Apr 4, 2022

The 'moral outrage' distortion engine

Emotionally-charged, moralizing content wins the virality lottery most often:

For each "moral-emotional word" used, content receives between 17-24% more engagement.
Moral anger and disgust increase virality across the political spectrum.
Content that’s written in more divisive, inflammatory language is consistently more engaging.

Social media platforms incentivize this behavior by promoting extreme content—because of its higher engagement—and then it’s engaged with even more, a catastrophic feedback loop of negative externalities.

Our concept of the “other side” becomes heavily distorted and reduced to a viral caricature. And because everyone sees these negative caricatures disproportionately, we believe there are more people who fit this image than there actually are.

As a result, it feels like there is far more moral outrage around us than there really is.

Moral outrage can play an important role in healthy public discourse and fighting injustice, but public discourse continually dominated by artificially inflated moral outrage makes progress impossible.

...

These posts are meant to be conversational.

Feel free to leave a comment on Twitter.
https://twitter.com/joshpitzalis/status/1510818003784708098

The ideas and stats came from a foundational course over at the Center for Humane Technology.

Shoutout to Uriel Soberanes for the thumbnail image.

Josh

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