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If you spend just five minutes scrolling through the X account @libsoftiktok, you’d think that the United States has collapsed into a lawless oligarchy run by power-hungry and morally bankrupt Democrats who are pushing kids to transition, letting terrorists in through the border willy-nilly, and funneling billions of dollars toward bogus diversity initiatives.
That’s exactly why @libsoftiktok has 4.3 million followers on X.
“This is how desperate they are to mutilate your kids,” the account wrote in response to a Colorado children’s hospital’s plans to resume gender-affirming care while the state challenges a related executive order. In another post, this one on foreign aid: “[Somalia is] using our own money to lobby for more money and handouts.”
The vague “they” in the first post is just as deliberate as the collective “our” in the second. Accounts like @libsoftiktok are known for sharing moralized content and discourse about our shared future; whether something is good for us, for instance, or if a policy is moving us in the right direction. These are big questions that are often unsettled, but one thing is for sure: We react to them. Passionately.
Research suggests that divisive content is more likely to go viral; so are tweets (now known as X posts) that use moral-emotional words like “attack,” “fight,” “shame,” and “wrong,” according to a 2017 study from New York University. A Pew study from the same year found that posts on Facebook expressing “indignant disagreement” or “annoyance, resentment, or anger” averaged more likes, comments, and shares than their more agreeable counterparts.
Academics like Sinan Aral, director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, have spoken out about why. In his 2020 book The Hype Machine, Aral argued that the architects of social media platforms aren’t necessarily malicious, they’re just beholden to business models that demand our prolonged attention. Moralized content is more likely to keep us engaged and consistently reel in the most likes, comments, and shares, so social media algorithms push inflammatory content to more users, who become equally inflamed. The contagion spreads.
Writer and media researcher Tobias Rose-Stockwell calls this the “outrage machine”: the mechanisms that amplify our anger, panic, and indignation. These emotional extremes are how posts go viral — and how they’re propagated throughout social media: We’re backed into the most emotional of corners, reduced to the worst of our immediate reactions and unchecked feelings.
The machine does what it’s built to do. I knew this. And yet, when Donald Trump was reelected in November, I couldn’t stop scrolling. Post after post and video after video expressed fury and disgust. There were pictures of Harris-Walz supporters breaking down in tears at watch parties, and on TikTok, glassy-eyed stares of pure disbelief. But beyond the pervasive sense of hopelessness, there was also a feeling of righteous moral anger. “If you voted for Trump, you are objectively a bad person,” a user posted on X. “You don’t have morals.” Others demanded that Trump voters unfollow them.
I understood why. The stakes of the election were enormous, and for many people, devastatingly personal. But I’d fallen into the same trap before: getting riled up in a haze of seemingly righteous anger, writing off my “opponents” as bad people, and refusing with a stubborn blindness to even engage with them, much less understand them.
Social media makes this easy. We balk at the “other side” and maintain that our position is both morally right and ideologically superior. That the other side is not just wrong, but evil. That disengagement is virtue.
But after an election in which Trump won the popular vote, deciding that 77.3 million people are unworthy of engagement is not a strategy; it’s surrender. It’s also exactly what the outrage machine demands. We scroll on our hyper-polarized feeds that prey on our emotional vulnerabilities, so that when we find ourselves retreating further into our ideological silos, we believe that we’re actually…better for it.
We lose a lot in the process.
First, we lose the ability to critically examine the content we consume and the emotional responses we experience. It’s easy to make a snap judgment — especially if it’s about a moralized topic — but mental friction is absolutely necessary on platforms tooled against it. We have to interrogate ourselves: What about this post makes me feel so strongly? In what ways does it flatten and distort issues into easy narratives of us vs. them?
Then we lose our willingness to engage. I’ve had my fair share of debates in the comments section, and I’ve scrolled through lengthy threads where two people are clearly and irreconcilably at odds. It seems even more impossible to talk about moralized content when we feel so passionately about what’s good or bad, right or wrong, just or unjust. We think less lucidly when we’re angry. Our ability to reason is punted out the window. We begin to shut down, close ourselves off.
Deb Roy, the director of the MIT Center for Constructive Communication, warns us of the “spectacle” that social media creates. “It is not designed for listening,” he says. “It’s not designed for dialogue…. It’s not designed for deliberation.”
So, what can we do? Roy tells us to exercise our “civic muscle.” That doesn’t mean entertaining a user who’s clearly trolling, but it does mean understanding that our ideological adversaries are often more complicated than X or Instagram makes them out to be. It means recognizing that we’re being manipulated by algorithms designed to provoke us. It means acknowledging that our problems are far messier than a 280-character post can express.
The sooner we understand how social media is exploiting our emotions, the sooner we can avoid acting on quick and reductive impulses. Because the question isn’t whether the outrage machine will keep running — it will; the question is whether we let it run us.
