Platforms like Twitter may amplify engrained human behaviors, but a future filled with healthy discourse and productive conversations isn't impossible.
To no one’s surprise, scientists from Yale University found that social media platforms like Twitter amplify our collective moral outrage. Additionally, they found that it was mostly politically moderate users who learned to be more outraged over time.
The researchers looked at two forms of social learning while following the tweets and tweeters over the course of the events. One type of social learning was reinforcement learning, where people learn to adjust their behavior based on social feedback that they receive. For example, getting likes and shares can be interpreted as positive social feedback.
They then trained a machine learning model to pick up the linguistic features that are most associated with the tweets labeled as containing outrage. The model then extrapolated it to new tweets, and can estimate the probability that any given tweet contains an expression of moral outrage. The model performs very well with political topics, but it’s unclear if it can also be used for non-political topics.
Jonathan Nagler, a co-director of NYU Center for Social Media and Politics, who was not involved in the study, says it’s not shocking that moral outrage gets rewarded and amplified on social media. Then, the social media world came along. “I think it is important to realize that those things are very much connected, because a huge amount of what gets spread on social media starts on cable news.”
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