In the Age of Algorithms, Even Reality Has Multiple Versions

Dr Sp Mishra
2 days ago
6 min read

Something fascinating is unfolding in India right now.

The CJP-led student protests in Delhi widened, and then over the weekend ended. What you believe happened, at every stage, has depended almost entirely on where you chose to get your information.

This is not simply a story about bias, or about one channel lying and another telling the truth. It is something more structural and once you notice it, you cannot unsee it.

The Same Event, Filtered Through Different Channels

It is tempting to sort this by generation. But the sharper claim is: it isn’t age that shapes the worldview, it’s the channel and the narrative running through it age just correlates loosely with which channels a person spends time in. Boomers lean on television, YouTube, and newspapers, with WhatsApp running underneath. Gen X triangulates across newspapers, television, Twitter/X, and YouTube, with WhatsApp forwards supplying a steady “have you seen this.” Millennials sit mostly on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube Shorts, with WhatsApp threading through as the place where all of it gets reshared, stripped of context, and passed along as news.

Gen Z is the exception, of degree, not just platform. The older cohorts draw on three or four overlapping channels, so their worldview gets cross-checked by accident. Gen Z’s diet is narrower: overwhelmingly Instagram and Telegram, with little of the WhatsApp, television, or print undercurrent that gives everyone else a second opinion; a structural fact, not a personality trait, that leaves less friction between what the channel shows you and what you believe happened.

This is precisely why the government’s own communication pivoted mid-protest. Once it became clear the movement lived almost entirely on Instagram; CJP reportedly gained tens of millions of mostly Gen Z followers within days in May, the Prime Minister posted late-night, self-recorded selfie videos on Instagram, styled as Gen Z-style reels, and reportedly told Cabinet ministers to do the same, because “the youths are on Instagram.” That’s not a government reaching a generation through its preferred medium; it’s a government acknowledging that, for this cohort, the medium is the only room in the house.

These filters are not the same kind of filter, and collapsing them into one explanation weakens the picture:

Television and newspapers filter through editorial selection; a human decision shaped by ownership and worldview, predating algorithms by a century.
Instagram and YouTube filter through algorithmic personalization; feeding you more of what you already respond to.
Telegram filters through self-selected curation; you subscribed; no algorithm pushed it on you.
WhatsApp filters through trusted-network relay, and may be the most powerful of the four: it borrows credibility from the messenger, not the message. A forward arrives with no by-line and often no original source, only a chain of people vouching for it by passing it on. That makes it near-invisible to scrutiny, and dominant in exactly the demographic band Boomers through Millennials and that includes both the people governing India and the people protesting in it.

Four mechanisms, one shared effect: siloed versions of the same event, each needing a different remedy and diversify against an algorithm, read across outlets against editorial bias, question your own subscriptions against self-selection, and against WhatsApp ask not “is this source biased” but “would I believe this from a stranger, not my uncle.”

It would be simpler to call all of this “narrative building and propaganda machinery.” I’m resisting that, because it isn’t accurate for all four. WhatsApp forwarding is propaganda in the classical sense. Telegram curation is closer to self-selection than manufacture. Editorial framing is sometimes propaganda, sometimes just ordinary bias. Algorithmic personalization, strictly, isn’t propaganda at all and no one is authoring a narrative aimed at you specifically; distortion is a side-effect of engagement optimization, not a design goal. Flattening all four into “propaganda” perversely lets the real propagandists off the hook; if everything is propaganda, nothing is. Some of this is intent; some of it is just architecture, and telling the two apart is the point of naming the mechanisms separately.

The Event Is One. The Connotation Is Many.

The underlying event is, in its bare facts, singular and knowable. What splinters is its connotation; the meaning, motive, and moral weight each audience attaches to it. As the protests widened, a parallel controversy over an alleged exam irregularity in Punjab was called a “leak” by some and mere “cheating” by others, depending on who was asked. The facts are discoverable; whether it’s called scandal or non-event depends on which lens you’re viewing it through.

