Moral Outrage Is the Internet's Favorite Drug

Coupling two visceral emotions, moral outrage can degrade the wit and composure of even those prepared to face it. Shocking videos of tragedy and gore going viral, political ads designed to scare and divide, headlines engineered by hate groups — moral outrage as a manipulative tool shows up constantly in daily life. The same emotion that fuels our desire to stand up for others and push for real social change is now routinely weaponized for fast money and political power. In Stand Out of Our Light, James Williams argues that moral outrage has become a powerful, flourishing force, driven by advances in technology. I agree — and I'd go further: the relevance of that point has only grown since the book was published, amplified by our current media culture and an increasingly divisive value system.

Moral outrage has become a go-to tool for advertisers, politicians, and hate groups looking to provoke a visceral reaction. Since the earliest days of mass information — newspapers, magazines — eye-catching headlines and imagery have been used to grab attention. But with the rise of social media, anyone competing for attention has discovered that one of the most reliable ways to get it is to trigger moral outrage in the audience. Williams describes moral outrage as "consist[ing] of more than just anger: it also includes the impulse to judge, punish, and shame someone you think has crossed a moral line." In recent years it's become a primary tool for grabbing mass attention and deepening divides between people who, in a lot of cases, wouldn't otherwise have any real issue with each other. Whoever controls what gets force-fed to us through media has an outsized grip on our emotions — as Williams puts it, "In the hands of a few dozen people now lies the power to shape the attentional habits — the lives — of billions of human beings."

Williams breaks attention into three categories: "Spotlight," "Starlight," and "Sunlight" — our direct, habitual, and underlying attention, respectively. He argues all three have been degraded by digital technology, and I'd argue all three have declined even faster in just the last few years. Clickbait is one of the clearest examples, touching all three categories at once. Williams cites a study of 100 million Facebook articles that found the most common phrases in top-performing headlines were things like "are freaking out," "make you cry," and "shocked to see" — and that headlines appealing to "a sense of tribal belonging" drove even more engagement. That's how blatantly exploitative a lot of the media we consume actually is. Applied to the "Sunlight" level, moral outrage becomes a root cause of a lot of the divisiveness we see today. Cancel culture, and a handful of related social phenomena, trace back to a collective sense of moral outrage turned against each other. When someone crosses one of our shared or tribal moral lines, we react with disgust and outrage — and because information now spreads instantly, we're exposed to essentially everything that gets posted anywhere. As Williams writes, "in the era of smartphones, if anyone experiences a misdeed, then everyone potentially experiences it." I'd add that the shift away from physical interaction has only made this more routine. We struggle to see past the constant barrage of what the crowd around us declares right or wrong, and it's easy to fall into a trap of self-superiority whenever someone gets publicly ostracized. Rushton and Thompson add another layer to this in Moral Outrage: Promise or Peril?: "We may justify our anger toward others by giving our emotions moral sanction or in self-serving posturing to elevate our personal standing or preserve our moral identity." That underlying self-justification is what lets moral outrage grow into more than just a spotlight-grabbing issue — it starts weaving itself into the "Sunlight" of how we see the world at all, at real cost to our own attention and self-interest.

The COVID-19 pandemic, arriving after Stand Out of Our Light was published, only proved the book's point further. Dependence on technology for social contact, work, and school spiked demand for people's attention, feeding an attention economy that encouraged companies to bombard consumers with targeted ads and politicians to run ads built to inflame and divide. And it wasn't just the pandemic's effect on our habits — Rushton and Thompson point out that COVID "laid bare the inequitable fractures in our health care system that place already vulnerable people of color at greater risk," happening in the same stretch as the collective outrage over George Floyd's murder. On top of media exploitation, we're genuinely living through a moment where moral outrage is, in a lot of cases, a fairly reasonable response. Climate change and systemic racism have kept millennials and Gen Z in something close to a constant state of moral outrage — which comes with its own cost to anxiety and attention.

Moral outrage has only become more prominent and more widespread since Williams wrote about it. The negative fallout has done real damage, especially to the people targeted by politicians and hate groups looking to exploit it. But it's also, over the same stretch, brought out something better in people — protest turnout and youth voter turnout being two clear examples. Given all of that, the responsible move is to actually educate people on how their emotions are being exploited, and help them see the traps a lot of us have already fallen into.

Sources: Williams, James. Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy. Cambridge University Press, 2018. · Rushton, C.H. & Thompson, L. "Moral Outrage: Promise or Peril?" Nursing Outlook 68, no. 5 (2020): 536–538.