as-legend edits did last time.
## stage two: how a campaign starts
these things rarely start with an outright lie. they usually start with something real. a foul with the buildup cut out. a referee decision without the replay that explains it. a clip that's technically accurate, but missing just enough context to tell a completely different story.
then the algorithm takes over. thousands of versions compete for attention, the ones that get the most engagement survive, and everything else disappears. after a while, the surviving clips stop feeling like isolated moments and start becoming talking points. eventually, they become "common knowledge".
my friends who couldn't name a single midfielder suddenly hated messi around the same time.
one MIT study looked at around 126,000 claims shared by roughly 3 million people on twitter over an eleven-year period. across every category they studied, false stories spread farther, faster, deeper and more broadly than true ones. on average, the truth took about six times longer to reach 1,500 people, while falsehoods were 70% more likely to be retweeted.
it's not hard to see why. outrage, conflict and surprise are simply better at capturing attention than accuracy.
## stage three: the paid layer
a lot of what looks like organic fan content isn't actually organic.
i'm obviously not going to make allegations about who funds the current wave but something similar already happened to this exact player and there was a police raid about it:
on the other hand, meta has been publishing quarterly takedown reports on coordinated inauthentic behavior since 2017, removing tens of thousands of fake accounts, pages and groups at a time, and researchers recently mapped a single operation running nearly 1,500 fake accounts across facebook and x. from doing this professionally i can tell you coordinated narrative campaigns are a normal, boring line item: content calendars, editing teams, creator networks, seeded talking points. this is how products launch, how tokens pump, how reputations get built and unbuilt. sport was never exempt.
## stage four: why it works on your brain
back in 1922, walter lippmann argued in Public Opinion that people don't respond directly to reality. they respond to the "pictures in their heads." he was writing about newspapers. today those pictures are fifteen-second clips selected by algorithms.
psychologists call part of this the illusory truth effect, one of the most consistently replicated findings in psychology. studies have shown that simply seeing a claim once makes people more likely to judge it as true later, even if it's false. the effect can last for days, survives fact-check labels, and shows up even when the claim contradicts something people already know.
that's why these campaigns don't rely on a single viral edit. one clip rarely changes anyone's mind. dozens of similar clips, repeated over days or weeks, slowly become familiar. eventually they stop feeling like something you were told and start feeling like something you always believed. that's what makes them so effective.
## stage five: the control group
football is one of the few things that's almost perfectly documented. there are twenty years of matches, interviews and clips online. almost every claim people make can be checked in under a minute.
and yet, the narrative still beat the evidence.
that's what makes it so interesting. if public opinion can shift this dramatically around arguably the most documented footballer in history, imagine how much easier it is in areas where most people can't verify anything for themselves. politics, wars, markets, even health. in those cases, you're usually relying on someone else's version of events.
## stage six: the acceleration
everything above used to be expensive. running a narrative at scale meant studios, editors, media buys and distribution relationships. that's why this playbook mostly belonged to governments and large corporations.
that constraint is disappearing.
