Facebook and Twitter algorithms incentivize 'people to get enraged'

100 years ago we would have called this yellow journalism.<p>If you want to make a system that is solely on getting eyeballs to look at advertisements the best way to do that is controversy. If you really understand social media how to get an advertisement for free on CNN is to say something controversial enough on Twitter that CNN will show a story of it. What we are witnessing is the disruption of original sources of information (TV &#x2F; Newspapers &#x2F; Magazines) into a more algorithmic system. A bunch of people do things like &quot;blame the algorithm&quot; but instead you have to consider that it is a cybernetic system with both artificial agents and people interacting with each other and the accountability doesn&#x27;t disappear at the part of the algorithm the accountability is with the organizations that deploy it.

I would also include Reddit in this list. The homepage (if you visit incognito or not being signed in) seems to be tailored to bubble up all the &quot;outrageous&quot; events.

Unlike newspaper front pages and magazine covers? (FWIW I agree that FB&#x2F;Twitter should take responsibility, but I also think journalists should reflect on their role as well. After all, it&#x27;s their headlines being ranked...)

This story is on Yahoo!, which serves numerous stories on its homepage from outrage rags like <i>HuffPost</i>, <i>TheDailyBeast</i>, <i>The Independent</i>, and <i>The Guardian.</i> And, what&#x27;s more, <i>doesn&#x27;t allow</i> users to customize their feed by filtering out such sources. They do seem to have a button to &#x27;show less from&#x27; sources, but it doesn&#x27;t seem to work, and doesn&#x27;t offer to remove them completely. Is this just shoddy product engineering? I&#x27;m not sure, I suspect that they know that people will click low quality outrage stories in spite of themselves - you can&#x27;t resist the temptation to click them when you see them, which is a big part of the reason why I would rather not see them in the first place.

I have two reactions to these kinds of pieces.<p>The first is to think &quot;of course they are - outrage is the easiest form of engagement and social media is all about easy engagement as that means more eyes to sell.&quot;<p>The second is that there is a delegation of responsibility in these articles. The tone is a &quot;Facebook&#x2F;Twitter made me act like a jerk.&quot; The algorithms may be tuned to surface content that will ruffle your feathers, but the reaction is yours as is the decision to engage with social media at all.

I hate on Twitter that the `What&#x27;s Happening` info box loads a half second before your feed. I&#x27;m sure that&#x27;s a deliberate &quot;growth hack&quot; for the outrage machine.<p>I should figure out how to block elements like that, which of course in the current internet landscape have completely randomized DIV class names.

I think this falls in line with the quip of ask a question and get crickets. Make an incorrect statement as fact and it will piss someone off enough to give you the answer to your initial question. All engagement metrics are based on actions and time. The long detailed answer and spewing vitriol increase both.

One simple thing twitter can do to reduce enraging behavior and harassment:<p>De-prioritize &quot;reply guys&quot; that always reply to a a popular account with an incendiary comment.<p>They get a ton of comments and few likes&#x2F;RTs (ratio&#x27;d) yet reply guys are usually the top response to a popular tweet.<p>Seriously twitter, why set reply guys as the top response to every tweet? It encourages hostility, and this is but one example.

I do wish that we had more solid research to back this claim. As it stands the claim that people are incentivized to be enraged is a single person’s opinion that resonate with people’s current beliefs. There are a number of other trends going on at a macro level and it seems like this one is an obvious culprit but nobody is doing the work to collect and analyze the data to back this up.

CGP Grey made a great video on the self-perpetuating cycle of outrage back in 2015: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc</a>

The social media platforms prefer to call it engagement. They never hid this fact and somehow it didn&#x27;t bother their user base as much as it should have.

Jack Dorsey donated $10 Million to the Antiracist Research Center. It makes me feel he made an outrage machine which outraged himself.

Social commentary:<p>As I was scanning HN headlines, I thought this said &quot;engaged&quot; instead of &quot;enraged&quot; :)<p>But my instinctual reaction was the exactly the same: &quot;Hmm yeah I guess they really are manipulating us - that&#x27;s the world we live in now I guess.&quot;

I made sure to follow people who post nice content about games, indie games, algorithms, aí, ml, pixel art, 3d stuff... And even though twitter keep finding ways of showing me what f** Bolsonaro did or what was the latest news on Big Brother. I deleted my account and never looked back. Same with Facebook.

The word I use for this in casual conversation (not claiming credit for) is &quot;aggro porn&quot;. I read once that anger is a powerful (useful) reward circuit in the brain, the problem is it increases stress hormones which have deleterious effects over time.<p>I&#x27;m sure it&#x27;s intentional but I presume it&#x27;s also somewhat inevitable that platforms with user generated and user amplified content will represent the reward circuits of the brain. Which, at 30,000 ft. makes it obvious which circuits Instagram, Tiktok, Reddit, et.al., even Hacker News are triggering.

