I
thought about this recently when one of our Colson Center board members
sent around a video from a recent Senate hearing. Last month, Tristan
Harris, a former design ethicist with Google and co-founder of the
Center for Humane Technology, testified on Capitol Hill about social
media.
In his testimony, Harris made startling
comments about Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. By far the most telling
was how he described these platforms. He called them “outrage
amplifiers.” This emotional reaction—outrage—is the secret sauce in
social media’s success.
According to Harris, Twitter in particular
is deliberately designed to spark, exploit, and perpetuate moral
outrage. He cited one study showing that every outrage-word a user adds
to their tweet increases their retweet rate by 17 percent!
Article after article has documented the
rise of “call-out culture,” the kind of online feeding frenzy that grips
users and drives them—often in the space of hours—to destroy
individuals’ lives and careers for the smallest offenses. If Harris is
to be believed, this outrage amplification isn’t a bug in social media,
it’s a feature. In fact, it’s their “business model.”
So far, my Twitter storms, and there have
been a few, have blown over without any permanent damage. Many others
aren’t so lucky. Jobs, friends, good names, even personal and family
security have been lost by many people, all because a small, outraged,
and ultra-amplified group of online activists decided to target them.