This is why forming an opinion in real time is treacherous, and why my instinct to resist an immediate conclusion still holds though with a caveat. “Wait for more facts” is not costless; it’s also exactly what power wants when it hopes a story loses momentum before accountability arrives. Patience must be genuine curiosity, not a polite way of looking away.

Two Different Standards, for Two Different Roles

If you are an observer, form a provisional view from what’s verifiably public, stay open to revising it, and extend empathy to people who, fed a different version, arrived at a different conclusion in good faith. That’s not refusing to have an opinion and it’s holding one without contempt for those who hold another.

If you are a stakeholder; a minister, a party, an institution, you don’t get to wait. You must act on the facts available and build in a real, visible mechanism to course-correct. Visible is the operative word: a private intention to revise later is not accountability.

The Resolution Split Too

Then the test case arrived faster than expected. Dharmendra Pradhan resigned. Wangchuk ended his hunger strike. CJP called off its agitation “in good faith.” By the standard above, this is about as visible as accountability gets.

But the connotation problem didn’t end when the protest did; it moved house. Within hours the resignation was narrated as four events: the government’s graceful, paternal exit; an internal-BJP voice blaming the party’s own communications failure; the opposition calling it necessary but insufficient; a state minister denying the opposition any credit at all.

Notice who is exposed to how many of those stories. A Boomer or Gen Xer scrolling WhatsApp alongside television runs into two or three within a day, sought or not. Gen Z, concentrated in Instagram and Telegram, is more likely to see only one; CJP’s own framing of a clean victory, since that’s the account their channels were built to carry. Not because they weigh claims less capably, but because their architecture presents fewer to weigh and the same asymmetry the Instagram pivot revealed, from a different angle.

Of the four mechanisms, one will outlast the news cycle. The television debate and the Instagram reel fade in a day or two; the WhatsApp forward doesn’t obey that clock. Whichever version of “why Pradhan really resigned” gets typed up first will still be circulating in family groups weeks from now, arguing its case not by evidence but by the trust of whoever hits forward and the slowest, least visible mechanism, with no editor and no algorithm to hold accountable, carrying whichever version was written to survive being repeated by someone you trust.

This is the detail I missed when I first thought about the subject: I treated the event as the thing that splinters and the resolution as the place where reality would reconverge. It does not. The mechanism that fractures a protest into a “movement” or a “law-and-order problem” is the same one that fractures its ending into “justice done” or “crisis managed.” A resignation is a fact. Whether it represents real answers to the paper-leak questions, or a sacrifice offered to end a news cycle before those questions were investigated, is once again a matter of connotation. The distortion doesn’t wait for a story to conclude but it is already redecorating the ending while the ending is still being written.

Why This Matters Beyond One Protest

It isn’t generation that sorts people into a version of events; it’s the channel and narrative running through it, and generation matters only to the extent it correlates with which channels a person’s day runs on. Gen Z is the clearest case, not because they’re a different kind of person, but because their diet is narrower and hence exactly why the government’s outreach had to go find them inside Instagram.

WhatsApp is the other exception: a common thread from Boomer to Millennial, which is exactly why it may shape the country’s shared and mistaken with a sense of what happened more than any single platform on its own.

We are no longer simply choosing our sources of information. Increasingly, our sources are choosing what reaches us, and what tone it arrives in.

In an age where the same event can be a “leak” on one screen and “cheating” on another, and where a resignation can be simultaneously an act of accountability and an act of containment depending on who is narrating it; so, intellectual patience, genuine and not performative, may be one of the most valuable civic virtues we have left. Not patience that waits forever, and not patience that lets accountability quietly expire, but patience that keeps asking: what do I actually know, versus what has simply been fed to me?

Dr. SP Mishra is the founder of India Career Centre (ICC), a career guidance, study-abroad consulting, and educational research organisation.