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There's a reason your feed can feel like a highlight reel of everything going wrong. The short answer is that your brain is partly to blame, and the platforms you scroll through have gotten very good at using that against you.
Psychologists call it negativity bias, the built-in tendency to pay closer attention to bad news than good. It's an evolutionary hangover from a time when scanning the environment for threats was the difference between lunch and becoming lunch. The brain learned early on that potential danger deserved more mental real estate than a pleasant surprise, and thousands of years of civilization haven't been enough to fully override that wiring.
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That's where social media platforms come in, and things get a bit circular. Algorithms are designed to keep you online as long as possible, which means they prioritize content that gets the most clicks, shares, and reactions. Anger and outrage, as it turns out, are exceptionally reliable engagement drivers.
A Yale University study found that expressing outrage online consistently earns more likes than almost any other type of interaction, and those likes gradually teach people to post angrier content over time. As co-author and Yale professor Molly Crockett explained, the amplification of moral outrage is a direct consequence of a business model built around engagement.
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The mechanics behind this are sometimes striking. Facebook reportedly adjusted its algorithm to weight an "angry" emoji reaction as equivalent to five regular likes, which predictably pushed more inflammatory content into people's feeds. What gets rewarded gets repeated, and what gets repeated gets amplified.
A Knight First Amendment Institute study found that of political content surfaced by Twitter's engagement-based algorithm, 62 percent expressed anger, compared to 52 percent in a simple chronological timeline. The difference isn't enormous, but it compounds across millions of posts every single day.
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None of this is a deliberate conspiracy. Platform designers did not sit down and decide to make everyone furious. It emerged gradually from the incentive structure of online advertising, where time-on-platform equals revenue, and negative content turned out to be a particularly effective fuel for keeping the clock ticking. The problem is that what keeps people scrolling tends not to be the heartwarming stuff.
