Why Online Outrage Is So Profitable, and So Hard to Quit

Almost every day a new trend pops up: an incident, a crime, a harassment case, a social crisis, a huge wave of outrage, then an even bigger wave of opinions. But the real question is: who benefits from this?

Media’s job is to shed light, and that’s natural and needed, but when you look at the big pages, you’ll notice that the disaster itself has become a source of engagement, views, comments, and shares. People in the comments turn into camps — men against women, with the victim or against them — everyone rooting for the team they identify with, completely detached from the truth or the details of the incident.

The Chemistry of Outrage

What happens is a state of collective psychological polarization: whenever people gather with those who share their opinion, their positions become more extreme and less willing to hear any different point of view. And this feeds off something even more dangerous — content that carries shock, anger, or provocation stimulates the brain’s reward system and makes it release dopamine, the same substance linked to addiction, which makes us come back to consume the same kind of news again even if it provokes us or wears us out mentally.

The data on this is more specific than it might seem. A 2018 study published in the journal Science, led by researchers Soroush Vosoughi, Deb Roy, and Sinan Aral at MIT, examined roughly 126,000 stories spread on Twitter over more than a decade and found that false news traveled faster, farther, and to more people than true news, especially stories built around fear, disgust, and surprise. The researchers didn’t find bots driving most of that spread. They found people, retweeting because the story provoked something fast enough to bypass whatever second thought might have slowed it down.

The Attention Economy

In simpler terms, the platform rewards anger, and the more anger there is, the more reach there is, and the more reach there is, the more profit there is — and that’s part of the attention economy. This economy is built on the idea that you’re not the user, you’re the product — your time, your anger, your comments, your shares, all of it turns into advertising value. And the pages or entities that support this, their main goal is profit; it doesn’t matter what the issue is or who’s wrong or who should be held accountable — what matters is reach and engagement. And the more dangerous thing is that rarely does anyone offer real solutions. The same issues repeat in the same way, the same wording, the same state of anger and division, because the goal isn’t change but riding the wave.

Why It’s Hard to Look Away

And there are a lot of people who understand the game but lose their bearings because of the flood of news and daily provocation that creates a constant inner feeling that you must speak, you must attack, you must defend. This is linked to a psychological phenomenon called emotional contagion — collective emotions spread like a virus. If anger dominates the timeline, you’ll feel angry even if you weren’t interested in the topic to begin with. Over time, confirmation bias appears. People start looking for content that supports their opinion, not content that clarifies the truth, and whenever they see big pages talking in the same direction, they assume that’s the whole reality.

It would be too easy, though, to treat every viral outrage cycle as manufactured and empty. Some of them produce real consequences: public pressure amplified through exactly this mechanism has led to firings, resignations, and policy reversals that wouldn’t have happened through quieter channels. The #MeToo movement moved as fast as it did partly because outrage is contagious in the way described above, and in that case the contagion surfaced accountability that had been buried for years. The mechanism itself is neutral. It amplifies whatever content is loudest, and sometimes the loudest content deserves the amplification.

The harder question, then, isn’t whether to feel anger about any of this — plenty of it is worth being angry about. It’s whether that anger is moving toward a decision or just circulating for its own sake, generating the next comment and the next share without ever arriving anywhere. Platforms don’t distinguish between the two kinds of anger because they don’t need to; both keep people scrolling. Internal Facebook research made public in 2021 through leaked documents and reporting on what became known as the Facebook Files found something the company’s own engineers had flagged years earlier: a 2018 change meant to boost “meaningful” engagement had ended up rewarding posts that made people angry more than posts that made them anything else, because anger was simply more likely to get a reaction. Telling productive anger apart from manufactured anger is a job no algorithm is going to do, which leaves it, uncomfortably, as the one part of this cycle an individual can still actually control.