newsguard counted 49 AI-generated news sites in may 2023. by december there were 614. today they track more than 3,000 AI content farms, with hundreds more appearing every month.
now imagine the same playbook in a world where convincing edits cost almost nothing to make.
what used to take years can now happen in weeks, and soon probably days.
not worried about messi at all. he'll be fine. he has every trophy that matters and two decades of footage behind him.
what worries me is everything else. if the internet can reshape the reputation of arguably the most documented footballer in history, imagine what it can do in situations where there isn't twenty years of footage for people to check. politics, wars, business, or people you've never even heard of. in those cases, the narrative often becomes the only version most people ever see.
## 相关链接
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- [@therosieum](https://x.com/therosieum)
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- [3:52 AM · Jul 21, 2026](https://x.com/therosieum/status/2079293289593741393)
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*导出时间: 2026/7/22 08:58:31*
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## 中文翻译
# 为什么大家突然讨厌梅西：宣传攻势拆解
**作者**: rosie
**日期**: 2026-07-20T19:52:06.000Z
**来源**: [https://x.com/therosieum/status/2079293289593741393](https://x.com/therosieum/status/2079293289593741393)
---
2022年12月，全世界都在庆祝梅西举起大力神杯。而今年夏天，所有人都在称他为骗子和反派（好吧，主要是那些从不看足球的人和青少年们）。
我这一生都在看足球（所以这对我来说是个敏感话题），而且我的工作就是塑造叙事。营销、定位，让人们对外界事物产生某种感觉。我知道改变舆论需要付出什么代价，知道这背后的工作是怎样的。这篇文章是一次拆解：这些活动如何发起，如何传播，为什么它们能对你的大脑产生影响，以及为什么下一次活动会快得多。
## 第一阶段：反转
四年前，几乎整个足球世界都希望梅西赢得世界杯。当他终于如愿以偿时，感觉这就像是这项运动史上最伟大的职业生涯之一迎来了完美的结局。
四年后，社交媒体不知怎么把他变成了反派。
从那时到现在，球场上的情况几乎没有什么真正的改变。判罚大体相同，阵容里也大多是相同的球员，梅西还是那个人，踢着同样的足球。几乎每一个变量都保持不变，然而舆论却完全反转了。
唯一真正改变的是分发层：Instagram和TikTok背后的算法，以及那些决定在这个周期里“梅西作为反派”的剪辑比上一次“梅西作为传奇”的剪辑表现更好的决策机制。
## 第二阶段：活动如何开始
这些事情很少以彻头彻尾的谎言开始。它们通常始于某些真实的事情。一段剪去了进攻过程的犯规视频。一段没有解释原因的裁判判罚。一段技术上准确但恰好缺少足够语境、从而讲述了一个完全不同故事的剪辑。
然后算法接管了一切。成千上万个版本争夺注意力，那些获得最多互动的存活了下来，其余的则消失了。过了一段时间，存活的剪辑不再感觉像是孤立的瞬间，而是开始变成谈资。最终，它们变成了“常识”。
我那些连一个中场球员名字都叫不上来的朋友，几乎在同一时间突然开始讨厌梅西。
麻省理工学院的一项研究调查了大约300万人在11年期间在Twitter（推特）上分享的约12.6万条声明。在他们研究的每个类别中，虚假故事都比真实故事传播得更远、更快、更深、更广。平均而言，真相触达1500人所需的时间大约是虚假消息的六倍，而假消息被转发的可能性要高出70%。
原因不难看出。比起准确性，愤怒、冲突和惊讶在捕捉注意力方面简直技高一筹。
## 第三阶段：付费层
许多看起来像自然产出的粉丝内容，实际上并不是自然生成的。
我显然不会去指控谁资助了当前的这一波浪潮，但类似的事情已经发生在同一位球员身上，并且还因此引发了警方突击搜查：
另一方面，自2017年以来，Meta一直在发布关于协同造假行为的季度删除报告，每次删除数以万计的虚假账户、页面和群组，研究人员最近还绘制了一个在Facebook和X上运营近1500个虚假账户的单个行动。从专业角度来看，我可以告诉你，协同叙事活动是常规、无聊的项目：内容日历、剪辑团队、创作者网络、植入的谈资。这就是产品发布的方式，是代币拉盘的方式，是名声建立和被摧毁的方式。体育界从未被豁免。
## 第四阶段：为什么它对你的大脑有效
早在1922年，沃尔特·李普曼在《公众舆论》中就提出，人们并不直接对现实做出反应。他们是对“脑海中的画面”做出反应。他写的是报纸。今天，这些画面是由算法挑选的15秒剪辑。
心理学家将这种现象的一部分称为“虚幻真相效应”，这是心理学中复制性最高的发现之一。研究表明，仅仅是看到一项声明一次，就会让人在后来更有可能判断它是真的，即使它是假的。这种效应可以持续数天，能挺过事实核查标签，甚至当该声明与人们已知的事实相矛盾时也会出现。
这就是为什么这些活动不依赖于单个病毒式传播的剪辑。一个剪辑很少能改变任何人的想法。几十个类似的剪辑，在几天或几周内重复出现，慢慢变得熟悉。最终，它们不再感觉像是别人告诉你的事情，而是开始感觉像是你一直相信的事情。这就是它们如此有效的原因。
## 第五阶段：对照组
足球是几乎被完美记录的少数事物之一。网上有二十年的比赛、采访和剪辑。人们做出的几乎每一项声明都可以在一分钟内得到核实。
然而，叙事还是战胜了证据。
这正是它如此有趣的原因。如果公众舆论在围绕可以说是历史上被记录得最详尽的足球运动员时都能发生如此剧烈的转变，想象一下在大多数人都无法亲自核实任何事情的领域，这该有多容易。政治、战争、市场，甚至是健康。在那些情况下，你通常依赖的是别人提供的版本。
## 第六阶段：加速
以上所有事情过去都很昂贵。大规模开展叙事活动意味着需要工作室、剪辑师、媒体购买和分发关系。这就是为什么这种策略主要属于政府和大公司。
这种限制正在消失。
NewsGuard在2023年5月统计了49个人工智能生成的新闻网站。到了12月，这一数字变成了614个。如今他们追踪超过3000个人工智能内容农场，而且每个月还会新增数百家。
现在想象一下，在一个制作令人信服的剪辑几乎不需要任何成本的世界里，运用同样的策略会怎样。
过去需要几年时间才能发生的事情，现在几周内就能发生，而且很可能很快只需要几天。
一点也不为梅西担心。他会没事的。他拥有所有重要的奖杯，还有二十年的影像资料作为支撑。
我担心的是其他一切事情。如果互联网能够重塑可以说是历史上被记录得最详尽的足球运动员的名誉，想象一下在没有二十年影像资料供人们查证的情况下，它能做些什么。政治、战争、商业，或者你甚至从未听说过的人。在那些情况下，叙事往往变成了大多数人唯一能看到的版本。
## 相关链接
- [rosie](https://x.com/therosieum)
- [@therosieum](https://x.com/therosieum)
- [13M](https://x.com/therosieum/status/2079293289593741393/analytics)
- [Upgrade to Premium](https://x.com/i/premium_sign_up)
- [3:52 AM · Jul 21, 2026](https://x.com/therosieum/status/2079293289593741393)
- [13.4M Views](https://x.com/therosieum/status/2079293289593741393/analytics)
- [View quotes](https://x.com/therosieum/status/2079293289593741393/quotes)
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*导出时间: 2026/7/22 08:58:31* 
