More troubling still is why these takedowns are so ubiquitous: There is, these days, a financial incentive to go viral. Once upon a time if someone spread gossip or lies to a tabloid, the upshot was pure personal satisfaction and maybe vengeance. (Even if they sold Page Six a photo, at least that photo was real.) But now, with the advent of things like creator funds for TikTok and Instagram—and the rise of influencing as a career more broadly—virality has financial stakes. And not all output is created equal either: Study after study shows that negative, divisive, or otherwise anger-stoking content is more likely to be shared…and therefore go viral.

While society’s long-established appetite for tearing down powerful women certainly seems to be at play in the Meghan example, the craze around Saltburn back in 2023 helped me identify another endemic online behavior worth addressing. I like to avoid movie spoilers, but there was no escaping the onslaught of horrified reaction videos to that film, leading me to believe Saltburn would make The Talented Mr. Ripley look like a children’s movie. But when I finally watched the film for myself, I realized that these scenes—represented online as being too vile and depraved for words—just weren’t that bad, if they existed at all. Here, again, the memes had fairly little to do with the truth.

A meme in its best, most harmless form spins a nugget of reality into a joke. But what’s increasingly happening is that people are getting clout from inventing a new “reality” altogether. More often than not these spins have one end goal: to dismiss or discredit someone or something. And the danger of being dismissive is cutting off another point of view.

What ever happened to forming an opinion of your own? It might be true that Meghan’s life is difficult to relate to, but my plea is for you to get there on your own and not based off a lifted clip. Watch the TV show, see the movie, listen to the podcast, decide how you feel about it, and then see what people are saying on TikTok. As Abraham Lincoln once said, “Don’t believe everything you read on the internet.”