Study: Social media’s outrage machine has most influence on moderates

For the study, the team of researchers built machine-learning software capable of identifying moral outrage in Twitter posts, which then trawled nearly 13 million tweets from over 7,000 users. After tracking the users’ pages over time, they discovered those who racked up more “likes” or “retweets” after showing outrage were more likely to keep doing so in future posts. This was subsequently backed up by controlled behavioral experiments conducted by the team.

But surprisingly, the finding was not confined to political echo chambers, where you would naturally expect slanted voices to grow louder. It’s true, the researchers say, that users with more politically radical networks spewed more outrage overall than those with more center-of-spectrum networks. But the rewards system had the greatest influence on the latter: “People with politically moderate friends and followers are more sensitive to social feedback that reinforces their outrage expressions,” Molly Crockett, a Yale associate professor, said in a statement. “This suggests a mechanism for how moderate groups can become politically radicalized over time . . . [through] feedback loops that exacerbate outrage.”