I solved this issue by removing people on fb who post political messages. It is surprising how tame, relaxing and good natured my fees is. Good luck trying to foster some inflammatory thread.

I have often felt that if everyone were rate-limited to two or three upvotes&#x2F;likes per day, the world might be a more-meaningful place.

I think there is a presupposition that being enraged is always bad. If the government is not working and all online dissent is oppressed by algorithms no one will be able to effect change and then you will have an enragement bubble so to speak. That bubble bursting will be much worse than people simply being enraged and voicing their concerns.

Ironic that this post wants us to be concerned about other platforms optimizing posts that make their users concerned

There was a good article [0] in The Atlantic yesterday linking this centralized algorithmic vitriol to the decline of democracy in America. The article also suggests some techno-legal fixes that I&#x27;m leery of, but I think its diagnosis of the issue is spot-on.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theatlantic.com&#x2F;magazine&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2021&#x2F;04&#x2F;the-internet-doesnt-have-to-be-awful&#x2F;618079&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theatlantic.com&#x2F;magazine&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2021&#x2F;04&#x2F;the-int...</a> (paywalled)

Of course, so do articles <i>about</i> the algorithms.<p>It&#x27;s turtles all the way down.

If you are going to claim that people are incentivized to do something, you had better state what those incentives are. Are there editors left at Yahoo?

The article is pretty light on how these platforms do so.<p>Do they not simply bubble up popular posts: ones with likes, retweets, and comments? That might mean a politicized post, but it also could be a positive one about the kindness of a stranger or some cute picture of your kids.<p>These platforms may well be incentivizing enraging posts. I just don&#x27;t know how they&#x27;re doing it, and this article did not help me understand it.

I’m going to take a moment to plug The Congressional Research Service. They produce reports on every topical issue. Free, readable, and timely. Stop reading the news&#x2F;social media and get informed (by a variety of higher quality sources).

Enraged is an easy form of engagement. Perhaps rage is the junk food of emotions...

People are getting increasingly enraged because there is a palpable culture shift happening in the western world, creating a giant rift in fundamental principles, societal perspectives, and interpretation of current events. When we can&#x27;t agree on any of these things, the other side seems radical and unhinged when interpreted through our own set of values&#x2F;principles.<p>The &quot;enrage machine&quot; is simply a product of this phenomenon. Sure, you can try and reduce the rage by censoring and banning minority views off the platform, but the underlying problem is still there. The angry division is still there, whether you&#x27;re hearing it on social media, cable news, talk radio, or Thanksgiving dinner.

I always thought Techdirt should be called Daily Outrage. When its all about eyeballs on pages of course things that draw attention will be prioritized.

How is this different than traditional news headline construction, other than it being done manually?

Let&#x27;s not forget YouTube in this

Obviously. Public gossip, rumours, hype and outrage sells and gives more eye balls and clicks.

i think they’re tailored to optimize for clicks. and the users themselves are the ones the click these enraging stories and therefore train the ml algorithms to show more of that

prof Scott Galloway has been screaming about this for some time on his Pivot podcast with Kara Swisher.

You should try a 4chan &#x2F;pol &quot;you rage you loose&quot; thread.

Definitely. They allowed Trump&#x27;s posts because it got people enraged, every tweet causing a storm of tweets from all camps, all going after each other and trying to &#x27;debate&#x27;, but in the end it became a meaningless cauldron of activity with a net effect of zero...<p>...for the participants anyway, for Twitter, any engagement, any activity, any pair of eyes on their service translates to money, both directly (ad impressions) and indirectly (engagement correlates with stock price). In the past year - less Trump, more Covidiots - Twitter&#x27;s stock price has doubled.

It&#x27;s an interesting one.<p>The objective function for serving content surely isn&#x27;t <i>literally</i> to get people angry, rather to &quot;promote engagement&quot; or whatever, which turns out to be the same thing.<p>Can you ban a company from trying to optimise its key metrics? No. So what do you do? If the enraging content is there anyway, what&#x27;s wrong with pointing people to it? If you&#x27;re allowed to sell dynamite to the public in your shop, why not point angry customers to it?<p>To me the whole model is broken, and picking individual bits of it that aren&#x27;t is not the constructive approach.

Nobody is forcing us to read the news, participate in social media etc. We can pick and choose what news to consume and from where (yeah, most news sites are crap, I get that).<p>There is no way these sites are gonna police themselves and there is no way for us to expect the govt to control them. There is just too much ad money and too much access to data, they are not going to give that up. But there is an easy solution to this. Just refuse to participate and consume only the absolute bare minimum news, social media etc.<p>Social media is not email or SMS, they are not necessary for daily life. One can easily live without Facebook&#x2F;Twitter&#x2F;Instagram etc (and many do), unlike say GMail.