VIRTUE SIGNALING

Virtue signaling is a process by which an individual tries to better his social status within a given in-group by adopting a set of accepted ideas and opinions within that group, regardless of their validity or quality. Relaying those ideas around in the group rapidly becomes a way to increase your status; criticizing them, or having diverging ideas makes you lose status.

A major problem in modern mainstream journalism is that journalists give way too much importance to virtue signaling to their peers as opposed to digging for complete coverage of a story. One particular angle becomes the "right" one, and the others fall in disregard. In Hollywood, the code of conduct is very complex and strict. You have to have the right opinions about lots of things if you want to keep your career going. These two factors combined limit the range of acceptable things to say in mainstream media to a surprising degree.

It is possible to commit virtue signaling errors if one possesses insufficient information or has the wrong prejudices towards a group. Those errors can be vey costly and limit or completely cut your access privileges to the target group. For example, early on election night, a couple of tourists entered a cosy bar in Los Angeles and started watching with the other patrons. Just to make conversation, the man asked the nearest patron "So, how are things looking?". The other answered "Looks like Hillary is winning." So the couple of tourists, eager to virtue-signal their political views, erupted in an exagerrated cry of joy and hi-fived each other. The 4 nearest customers turned towards them in an unfriendly manner, and one said in an icy tone "Actually we happen to be rooting for Trump here." Oops. After overplaying their opening hand in such a clumsy manner, the couple had little choice but to leave and try at another bar.

Finally, virtue signaling is most of what people do all day every day on social media by liking the right things and by showing outrage towards the right things.