The age of digital outrage

In 2016, a skinny vegan violinist named Nicholas Perry announced on YouTube that he was giving up veganism for health reasons. He began posting mukbang videos online, tapping into a trend that originated in Korea for watching people eat large quantities of food on camera. Soon Perry, who renamed himself Nikocado Avocado, was eating entire fast-food menus and mountains of flaming hot Cheetos and instant noodles for his digital audience. Within a few years his weight had ballooned to more than 400lb (around 180kg), and he sometimes appeared on videos wearing a CPAP oxygen mask or in a mobility scooter. Many of his hour-long videos have been viewed over a million times, but I found it too disturbing to watch for more than a few minutes what looks like an unending, slow-motion breakdown as Perry cries and rants and screams and flutters his eyelids and forces huge forkfuls of food into his mouth. Perry’s story is an extreme example of a feedback loop that many people are familiar with: you post something online, perhaps a snarky comment or a cat video or a bikini snap or a long, informative Twitter thread, and notice a spike in interest, which encourages you to post more of the same, until soon snark or cats or thirst traps or mansplaining become central to your online identity.

This is one of many mechanisms the writer and technologist Tobias Rose-Stockwell identifies by which social media encourages people to take extreme positions. Facebook’s own data has shown that borderline content – posts that almost meet the threshold to be banned for being too graphic, misleading or offensive – attract much higher engagement than more anodyne posts. We cannot help but gawk at the metaphorical (or actual) car crash in our social media feeds, and when we do we often feel compelled to respond, to signal our disgust or anger. This, in turn, triggers others to respond, creating a cascade of outrage.

This emotional volatility is often increased by the information we receive on social media – a photo or short video clip, an angry tweet – being stripped of its wider context. This can make it more inflammatory, because we are not witness to any attenuating circumstances, and contributes to a phenomenon Rose-Stockwell calls context creep, as people begin to project different meanings onto a controversy. A famous person, let’s call him Jim, is having a bad day and sends a rude tweet, which one group of outraged Twitter users conclude is subtly directed at his female colleague, proving that Jim is a raging misogynist. This triggers another group of outraged Twitter users to point out that it is dangerous to pile onto a vulnerable figure, Jim having spoken recently of his drug addiction. At which point, another group of angry users leaps in to rage about the stigmatisation of drug users, or the unassailability of male privilege… and so on.

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