The mechanism is ancient, and its effectiveness has never depended on truth. A community disturbed by a crisis it cannot name converges, sooner or later, on a person or a group it expels in order to recover a peace that, in reality, never resolved anything at its root. The philosopher René Girard described this process half a century ago under the name of the scapegoat mechanism, and explained why it works even when the victim is innocent. What Girard could not anticipate was the speed at which social media would industrialise that mechanism, nor the fact that someone, somewhere along the chain, collects a fee for every accusation that goes viral. This essay takes up Girard’s anatomy of sacrifice to ask a question classical anthropology never asked, who profits when the crowd decides, once again, that it has found its culprit.
The desire that manufactures rivals
Girard began from a simple observation, disturbing precisely because of its simplicity. We do not desire objects for themselves, we desire them because someone else desires them first. He called this phenomenon mimetic desire, the human tendency to copy other people’s desires rather than invent our own. The problem is not the object but the model who desires it, because sooner or later the imitator begins to see a rival in his model, and the rival begins, in turn, to imitate the hostility of the one who copied him.
That reciprocity produces what Girard called mimetic doubles, adversaries who become indistinguishable from one another insofar as each does only what the other has already done. The hierarchies that once ordered a community dissolve under the weight of that symmetry. There is no longer any above or below, only two camps mutually copying each other’s resentment. Girard called this stage the mimetic crisis, the moment when reciprocal violence threatens to destroy the entire social fabric because no one remembers any longer what the original grievance was.
Oedipus is found guilty of the plague ravaging Thebes not because he actually committed the crimes attributed to him, but because a city in crisis needs to place upon someone the weight of a disorder it cannot otherwise explain. Rome, according to its own founding story, is built on the murder of Remus by his twin brother, a mimetic double by definition, chosen ahead of any other possible rival. Western civilisation repeats this structure with such constant regularity that it has ceased to be perceived as structure, and has begun to be perceived as nature.
Girard devoted much of his later work to the European witch hunts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which he read as an almost textbook repetition of the same script, communities struck by famine, epidemic or religious war that found in an unmarried, elderly or simply different neighbour the body on which to unload an anguish no secular court knew how to explain otherwise. Historians estimate between 40,000 and 60,000 executions over that period, more than three quarters of them women, on charges no judge would have upheld in calmer times. The Trier trials alone, in what is now Germany, killed some 386 people within a few short years, among the largest peacetime mass executions in European history. The exact figure matters less than the pattern, the crisis always precedes the victim, never the reverse.
What is new is not the mechanism, it is its speed of execution. A study published in 2017 in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, replicated since on various platforms, measured with precision something intuition already suspected, moral outrage spreads faster than any other type of content on social media.
A study by Brady, Wills, Jost, Tucker and Van Bavel, published in 2017 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that adding a single moral-emotional word to a message increases its expected retweet rate by up to 24%, a pattern since confirmed by further studies across multiple platforms.
The victim need not be guilty
Girard called méconnaissance, a French term he preferred never quite to translate, the collective blindness that allows the mechanism to work. The community that expels its victim does not experience that act as arbitrary but as necessary, even sacred. No one asks whether the victim deserves the punishment, because the question itself has already been settled in advance by the urgency of the crisis. What is needed is not a true culprit, it is an available one.
Availability follows its own rules, almost always the same throughout history. The ideal victim is recognisable, marked by some visible difference, outside the core of the group that singles her out, and above all unable to defend herself on equal terms. A foreigner, a dissident, someone whose conduct already aroused suspicion before the incident that finally set things off. On today’s social media, this selection happens in minutes, not generations. A screenshot circulates, a comment is lifted out of context, and the digital community converges on a name following the same sacrificial logic Girard described in societies that had never heard of the internet.
Girard called these traits victimary signs, markers that have nothing to do with actual guilt but that steer the community’s choice, extreme poverty or extreme wealth, a visible disability, a different accent, a biography that already drew comment before the episode that triggers the accusation. None of these signs proves anything. All of them make it easier to find, quickly, a body on which the crowd can agree without negotiating.
What is most disturbing about the mechanism is not its cruelty, it is its efficiency. The first accusation is the hardest to make because it has no model, no one has made it before. The second is already easier, and the hundredth barely requires any effort, because by then reality itself has reorganised around the victim’s presumed guilt. There is no longer any need to check anything. It is enough to join in.
Who profits from outrage
This is where a strictly anthropological reading of Girard begins to fall short. His theory explains why a community needs a scapegoat to restore a unity it perceives as threatened, but it does not explain who now runs the platform on which that ritual is carried out, nor who benefits from collective attention staying fixed on an individual culprit rather than examining the structural causes of the crisis that produced him.
