“Liking” Outraged Posts Encourages People To Express More Outrage In The Future

By Emily Reynolds It can be hard to know what’s going to go viral — or even what’s going to get you just a few more likes. For many, however, expressing an outraged opinion on politics has been a good way of garnering interactions, even if it doesn’t always have the intended effect. A new study, published in Science Advances and authored by William Brady and colleagues from Yale University, looks more closely at how outrage spreads on social media. It finds that likes and shares      garnered by outrage act as a reward that “teaches” us to express more of the same. The team first trained a machine learning algorithm to classify tweets by whether or not they expressed outrage. The algorithm was trained on 26,000 tweets collected after a variety of incidents that sparked widespread outrage in the United States, such as the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh and the Trump administration’s ban on transgender people in the military; some of these tweets contained outrage and some didn’t. The incidents were chosen because of their hypothesised resonance with different groups of people on the political spectrum; one, an incident showing an angry woman being ejected from a United Airlines flight, was non-political in nature. Once trained, the algorithm was then used to analyse the entire tweet history of 7,331 Twitter users who had posted about these incidents, totalling around 12.7 million tweets. The team also gathe...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Social Twitter Source Type: blogs