Blood in the Feed

Blood in the Feed
How Social Media Algorithms Turn Political Rage, Immigration, and Death into Engagement

We, the people of the United States of Algorithm, are at war.

2026 began with a bang.
That bang was the killing of Ren'ee Good in Minnesota on January 7th.
The second act came on January 24th, when Alex Pretti was killed.

These deaths ignited a Second Amendment debate like no other, while anti-ICE protests erupted across the country almost immediately. What followed wasn’t just public outrage—it was algorithmic acceleration.

Most of us encounter news through social media. Social media runs on algorithms designed to keep us engaged. Not informed. Not grounded. Engaged. And that engagement often means trapping users inside echo chambers or feeding them perfectly tuned rage bait.

I know this because I’ve participated.

After engaging with politically charged content on Facebook, I noticed a sudden spike in protest-related posts tied specifically to the Salt Lake City area. The algorithm noticed my anger before I did—and it rewarded it.

Engaging with rage bait doesn’t pull us out of the echo chamber. It drops us straight into a virtual civil war stripped of context, nuance, and civility. Immigration enforcement is an enormously complex issue, but the algorithm flattens it into something simpler and more combustible: left versus right.

From the right, the talking points are familiar—paid protesters, sheep, Obama, jobs, and in Salt Lake City, the ever-popular “Why aren’t you at church?”
From the left: Nazis, human rights, sheep, Trump, and murder.

This list is incomplete. It’s based on personal observation. But once the verbal sparring begins, the pattern is always the same. Insults replace arguments. People become avatars. I’ve been called fat, stupid, and told to “go back to California or the East Coast.”

One of the most common refrains from the right is that Obama deported more people than anyone else.

That claim isn’t wrong—but it is incomplete.

Between 2009 and 2016, the Obama administration deported roughly 2.4 million undocumented immigrants, according to Department of Homeland Security data. These numbers reflect official removals carried out by ICE and other DHS agencies—not voluntary returns or border expulsions by Customs and Border Protection.

Deportations peaked in fiscal year 2013, when over 438,000 people were removed. Even as enforcement priorities shifted toward individuals with criminal convictions and recent border crossers, removal numbers remained historically high throughout much of Obama’s presidency.

Now compare that to Trump.

During Trump’s first term (2017–2020), total removals were lower than during Obama’s years, but still substantial—roughly 1.0 to 1.1 million people, depending on how removals are counted across ICE and CBP.

Trump’s second administration tells a more chaotic story.

Since January 20, 2025, DHS has claimed more than 605,000 deportations, though independent analyses place the number closer to 350,000, with interior ICE removals estimated between 230,000 and 327,000. The discrepancies come down to methodology—what counts as a removal, and which agency gets credit.

But deportation numbers alone don’t tell the whole story.

Deaths in ICE custody matter too.

These figures represent people who died while detained—not people killed during enforcement operations. Even so, the trend is revealing.

From 2009 to 2012, ICE custody deaths ranged between 8 and 14 per year. Reporting becomes less consistent after that, but between 2018 and 2020, approximately 35 people died in ICE custody. The numbers dropped during the early Biden years, hovering in the low single digits.

Then came 2025.

An estimated 30 to 32 people died in ICE custody—making it the deadliest year in more than two decades.

These numbers are not slogans.
They are not debate points.
They are people.

And yet the algorithm doesn’t care about accuracy or context. It cares about engagement. About escalation. About keeping us angry, divided, and scrolling—while real lives are reduced to talking points and comment-section ammunition.

This isn’t just an immigration crisis. It’s an information crisis.

I don’t claim a political affiliation, but I can clearly see the devolution of online interaction. We are not talking to each other. We arrive convinced we are correct, and the verbal sparring begins. There are no winners—because no one really wins when all sides are armed with keyboards and a deep dislike for the opposing keyboard warrior.

The generalized arguments from the right drive me nuts:
“The left is against deporting criminals.”
“The left wants to keep rapists in the country.”

Meanwhile, the left calls the right sheep, and the right calls the left sheeple. I can’t help but remember the days after Trump lost the election—when countless vehicles adorned with Trump paraphernalia paraded up and down State Street in Sandy, Utah, bringing traffic to a crawl. The same people now complaining about protests interfering with traffic.

We are a tone-deaf country.

At the end of the day, violent criminals should be deported. But we do not need masked, seemingly unchecked forces on power trips storming through communities. We do not need door-to-door intimidation. We do not need armed, military-style operations carried out in American neighborhoods—especially when those operations result in people being killed, regardless of what country they are from.

I don’t know how—or where—we turn online insults into productive change and honest conversation. I do know this: locked inside our digital echo chambers and fueled by rage bait, we will remain divided.

We need to return to valuing human life over political allegiance.
We need to disagree with political figures instead of worshipping them.
Blind faith leads to blind stupidity—and we already have enough stupidity in this nation.

Bishop :( :