Last issue I talked about experiencing feelings of anxiety, something that I’ve never experienced before.
Sure, I’ve experienced dread and abject terror, but this general sense of the world being out to get me…
I’ve heard anxiety defined as the fight or flight response being activated due to a non-physical stimulus, where you are ready to run away, or defend yourself, but instead what is coming at you is a never ending stream of doom.
And, instead of offering well-balanced, nuanced arguments, what social media serves up is a toxic stew of left wing anger, right wing propaganda, AI slop and highly biased opinions from people you’ve never even heard of who are suddenly showing up in your feed.
Here’s the deal. Social media companies? Profit on outrage. They make money when people are engaged and baby, there’s nothing more engaging than yelling at someone you don’t disagree with.
They didn’t invent outrage. All they did was monetize it on a nationwide, even planet wide scale.
People yelling at your platform might seem like a bad thing to happen, but Facebook and other companies like it (I’m looking at you, X) have discovered that anger keeps people scrolling, fear keeps them clicking, moral indignation keeps them posting. And nothing focuses the attention more than the feeling that something is wrong and someone must be held accountable.
And it’s not even just politics (though don’t get me started on politics). People get worked up about opinions on Star Wars (What’s with the women!), Star Trek (What’s with all the women!), Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey adaptation (what’s with the black woman!) and basically any subject under the sun. If they can divide, they can conquer, financially.
Remember those innocent days, back when social media allowed us to connect with people we went to school with or stalk ex-girlfriends to see what they’ve done with their lives (I use the plural so people know I am not talking about myself, as I wasn’t cool enough to have more than one ex-girlfriend. She’s doing great. Lives in Fraser Lake these days. )
Social media companies sell advertising, but advertising only works if people are paying attention, and decades of psychological research show that negative stimuli—especially moral threats—are processed faster and remembered longer than neutral or positive ones. Outrage, in particular, is a high-arousal emotion. It doesn’t just grab attention; it demands action.
That action might be a share, a comment, a quote-tweet, or an angry reply—but from the platform’s perspective, all of those are wins.
Former Facebook engineer and ethicist Tristan Harris summarizes this dynamic bluntly: “Outrage drives engagement.”. The more a system learns from engagement metrics, the more it amplifies the emotional states most likely to generate them.
People think that social media endorses content as a form of promotion, but in reality, the algorithms don’t understand incentives—fact or fiction, left or right, good or bad—only patterns.
A key misunderstanding is that social media platforms “promote” outrage because they endorse its content. In reality, they promote it because algorithms are incentive-blind. They do not understand truth, nuance, or social cost—only patterns, and if this post is more likely to be commented on than that, it doesn’t care if the poster is on the side of the angels or devils, it just knows that engagement is booming. Disagreement is indistinguishable from agreement to the algorithm.
But reflection plus amplification equals distortion. When the loudest, angriest voices are boosted because they perform well, the emotional center of gravity shifts.
Outrage does something else that platforms love: it keeps people coming back.
Anger leaves people feeling unfulfilled. You don’t feel “done” after one scroll. You want updates. You want validation. You want to see if your side is winning. And slowly, subtly, you, in your efforts to affect the outcome of the argument—pro or con—are being affected. You check Facebook or X more. You click that video on YouTube that leans just a little farther left or right to find out if you agree with or disagree with the creator, which you’ll do vociferously in the comments
Way back when, I had the opportunity to interview media critic Neil Postman for the Vancouver Sun (what? You thought this was the high watermark of my career?). Even before social media existed, he argued in his most famous book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, that “Public discourse has become a form of entertainment.”
These days, it’s not just discourse, but conflict—political, cultural and even interpersonal—that people are turning to for entertainment. Rage baiting goes mainstream and the rich get richer.
Social media benefits from outrage because outrage aligns with its economic incentives. It isn’t malicious, just optimized for engagement.
And as social media makes us angrier, it also teaches us—quietly, persistently and dangerously—that anger is the most valuable way to be seen.
We are rewarded for bad behaviour, just as we reward others for bad behaviour. When people start fighting online, the eating popcorn memes come out. This is not people becoming better through dialogue, this is entertainment, akin to gladiators in the Roman coliseum. Maybe people aren’t literally dying for our amusement, but we are being made lesser.
So I’m going to suggest something to you. Something dangerous. Something difficult, but something that could be rewarding. Unplug. Walk away. Take a social media sabbatical, especially with Lent starting on February 18. You can’t change the algorithms by dancing on their Threads, so step back, step away, and breathe the fresh air. There are few places where it is as easy to just get away from it all and go for a walk. And when/if you return? Watch for the invisible hand behind the scenes, trying to pull your strings and get you riled up.
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.
