Second-guessing social media's outrage feedback loop

In the cacophony of hot takes, we must reassess how outrage culture affects us

In August 2021, Yale University published a study in Science Advances about how social learning amplifies moral outrage expression in online social networks. The researchers measured how users express moral outrage on Twitter in times of controversy and studied the behaviours of subjects in controlled experiments. These experiments were designed to test if social media algorithms reward users for expressions of outrage.

Their results? Social media users who got likes and retweets when they expressed moral outrage on Twitter were more likely to express outrage in later posts.

In the age of information overload, it’s easy to get lost in the cacophony of contrasting opinions. And the easiest way to get attention these days is to share provocative opinions, unprovoked. The millennials have a spicy name for it: hot take.

But while it’s tempting to look at outrage from polar ends as either good or bad, the reality is often a lot more nuanced.

At a glance, outrage is a negative phenomenon, since we’re living in a time where being called “emotional” is an insult. After all, what is it about hot takes that turn us into hordes of angry keypad warriors pouring our rage into expensive gadget screens? But emotions are in fact primal instincts.

Love, for example, makes us appreciate things and people and memories. Fear, fueled by adrenaline, alerts us to danger and helps us deal with dangerous situations; envy motivates us to improve, and regret makes us learn from mistakes. Outrage also has its benefits, like helping us set and enforce boundaries. When someone commits a misdemeanour, we feel offended, and when they commit crimes, we’re enraged.

There’s a full spectrum of things to offend us: minor hot takes, terrible opinions, social and moral injustices, et cetera. And while certain moral outrages are justified—especially around the socio-politics of race, gender and identity injustices, social media culture constantly exposes us to tonnes more of less relevant outrages. Then it becomes all too easy to fall into the trap of combative ideologists and also trolls who are always bringing forth new things to get angry at.

Every other day, for example, we see people argue about trivial things like how much to spend on dates, being high-maintenance, deserving and demanding certain treatments, and even gatekeeping certain meals. Someone says they won’t settle for less and it becomes a trending argument for two days. How is this even a point to be argued?

It’s important to note that the concept of intersectionality explains that it’s possible for mundane things to make for important conversations around social justice. Socially conditioned biases like sexism and misogyny often play into how certain demographics treat others and reflect into these hot takes and counter hot takes. But naunce and context are rarely applied in these situations and they often snowball into who has the hottest take or who can make the coldest ratio. After all, we’re all here for “vawulence” and agenda must agend.

The results of Yale’s study show evidence that some people learn to express more outrage over time because they are rewarded by the basic design of social media. And the irony of outrage culture all too often is that, when well-meaning respondents bash trolls, the trolls get more attention. And social media is rife with people who have built immense followings as trolls, incels, hate inciters, attention seekers and disinformation agents, in spite of how often they attract outrage.

For outrage to thrive, an incitive opinion needs to be bashed; and then we need like-minds to relieve the angst. We need people to “can you believe this shit?” with; we need people to “look at this nonsense!” with. We need people to ironically create ‘new’ reactionary subcultures and the outrage monster continues to feed the problematic opinions with attention. And we get even more outraged by the outraged, while ironically generating more interest from people who agree with the original problematic tweet.

Another irony? We end up being mad at our own gullibility. After everything is said and done, we realise how easy it is to keep being baited into getting mad at the same things every three market days. Such trivial provocations rise from nothing and are continuously fanned by both trolls and intellectual elites going at each other in an outrage feedback loop.

Who wins? Big tech companies. Social media apps claim they simply create neutral platforms for engagements. But in reality, they reward the culture of outrage. Yale’s study shows that the amplification of moral outrage is a clear consequence of social media’s business model, which optimises for user engagement.

In the era before social media, maybe outrage effectively discouraged certain transgressions, because the world was still small and erring members of the community could more intimately feel the effects of such communal anger. But in 2022, outrage over trivial hot takes only makes us a bunch of hyperactive idiots. Ultimaely, you’re not intimidating anyone when you respond to a dumb tweet with “???” from hundreds and thousands of kilometres away.

As a point of digital well-being, we need to understand how the design of the spaces in which we are interacting can impact the way we choose to express ourselves. Maybe we can start by being more introspective. To do more of “this thing no make sense” and keep it moving rather than being compelled to respond with righteous vitriol.

When you see a problematic piece of content, before doing anything else, can you take a moment to pause and wonder if that tweet is important enough to stir your reaction, if that article headline or caption or hot take was created specifically to bait outrage? Nine times out of ten, it was.

The internet will never lack things to trigger a response. New red flags, new things to be annoyed at, and an infinite ocean of WTF opinions. It’s our responsibility to stay true to ourselves and define the boundaries of things we hold true. If an account is notorious for trolling, block them. If a friend keeps resharing shepeteri content to your TL, mute them. These filters are underutilised features in a cesspool of annoyances.

This is not to say we should ignore crucial issues like societal oppression. In reacting to distasteful content, perhaps we can try to figure out how best to contribute to enforcing boundaries on more pressing issues. Volunteering time and energy and financial resources to noble causes is one way to go about it. Using authority in your circle of influence to spread awareness is another. But if you can't do anything about it apart from dropping hot takes and contributing to ratios, then what’s the point? Even more dangerously, you run the risk of losing control of the narrative to trolls and clever agents of disinformation.

Wouldn’t it be better to focus on injustices we have real power to remedy, rather than living like a rabid animal in a constant state of insatiable outrage? Unless, well, the goal is to build a reputation for being a combative online personality, then anything is fair game.

Ultimately, in today’s highly charged social media landscape, we must learn the art of navigating minefields of hot takes. Let’s try to take a step back, take a breath, remove ourselves from the point of frustration and cognitively reappraise hot takes before we react. Because if we allow ourselves to react to every little provocation, then we don’t really stand for something beyond performing outrage for an angry crowd baying for “vawulence”.

TLDR: we must carefully choose our battles and be in control of the things we allow ourselves to be outraged about.