What’s to like as angertainment rules the news feed

US politicians have been impotent in regulating the angertainment beast.

If you have noticed something strange happening in the information ecosystem during the past few years you are not alone.

While many of us have long suspected that something weird is happening, now researchers are beginning to understand just how much our media environment has changed across a relatively short time span.

A study published this month in the journal PLOS One has found that among American media organisations, headlines that denote anger, fear, sadness and disgust have all increased dramatically, while headlines denoting neutrality and joy have declined across the same period.

The study, authored by a research team from the University of Otago, New Zealand, looked at 23 million headlines from 47 news outlets in the US and analysed them for an “emotional payload” across a 20-year period. In that time, headlines that denoted anger increased 104 per cent, fear increased 150 per cent, disgust increased 29 per cent and sadness increased 54 per cent. Headlines that denoted neutral emotional content have decreased by about 30 per cent. Similarly, joy also has declined (after increasing in the mid-2000s). These trends were found to be bipartisan.

The trends studied are specific to the US, and a similar study has not been carried out in Australia, so we should generalise to our own country with caution. Nevertheless, the Australian media industry does suffer from many of the same pressures as our American cousins. And while the problems faced by each industry are not identical, there is sufficient overlap to merit analysis.

The authors of this study note that there was an inflection point in US media trends in about 2010. The most obvious explanation for this inflection point is that social media companies made important changes to their platforms in the year before. In 2009, Facebook added the “Like” button and Twitter added the “Retweet” button to their platforms. This suddenly introduced virality into the media ecosystem and news organisations were forced to adapt or die.

An article published in The Wall Street Journal’s Facebook Files last year tells a fascinating story. In 2018, the chief executive of BuzzFeed emailed a top manager at Facebook to tell him that the platform was making their worst content go viral, which was incentivising BuzzFeed to create more terrible content. Articles such as “21 Things That Almost All White People are Guilty of Saying” were getting tens of thousands of shares while other articles about self-care and kittens were struggling to gain traction.

It’s not clear what reply the BuzzFeed executive received from Facebook. But what we do know is that Facebook (now Meta) has not changed.

According to the WSJ, Facebook’s internal research confirmed, for years, that sensationalistic, outrage-induc­ing content was being rewarded by its algorithms. Any post that has a lot of comments underneath is pushed to the top of users’ news feeds, presumably because past engagement is the best predictor of future engagement. And the main goal of Facebook is to keep you engaged for as long as possible, not to keep you informed and not to keep you happy. If you’ve ever been on Facebook you will know the posts with the most comments are usually the ones in which people are having “flame wars”; that is, fighting with each other.

So in a very perverse way news organisations have been subtly influenced to produce more and more content that provokes such reactions.

Many of us have long suspected that social media is having an unhealthy impact on the news industry. So it is validating to see these intuitions confirmed by scientific research. A study published last year authored by David Rozado, Musa al-Gharbi and Jamin Halberstadt found that in The New York Times alone, use of the word racist and sexist had increased by 400 per cent across just 10 years. Either actual incidents of racism or sexism have increased 400-fold between 2010 to 2020 and the paper has been reporting on this massive uptick in hate crime, or the paper has been spoonfeeding its readers the provocative material that might benefit its bottom line. I’ll let you decide which explanation is more plausible.

Researchers now know that posts that have “high emotional valence” receive more retweets and likes than posts that are more emotionally neutral. And, out of all the emotions, anger gets the most traction. But another variable predicts reweets and likes even more than anger. That variable is out-group animosity.

Another study last year authored by Steve Rathje, Jay Van Bavel, and Sander van der Linden found that posts from news media outlets about the political out-group were shared or retweeted about twice as often as posts about the in-group. If you are right-leaning and want to get a lot of retweets, then you must hate on leftists. If you are left-leaning you must hate on rightists. This is a mutually escalatory cycle where no side can win and both sides compete to waste each other’s energy and time.

Media organisations have had to adapt to this new environment by producing what I call “angertainment”. Angertainment can be profitable in the short term but across the longer term it is harmful to the public and damaging to the journalistic profession. I think we all know this. But the uncomfortable reality is that audiences often demand anger­tainment. Much like the spectators in the Roman Colosseum, many people want to live vicariously through watching blood sports. Today, media is one of them.

While we can agree that the trend towards angertainment is a concerning one, nevertheless some issues are of course worthy of indignation. Companies such as Meta have made tens of billions of dollars enriching themselves, their board members and their investors while pumping hot air into our information environment like a chemical plant dumping toxic waste into a river. While Australian legislators are doing their best to protect the Australian public, US politicians have been devastatingly impotent in regulating this beast. This is one thing that is worth getting angry about.

Claire Lehmann is founding editor of Quillette.