Two Videos, Two Standards
Two videos circulated online this week. The first showed a Nigerian pastor walking into the sea, attempting to part it in the manner described in the Book of Exodus. The attempt failed, the man got wet, the clip went viral. The second was a post by a Polish-language account with the username sknerus_, asking how one could respect people who, the account wrote, "come from a foreign country, block someone's place and behave like animals." Both pieces of content circulated widely. Only one was treated as entertainment.
The contrast is not accidental. The same media ecosystem that packaged the pastor's failure as feel-good content — an eccentric doing something strange and harmless, a curiosity to scroll past — processed the sknerus_ account's framing with considerably less friction. The dehumanisation of a group of human beings, described as animals and as an occupation of someone else's space, moved through the same feeds with less friction, less condemnation, and less collective reckoning about what it actually represents. That asymmetry deserves examination.
The pastor video performs a function for its Western audience that has precedent in how missionary-era media framed African spiritual practice: as spectacle to be marvelled at, corrected, or consumed as a curiosity with no real stakes attached. The anti-migrant rhetoric from the Polish account describes a political programme in miniature. Dehumanising language — calling human beings animals, framing their arrival as an invasion of someone else's space — has documented consequences. Across migration corridors from the Mediterranean to the Belarusian border to the Channel, such framing has been traced by researchers and humanitarian organisations to real-world policy decisions and violence. The language does not stay online. It migrates into political movements, into legislation, into border operations, into boats that sink because the people on board have been categorised in advance as less than human.
The question is not whether the pastor video is harmless — it clearly is, in the narrow sense. The question is why the sknerus_ account's language, which is not harmless by any reasonable measure, received less friction in the same information environment. There is no satisfying answer to that question, only a pattern that repeats across platforms and across years. Content that fits existing hierarchies of attention travels easily. Content that names the violence embedded in nationalist rhetoric faces a harder path to the same audiences.
The structural pattern is not new. What changed is the distribution mechanism. Missionary-era media made spectacles of African spiritual practice and called it civilization-building. Contemporary algorithms make spectacles of African spectacle and call it engagement. The sknerus_ account makes no spectacle of anything — it simply describes, in plain language, a political vision: these people are animals, they do not belong, they are taking something that is ours. That vision has currency. It circulates in comment sections, in campaign leaflets, in party political broadcasts, in the rhetoric of governments across the continent. It has produced policy. It has produced deaths. It travels quietly because it is not new, because it fits, because the infrastructure of attention was built to amplify it.
The pastor video and the sknerus_ posts are not equivalent objects. One shows a man waist-deep in water, producing nothing of consequence. The other shows a person describing a group of human beings as animals entering a foreign country to block someone's space. The algorithm cannot tell the difference — engagement is engagement, and both were engaged with. But the human consequences are not symmetrical, and it is worth asking why that asymmetry persists even as the platforms that host it insist, in their public communications, that they take the harms of dehumanising speech seriously.
The answer, such as it is, lies in the architecture: the systems that curate what rises and what sinks are optimised for attention, not for harm. The pastor's failure draws a laugh. The sknerus_ account draws followers, shapes opinion, and goes to work on the political landscape with no equivalent backlash. That is not a failure of individual platforms alone — it is the output of an information environment that has not been forced to confront what it amplifies and why. The question is what it will take to change that calculation, and whether the harm has to get considerably larger before the answer changes.