🦠 How Misinformation Multiplies By Exploiting Outrage
New research finds a tight link between dishonest news and feelings of outrage on social media
If you’ve paid any attention to modern social challenges over the last decade, you’ve probably come across the growing problem of misinformation online. Maybe you’ve even seen fishy stories appearing in your social media feeds.
It’s not that lies have never been a problem in the news before. Misinformation campaigns, dishonest propaganda, and distorted news stories have been a problem throughout human history. The only difference today is how easily that misinformation can be created and spread around the world.
For many examples of misinformation, a primary objective for the creator is to emotionally manipulate their audience, because emotions can be highly effective at motivating action. You don’t need to pay a marketing guru to help you spread the word about your latest initiative if you can provoke people into spreading it themselves.
For a politician, this might involve a smear campaign against an opponent, while for bad actors at their computers, it might simply involve making money from creating harmful viral content. In both cases, there is an attempt to get into the head of the person reading the headlines to emotionally nudge them toward interacting with and sharing your message.
A new study has examined one of the key emotional responses that misinformation will target in order to spread as widely and quickly as possible: outrage.
🗞️ What new data says about the link between misinformation and outrage
In a new study published at the end of November 2024, researchers examined misinformation from a couple of different angles to understand the strength of its association to emotional outrage.
First, they analyzed over 1 million links posted on Facebook and over 44,000 links on Twitter, and they classified the link sources as either high-trust or low-trust using third party fact-checking databases. This classification applied to the source website as a whole (e.g. “Internet Research Agency” labeled as a low-trust Russian propaganda organization).
For links posted on Facebook, the researchers looked at the quantity of anger reactions on posts for high-trust vs low-trust news sources. They found that posts linking to low-trust news sources elicited significantly more anger reactions than posts linking to high-trust news sources after controlling for overall audience size. They also saw that misinformation posts were more likely to elicit an anger reaction than any of the other Facebook emotion reactions (e.g. love, sad, wow).
The same pattern emerged for Twitter posts. When people responded to a tweet linking to a news story, their responses were significantly more likely to contain a sentiment of outrage when the link source was low-trust rather than high-trust.
Outrage didn’t just affect the sentiment people expressed in response to the story. Anger reactions on Facebook predicted a greater likelihood of sharing a story from both low-trust and high-trust sources. And once again, the same pattern appeared in the Twitter data, with more angry sentiments in tweet responses predicting more sharing.
In a final set of studies, the researchers ran their own behavioral experiments to test whether directly evoking outrage in participants would boost their motivation to share news stories. The researchers pulled together a list of 20 news headlines individually fact-checked as either true or false by Snopes and categorized them as either high-outrage or low-outrage. They then showed these headlines to groups of US participants (700+ participants per study) and asked them to rate how accurate they felt each story was and how likely they’d be to share it.
Participants were significantly more likely to report sharing news stories that made them angry, regardless of whether the stories were truthful or dishonest. This effect persisted even after controlling for people’s political ideologies, so it didn’t matter whether a participant considered themselves right or left-leaning. This greater desire to share outrage-evoking stories applied to misinformation as well as truthful stories, even though people were able to discern between the two in their accuracy ratings.
When people are angry about a news story, they are more likely to share it with their network. And when news stories come from low-quality sources that are associated with misinformation, they are frequently designed to elicit angry reactions. Altogether, this is a recipe for the rapid spread of misinformation online. When a bad actor’s objective is to spread a dishonest message as widely as possible, their best bet is to craft a message that sows widespread outrage.
⭐️ Takeaway tips
#1. How does a news headline make you feel?
When you see a headline on social media, pause and reflect on how it makes you feel. Sometimes, our emotions can blind us to our own condition as our conscious thoughts spiral away into interpretations about the headline and what should be done about it. For both low- and high-quality news sources, headlines are designed to grab our attention and enflame us because it gets clicks. This isn’t to say that we should never feel angry or compelled to act on perceived injustices in the world, but we should at least be fully aware of how a headline is impacting our psychology and how it might unintentionally change our behavior.
#2. Read before sharing
When we feel outraged, we’re particularly vulnerable to acting without thinking. In the studies above, any intense emotion in response to a story was associated with a greater likelihood of sharing a headline without reading the article. This is a problem because headlines are often the least representative and most distorted parts of a story, even when they come from high-quality sources (I can personally say that editors in the past have changed my headlines into statements I disagree with before publishing my work). When you want to share an article, make sure you’ve read the content of the article and understand what really happened in the story. For low-quality news sources, this might not help much since they’re likely to include factual errors within the entire text, but for high-quality news sources, it makes a big difference.
#3. Be discerning about trustworthiness and intention among your news sources
Wherever you sit on the political spectrum, you’re likely to find news sources that vary in their dedication to integrity and honest reporting even if they all agree with you. It’s important to know the difference between them and be aware of which sources you really trust to give you accurate information and which you might consume more for entertainment. Since people are more likely to be misled by low-trust sources, you could consider limiting your shares on social media to higher quality sources, even if you find low-quality sources saying the same thing.
“For evil news rides post, while good news baits.”
~ John Milton