The Cost of Creating Online: Is Declarative Content Harmful?

The tension between hooking an audience and delivering truth

Image generated with Grok

If you create content online, you play a game with an algorithm that rewards certainty.

I could have written“…an algorithm that might reward certainty”, but that risks losing you, the reader, in ambiguity. Instead, I chose a short, direct sentence—less for you to unpack, more to hook you instantly.

This style is considered declarative: concise, confident claims presented as truth.

I learned this approach from Nicolas Cole’s The Art and Business of Writing Online before I started publishing articles. It’s a tactic I’ve embraced because it grabs attention, whether you’re writing posts, scripting videos, or storytelling through photographs.

But this style, while engaging, often goes unexamined. It sidesteps the pursuit of truth.

Let’s explore whether this style, pushed by online platforms, does more harm than good.

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Declarative hooks work because they’re frictionless

Online platforms are designed to capture attention in seconds. Ambiguity creates frictions.

The resulting system is an attention economy, where clear impactful content rises. Truth, on the other hand, demands depth that’s hard to condense into bite-size hooks, and so it often gets overshadowed.

AI, like ChatGPT, mirrors this.

ChatGPT not only tailors its responses to you but writes to hook and retain your attention. Like the recommendation engines of social media, the probabilistic machine learning algorithm of chatbots predicts that humans prefer certain and biased responses over truth.

But truth itself is a complex topic.

The line between truth and weaponized truth

This brings me to malinformation.

Malinformation is true information with the intent to mislead, distort, or cause harm. Unlike misinformation (false, unintentional) and disinformation (false, intentional), malinformation manipulates truth by stripping context.

Imagine an ex sharing a screenshot of your text: “I can’t do this anymore.”

That message is real. You wrote it. But she leaves out the four paragraphs above it where you explained your mental health was spiraling, where you took responsibility, and where you thanked her for the good times.

That’s malinformation: a fragment of truth, weaponized into a narrative that spreads faster than any full story ever could.

Declarative language predates the algorithm

Declarative writing isn’t new. It predates algorithm, the internet, and even the printing press.

We’re going way back, even before Ancient Roman History (sorry, lads).

Declarative language roots lie in Ancient Greece, the birthplace of teaching rhetoric—the art of persuasive language.

While rhetoric existed since humans started to speak, Greece formalized it as a teachable discipline since the established democracy created a public platform to openly debate.

Teachers, like Sophists, taught persuasion using style over truth to win in courts and assemblies.

Meanwhile, Socrates, known for the maxim, “I know that I know nothing,” challenged this confident rhetoric by embracing inquiry. He wasn’t against declarative speech but opposed unexamined claims.

But it was his very questioning that got Socrates silenced—and ultimately killed.

His questioning was deemed dangerous for “corrupting youth” and impiety (a fancy way of saying he may not believe in god).

This tension—between persuasive certainty and rigorous inquiry—persists today in our digital Agora (the Athenian town square for public discourse), amplified by the global reach of the algorithm.

The harm of declarative content

Declarative content can spread misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation, with lasting impacts:

• Critical thinking erodes: Studies show ChatGPT can weaken critical thinking skills.

• Cynicism spreads: Contradictory claims across the internet breeds skepticism towards everything.

• Nuance disappears: There is little room for uncertainty in an attention-driven system.

Yet, suppressing declarative content risks a paradox: striving for free speech while controlling the narratives:

• In 2020, Twitter flagged posts about the COVID lab leak hypothesis as “harmful” for challenging official narrative. Now, the FBI and Department of Energy lean towards an accidental lab leak.

• Socrates faced similar accusations of harm for questioning civic norms, but his real crime was challenging authority through questioning, not spreading falsehoods.

Here the harm isn’t the free speech—it’s the efforts to control free speech through declarative persuasion.

Declarative writing can cut through the noise

Let’s be fair, declarative writing is effective.

It drew you into this article, engaging you with a complex topic. You crave clarity and answers, and declarative statements deliver.

But their utility doesn’t require truth.

The problem isn’t my declarations to hook you—it’s that you have little incentive to challenge them.

Nuanced engagement, like nuanced content, is buried in the attention economy.

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Towards a Better Digital Agora

To foster better discourse, we need:

• Media literacy to teach people how to examining declarative claims critically.

• Platform incentives that reward nuanced discussion.

• Cultural norms that value questioning over confidence

The risk of unchecked claims are as real today as they were 2000 years ago.

Let’s embrace the courage to say, “I don’t know,” and build a culture towards a better town square for public discourse.

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