The answer is less mysterious than the mechanism itself would like us to believe. The platforms on which contemporary pile-ons unfold are not neutral spaces, they are businesses whose revenue model depends directly on how long a user stays outraged in front of a screen. The longer the pursuit of the designated victim lasts, the more advertising sells around it. Scandal does not interrupt the business, it feeds it, and it feeds it better than any other content. The advantage of moralised outrage over an ordinary scandal, documented by the same Rathje study already cited, lies in its recurrence, an ordinary viral episode burns out within days, whereas the hunt for a culprit identified with an enemy side can be reactivated indefinitely against the same name. And the business, in turn, has owners with names and surnames.
According to a report by the non-governmental organisation Oxfam, published in January 2026 to coincide with the World Economic Forum in Davos, the world’s billionaires now own more than half of the leading media companies, while their combined wealth reached a historic high of $18.3 trillion, 81% more than in 2020.
Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Patrick Soon-Shiong and France’s Vincent Bolloré are named by Oxfam among the owners of that media concentration, a list that grows every year without existing regulatory initiatives having managed to reverse the trend. The same report calculates that a billionaire today is four thousand times more likely than an ordinary citizen to hold political office. The class that owns the infrastructure on which the scapegoat is judged is, often, the same class whose economic decisions generated the original crisis that the disoriented community ended up projecting onto another body.
The very witch hunt Girard analyses as an archetypal case coincided, the historian Silvia Federici argues, with the phase of primitive accumulation of European capitalism, the enclosure of common land and the forced discipline of a workforce that had to learn to sell its time. Federici argues that persecuting the women who administered reproductive and communal knowledge outside wage control was not a side effect of the period’s religious crisis, but a condition of possibility for the new economic order. It is a thesis debated among historians, but its underlying logic coincides exactly with the one proposed here, the choice of victim is rarely neutral with regard to the material order the crisis threatens.
This does not mean there is a deliberate conspiracy, a secret committee deciding each week whom to sacrifice. Girard was right about something essential, the mechanism works precisely because no one consciously directs it. What has changed is not the intention but the infrastructure, and the infrastructure, unlike mimetic desire, does have an owner.
The freedom not to point the finger
No society has ever fully managed to dispense with the reflex of seeking a culprit when the complexity of a crisis exceeds its capacity to understand it. Replacing the difficult question, what combination of decisions and structures produced this disorder, with the easy question, who must pay for it, remains the most travelled shortcut in human history. Democracies are not meaningfully distinguished from one another by having outgrown that ancient reflex, they are distinguished by the discipline with which they resist it.
That discipline is not free. Investigating structural causes takes time, requires accepting that the likely explanation will not fit in a headline or a viral post, requires giving up the immediate satisfaction of having finally found a face on which to place collective blame. Pointing the finger at a culprit is, by contrast, instant and gratifying, and now profitable too for whoever owns the platform on which the pointing takes place.
Towards the end of his work, Girard reached a conclusion that unsettles his religious readers as much as his materialist ones. He argued that the Gospels, unlike classical myth, do not conceal the victim’s innocence but display it, Christ is presented explicitly as a scapegoat conscious of being one, which, Girard held, breaks the mechanism of méconnaissance that makes sacrifice possible in every earlier culture. The observation is debatable as theology, but it works as a secular diagnosis, a society only begins to resist the scapegoat mechanism the day it stops believing in the automatic innocence of the crowd doing the pointing.
Girard wrote that no one is safe from becoming a scapegoat, because the logic of the mimetic crisis does not distinguish the innocent from the guilty, only the available from the unavailable. What Girard did not live to see is that someone, on some server, collects a fee every time that availability turns into spectacle. Archaic sacrifice promised to restore the sacred order of the community. Contemporary sacrifice, more modest in its ambitions, settles for restoring the quarterly earnings of whoever sells the attention…
G.S.
Sources
- Girard, René. The Scapegoat. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986. (reference work, no link)
- Girard, René. Violence and the Sacred. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977. (reference work, no link)
- Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch. Autonomedia, 2004. (reference work, no link)
- Emotion shapes the diffusion of moralized content in social networks
- Out-group animosity drives engagement on social media
- Contra el imperio de los más ricos, Oxfam Intermón, January 2026
- Creciente riqueza es acompañada por dramática concentración de influencia política, Forbes México, January 2026
- Oxfam reporta que hay 3.000 multimillonarios que suman US$18,3 billones de riqueza, La República, January 2026
- La cultura de la cancelación, entre la democracia y el linchamiento digital, The Conversation, October 2024
- Early modern witch trials, Encyclopaedia Britannica
