Why do social media amplify outrage and division?

Angry emoji face to illustrate how social media amplify outrage — Why do a lot of social media amplify outrage and division? More research continues to shed light on this question.

One of the reasons I don’t sign up for most social networking sites is that they seem to bring out the worst in us. Nowadays, there’s never a shortage of angry outbursts on social media. In fact, Nature Human Behavior, a cognitive and behavioral science journal, recently published another study on how social media amplify outrage—not just among individuals, but also among groups.

For instance, here are some of the findings from this study:

Individuals who spend more time on social media are more likely to feel angry, particularly with respect to social and political issues.
On many issues, people actually agree with each other more than they think. But social media leads them to overestimate how outraged they are with one another.
This overestimation of anger and outrage among people can lead to a similar overestimation of hostility between whole groups of people. In this way, online outrage feeds into further social division.

The only addendum I’d attach to these findings is that a lot of social media amplify outrage because they’re designed to do exactly that. It’s worth taking a moment to understand how.

How social media amplify outrage by design

Social media replace faces with interfaces.

When people don’t listen to each other, look at one another, and deal with their emotional responses in person and in real-time, succumbing to outrage on social media becomes all too easy.

There’s a big difference between face-to-face communication among people vs. screen-to-screen communication on social media.

In face-to-face communication, people tend to keep their conversation civil. After all, it can be emotionally draining to yell at someone, especially if the other person yells right back.
However, when people communicate from behind a screen, they don’t have to deal with other people’s emotional reactions, at least not in person or in real-time. And social media is no exception.
For example, when you post on social media, you don’t necessarily perceive other people’s facial expressions. Nor do you hear their tone of voice or read their body language.

As a result, it becomes quite easy to talk trash about others from behind a screen. It’s no surprise that a number of social media users trade insults online that they’d probably never utter to one another offline.

Social media reward what’s most outrageous.

Many social media platforms tend to reward whatever hijacks the most attention; and what hijacks the most attention is often what’s most outrageous.

To cut a long story short, several social media platforms are designed to do the following.

First, hijack your attention the second you log on to social media, usually through click-bait ads or viral content, which are designed to keep your eyes glued to the screen for as long as possible.
Next, collect all the data you leave traces of online, including your ‘likes’ and all the time you spend scrolling.
Then, offer advertisers and outside parties access to your data. In turn, those advertisers and outside parties may use your data to target you with even more click-bait ads and viral content, especially if those ads and content keep you ‘liking’ and scrolling endlessly.

Unfortunately, when social media platforms are designed to constantly hijack attention, what gets the most attention is often what’s most outrageous. In other words, it’s whatever gets people worked up or outraged from moment to moment.

From online outrage to social media reform

In these ways, social media amplify outrage by design, magnifying anger among individuals and hostility between groups of people. That’s why I believe social media reform may be one of the most important tasks of our time. Our future well-being, both as individuals and in groups, may very well depend on it.

References

Brady, William J., McLoughlin, Killian L., Torres, Mark P., Luo,Kara F., Gendron, Maria, and Crockett, M. J. (2023). Overperception of moral outrage in online social networks inflates beliefs about intergroup hostility. Nature Human Behavior, 7, 917–927. doi.org/10.1038/s41562-023-01582-0

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