Sheikh Selim
Not long ago, a single television set in the living room was enough to bring a Bangladeshi family together, and that shared screen came with a shared, unspoken agreement about what deserved to be seen, spoken aloud, or held onto in memory. That kind of collective filtering barely exists anymore. What has replaced it is a sea of individual screens, each one running its own private algorithm, each one tuned to reward whatever grabs attention in the space of a minute or less.
Across the last ten years, Bangladesh has gone through one of the deepest cultural shifts in its modern history, and remarkably little of that shift has been steered by conscience. It has, instead, been steered by clicks. This editorial is not an argument against social media itself, nor a plea for a return to some imagined golden age of manners. It is a demand that we look honestly at what has been normalized in the name of reach, revenue, and relevance, and ask whether the country is comfortable with what it has become.
A Decade of Performed Indecency
Scroll through any major Bangladeshi social platform today and a pattern emerges that is hard to unsee. Domestic quarrels are staged rather than caught, rehearsed for an audience before being uploaded as if spontaneous. Strangers, a tea stall owner, a woman walking home, a delivery rider fumbling an order, are filmed without consent and turned into comic relief, their embarrassment repackaged for people they will never meet.
Religious sentiment, political rivalry, and class resentment are not just present in this content, they are provoked on purpose; because outrage travels louder and faster than agreement ever does. Influencers now treat confrontation as its own genre, walking into shops, rickshaw stands, or rivals’ comment sections with the outcome already scripted, the insult calibrated for maximum sting, and the fury it generates converted into ad revenue before the clip is even a day old.
Advertising has absorbed the same logic rather than resisting it. Campaigns now borrow the aesthetics of controversy on purpose: casual sexism dressed as humor, communal stereotypes dressed as relatability, staged aggression marketed as bold storytelling. Brands that once guarded their reputation now court manufactured scandal, since an algorithm cannot distinguish a viewer who loves an ad from one who is furious at it. Corruption has followed the same path into raw material; genuine investigative work still exists, but it now competes with a far larger volume of theatrical outrage that offers the feeling of accountability with none of its substance. It is, indeed, a market for lemons.
None of this is unintentional. It is the anticipated output of a business model built entirely on attention, with no mechanism to ask whether that attention was earned honorably. Decency is quiet and slow to reward. Cruelty, humiliation, and spectacle are immediate and endlessly shareable, so it is little surprise which one now dominates the feed.
Where Human Rights Quietly Disappear
It would be easy to dismiss all of this as nothing more than bad taste. It is not. When someone is filmed without their permission in a private or vulnerable moment, and that footage is then monetized, their dignity has effectively been sold as someone else’s advertising inventory. When staged violence, mock assaults, or manufactured communal friction are uploaded purely for entertainment, the boundary between fiction and real incitement starts to blur, and that is especially dangerous in a country where online rumor has already triggered actual mob violence over the past decade.
When women, religious minorities, or the economically disadvantaged are repeatedly written into these videos as the joke or the instigator, platforms are not simply mirroring existing social divisions, they are rehearsing and deepening them for profit. This deserves to be named plainly as a human rights issue rather than waved off as a question of taste.
Dignity, consent over one’s own image and story, and the right to live free from incitement are not abstract principles confined to law textbooks. They are being chipped away in small, monetized fragments, day after day, across Bangladeshi social feeds. Because this damage is spread thin across millions of individual clips rather than concentrated in one visible catastrophe, it has been easy for society to underestimate how serious it has become, and slow to respond with the urgency the pattern actually warrants.
Is Rating the Answer?
Content rating, borrowed from cinema and broadcast traditions, is often proposed as a tidy solution. Label the content, let algorithms sort by age and sensitivity, and let adults choose freely. There is some value here. Clear labeling for graphic material, staged confrontation, or explicit language gives users and especially parents a tool for informed choice. But rating assumes a level of intentional, centralized production that most viral social content simply does not have.
A rating system built for a film studio cannot easily govern millions of individual creators uploading in real time from their bedrooms. At best, rating offers a partial filter at the edges of the problem. It does nothing to address the underlying incentive structure that rewards manufactured outrage in the first place.
Is Moderation the Answer?
Moderation, whether by platforms or by regulators, fares somewhat better but carries its own serious risks. Aggressive content moderation, particularly when controlled by the state, has historically been vulnerable to political misuse, silencing legitimate dissent under the banner of protecting decency. Platform-led moderation, meanwhile, is inconsistent, often blind to local cultural and linguistic context, and reactive rather than preventive, arriving only after a video has already spread and caused harm.
Moderation is necessary as a safety net, but it should never be mistaken for a cure. It manages symptoms after the fact rather than addressing why the content was created and rewarded in the first place.
The Harder, Better Path: Social Transformation
The most durable solution is neither a rating label nor a moderation queue but a genuine shift in social norms and industry standards, one that treats digital decency as seriously as physical courtesy once was. This means media literacy education starting in schools, teaching young people to recognize manufactured outrage and staged conflict rather than simply consume it.
It means advertisers and brands voluntarily committing to standards that reward genuine creativity over manufactured cruelty, understanding that reputational capital, not just reach, is at stake. It means platforms operating in Bangladesh being held to transparent local accountability rather than opaque global policies that treat every market identically. Social transformation is slower than legislation and less satisfying than a ban, but it is the only approach that changes the underlying incentive rather than merely hiding its output.
Should the Government Act, or Let It Flow?
Here we can take a clear position. The government cannot simply let this flow unchecked, but neither should it reach reflexively for heavy-handed censorship. The risks of inaction are severe and already visible: normalized cruelty desensitizing an entire generation, eroding empathy at scale; unconsented footage destroying reputations and mental health with no legal recourse; staged conflict occasionally spilling into real communal tension; and a marketing industry increasingly comfortable profiting from division rather than cohesion. Left entirely alone, this trajectory does not self-correct, because the platforms profiting from it have no financial incentive to slow it down.
Equally, the risk of overreach is real in a country where free expression has often been the first casualty of well-intentioned regulation. The answer is targeted; transparent governance rather than sweeping control. The government should establish clear legal protections against non-consensual filming and doxing, require platforms operating commercially in Bangladesh to maintain local grievance and takedown mechanisms with enforceable response times, and fund independent media literacy programs rather than policing speech directly. Regulation should target harmful conduct, such as incitement, harassment, and exploitation of minors or the vulnerable, not opinion or satire.
A Closing Word From This Desk
Bangladesh’s sense of decency did not erode in a single night, and it will not be restored by a single piece of legislation or a tweak to an algorithm either. What this moment calls for is a shared resolve, one that families, schools, advertisers, platforms, and policymakers all arrive at together, that human dignity should never be the going rate for a trending clip.
Virality has effectively become its own form of currency, but any currency only holds worth because enough people continue to accept it as valuable. We retain the power to withdraw that acceptance, to expect more from the creators we follow, the brands we support, and the platforms we open without thinking every day. The coming decade of Bangladeshi social media is not obligated to repeat the last one. That outcome was never really the algorithm’s to decide. It is, and always has been, ours to decide.
