A Yale University study supports the idea that social networks have become a place for the proliferation of issues that generate outrage instead of being neutral spaces for conversation and debate .
According to researchers from the Department of Psychology, social networks, powered by their algorithms, reward more users who share messages that generate outrage and promote that feeling of anger over time.
“Social media incentives are changing the tone of our political conversations online,” says William Brady of Yale, a researcher in the Yale Department of Psychology and author of the study led with Molly Crockett Professor of Psychology.
The Yale team thought that Twitter was the best option to carry out their experiment. To do this, measured the expressions of indignation in that social network during controversial events in real life . He also studied people's behaviors to determine whether the algorithms fostered feelings of anger.
In order for the study result to be considered as strong evidence, the researchers had to include an enormous number of tweets. As it was impossible to collect the information manually, they developed machine learning software capable of tracking moral outrage on the social network.
The observational study included 12.7 million tweets from 7,331 users. It showed that “platform incentives change the way people post.” Users who received the most “likes” and “retweets” when they expressed outrage in a tweet were more likely to express outrage in subsequent posts .
Credit: Michael S. Helfenbein
Outrage on social media, over time
To back up their findings, the team did additional studies and discovered even more. The new data revealed that being rewarded for expressing outrage on social media ends up increasing that feeling of outrage over time . As if this were not enough, it also presents a “worrying link with current debates about the role of social networks in political polarization”.
The researchers explain that politically extreme people expressed more outrage on social media than politically moderate ones. However, moderates were more influenced by rewards, that is, “likes” and “retweets”.
“Our studies find that people with politically moderate friends and supporters are more sensitive to social feedback that reinforces their expressions of outrage,” says Crockett. “This suggests a mechanism for how moderate groups can become politically radical over time,” he adds.
