Social media platforms like Twitter amplify displays of moral outrage over time, as users who learn such language are rewarded with a higher number of "likes" and "shares," according to a new study from Yale University. And these rewards had the greatest impact on users connected to politically moderate networks.
“Social media incentives are changing the tone of our political conversations online,” said William Brady of Yale, a postdoctoral researcher in the Yale Department of Psychology and lead author of the study. He led the research with Molly Crockett, an associate professor of psychology at Yale.
The Yale team measured the expression of moral outrage on Twitter during controversial real-life events and studied subjects' behavior in controlled experiments designed to test the social media's algorithms, which reward users for posting popular content. , encourage outrage.
“This is the first evidence that over time some people learn to express more outrage as they are rewarded by the basic design of social media,” said Brady.
Moral outrage can be a powerful force for social well-being, motivating punishment for moral transgressions, promoting social cooperation, and instigating social change. It also has a dark side, contributing to the harassment of minority groups, the spread of disinformation and political polarization, the researchers said.
Social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter state that they merely provide a neutral platform for conversations that would otherwise take place elsewhere. But many have speculated that social media is fueling the outrage. Hard evidence for this claim was lacking, however, as accurately measuring complex social expressions such as moral outrage presents a technical challenge, the researchers said.
To gather that evidence, Brady and Crockett assembled a team that built machine learning software that could track moral outrage in Twitter posts. In observational studies of 12.7 million tweets from 7,331 Twitter users, they used the software to test whether users expressed more outrage over time, and if so, why.
The team found that the incentives of social media platforms like Twitter are really changing the way people post. Users who received more "likes" and "retweets" when expressing their outrage in a tweet were more likely to express their outrage in later posts. To substantiate these findings, the researchers conducted controlled behavioral experiments to show that rewards for expressing indignation caused users to increase their expression of indignation over time.
The results also suggest a disturbing link to current debates about the role of social media in political polarization. Brady and his colleagues found that members of politically extreme networks expressed more outrage than members of politically moderate networks. However, members of politically moderate networks were more influenced by social rewards.
“Our studies show that people with politically moderate friends and followers are more sensitive to social feedback that amplifies their outrage,” Crockett said. “This suggests a mechanism for how moderate groups can radicalize politically over time – the rewards of social media create positive feedback loops that exacerbate outrage.”
The study was not intended to say whether amplifying moral outrage is good or bad for society, Crockett stressed. But the findings do have implications for leaders using the platforms and policymakers considering regulating them.
“Strengthening moral outrage is a clear consequence of the social media business model, which optimizes for user engagement,” Crockett said. “As moral outrage plays a critical role in social and political change, we need to be aware that technology companies, through the design of their platforms, have the ability to influence the success or failure of collective movements.”
She added:“Our data shows that social media platforms do not just reflect what is happening in society. Platforms create incentives that change the way users react to political events over time.”
