Class 42. Why Social Media Makes You M.A.D.
We blame the platforms. But what if the bigger problem is us?
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My goal had been to start off 2025 with the home stretch of the course syllabus, which was originally called “Disinformation and the Lure of Authoritarianism.” However, since that boat has sailed and half the country has happily signed up for autocracy, I have renamed the last module to “Building Resilience Against Disinformation.” We’re going to need it. I’ll be kicking off that module next Sunday with the fabulous Ruth Ben-Ghiat, who will help us understand just how bad things are going to get. But on the theory that we basically have no where to go but up, I’ll spend the last few weeks after that exploring some forgotten old and untried new ideas to combat the current iteration of the information war.
For now, though, I want to close out my module about Social Media and the Media Ecosystem by talking why social media is the anger- and anxiety-causing cesspool we know and love today. I think most of us know by now, or have at least intuited, that rage is the emotion that travels fastest on the internet. The question is, why?
The short answer, of course, is that the platforms on which we will end up spending 5% of our lives are offshoots of what started as a website to rate (and rank) the attractiveness of the women at Harvard. I mean, these were not exactly designed to promote the loftiest of goals. But the longer story is more complicated, and weaves together some of the themes I covered earlier about excessive bonding social capital (Class 27), group psychology (Class 31), and tribal identity (Class 34).
Social media offers the perfect storm for these three already dangerous ingredients to come together and maximize their toxic potential. Most of you recognized this in the last class assignment, when I asked you to watch a clip of 1984’s “Two Minutes Hate” and analyze how the same scene would manifest on social media. You wrote the following:
“[W]hen i was on twitter, the 'ganging up' on 'the other' was so ugly and unnerving, i couldn't stay on the platform”
“Social media is the perfect weapon since a number of accusations and grievances can be launched and adjusted as needed to stoke the various reasons people are on the bandwagon”
“They have a certain amount of anonymity so they can type things that they would not normally say in person. They feel empowered because no one can see them as they do this. It is a group mentality while being alone”
“Being with other people might temper my reaction (if I were not sure of their leanings) but it might also heighten my fury in a collective of like-minded people. On social media, we tend to reinforce each other and not interact with those with opposing views”
Our last class speaker, Renee DiResta, author of Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies Into Reality, has a term for the target of outrage on social media (usually on X/Twitter): the “Main Character” of the day. She writes that the “Main Character” can be the focal point for outrage about a “pseudo event” (some real or imagined slight that one user feels/observes and then shares with others), which then riles up an online mob:
Twitter’s design creates an opportunity for emergent collective behavior in which bystanders everywhere can instantly jump into online crowds and start brawling…. In the real world, statues are toppled, and protests come to an end; alternately, hatred can be mitigated by looking into the eyes of the target and recognizing their humanity.
But online harassment, brigading, and dogpiling have no similar catharsis. There is no physical requirement to disperse and no achievement indicating that things have come to an end. Instead, there is a perpetual state of simmering outrage or vitriol, ready to boil over at an opportune provocation…. As members [grow] tired of brigading one person or raging against some idea, they simply [grasp] at the next. And participants in the mobs are further emboldened by the cloak of anonymity.
It’s basically Two Minutes Hate, on steroids (Perpetual Hate?). (I myself have been the Main Character on Twitter a couple of times — once for daring to suggest that Nikki Haley may go by an anglicized nickname rather than her given first name because it can help her “pass” in a race-conscious society — and it wasn’t particularly fun.)
As illustrated by both the 1984 clip and DiResta’s description of the Main Character, you basically need three things to generate group outrage:
A common enemy
A story about the enemy that creates moral outrage
A way to communicate your moral outrage to others
Let me introduce you to the work of my Yale colleague, psychologist Molly Crocket, and her two coauthors, William Brady and Jay VanBavel, who came up with something called the M.A.D. Model of Moral Contagion. The model explains how group identity, user behavior, and the design of social media platforms interact in synergistic ways to spread mostly highly emotionally-reactive content. You can read the whole piece (and I recommend it), but their simple diagram is really all you need to follow along as I pull out the main points:
The authors base their model on empirical observations that “moral-emotional content” — content that both has political salience and is emotionally arousing — is more likely to be spread by users than other content, a phenomenon they call “moral contagion” (sort of like the spread of a disease). Let’s see how the three components for group outrage play out in this model:
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