🇦🇷 The hate against Messi came out of nowhere, and it has nothing to do with football. Here's what's actually going on... Messi lifted the World Cup in December 2022 and the entire planet lost its mind celebrating. Three and a half years later, a chunk of the internet suddenly decided he's a villain. Nothing on the pitch changed. Same guy, same career, twenty years of footage anyone can check in under a minute. What changed is the feed. Villain edits started outperforming legend edits and the algorithm noticed. A 2018 MIT study tracked 126,000 claims across 3 million X users. False stories spread six times faster than true ones and got retweeted 70% more often. Outrage simply beats accuracy at getting attention. None of this needs a single big lie either. Illusory truth effect: see a claim enough times and it starts feeling true even when you know it's false, and the effect survives fact checks. Football is basically the most documented thing on earth. Every match, every angle, every ref decision, all archived. The narrative still won anyway. If the algorithm can flip public opinion on the most watched athlete alive, it can flip it on anyone with no footage to fall back on. Source: @LeoMessiFanZone, @therosieum / Writer: Sol