Social media is designed to create strong emotions

Algorithms boost information that creates strong emotions, especially anger because it increases clicks, which increases profits

Supporting Research

Studies have shown evidence that social media algorithms are optimized to boost user engagement, which in turn was associated with strong emotions, including anger:

- Facebook Researchers discovered its ranking algorithm was prioritizing content with reaction emojis, especially “angry reaction emoji”. These posts tended to keep users more engaged, and “keeping users engaged was the key to Facebook’s business.” Data scientists at the company confirmed that posts with the angry reaction emoji were “disproportionately likely to include misinformation, toxicity and fake news”

- A published study by computer scientists at Cornell and UC Berkeley found that X (formerly Twitter)’s algorithm amplified tweets expressing stronger emotions, especially anger. Moreover, political tweets shown by the algorithm led to ‘othering behavior’ including reinforcing negative beliefs about groups in society with opposing views

- A study by researchers at University College London and the University of Kent detected a four-fold increase in the level of misogynistic content served up to a fresh TikTok account over five-days of monitoring. The algorithm served more extreme videos, often focused on anger and blame directed at women.

- The Integrity Institute reviewed the literature on social media newsfeeds which are “ranked by engagement”. They observed that:

  1.  Internet platforms rank content primarily by predicted engagement

  2.  Ranking by engagement increases user retention

  3. However, engagement is negatively related to quality – the most engaged with content is “objectively low quality” (clickbait, spam, misleading headlines and misinformation)