Outrage and the Internet

In this video essay on why rage, anger and hate rules the internet and social media (spoiler its because our brains love outrage). So next time you rage quite over someone's stupid post, know they are most likely rage farming you.

Semir Zeki, co-authored a study: ‘Neural Correlates of Hate’ which concluded that love & Hate are intrinsically linked, stating: ‘to the biologist, hate is a passion that is of equal interest to love.’ This is most likely why we pay attention to posts that get us angry.

Negative emotions can be just as powerful if not more so at grabbing an audience's attention than positive emotions. There’s no better example of that than the genius that is Andy Kaufman. He’d regularly troll his audience - Andy Kaufman began wrestling women during his act and proclaimed himself "Inter-Gender Wrestling Champion of the World."

Social media companies benefit greatly from our outrage, entertainers, and politicians are thus encouraged to make rage farming posts for attention.

Neuroscientist, Molly J. Crockett details how moral outrage content is the most engaging, increasing retweets by 20%. *clip from Molly J, Crocket. By creating an information ecosystem, the most outrageous content will float to the top. This directly incentivises humanity to be wild, you will get more attention if you trigger people's outrage.

Algorithms are designed to grab our attention, unfortunately outrageous posts make us feel like we are forced to reply: It forces you to take a stance and get involved whether you like it or not. The poser gets a ton of attention from a ton of people who wouldn’t have heard of them otherwise. They use our anger to give them visibility on social media.

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