There are many downsides and problems with social media, with just as many reasons to back them up. However, the real problems lie much deeper, in the place where it all started: Silicon Valley.
Silicon Valley was created by a shunned engineer who recruited brilliant misfits to his corner of California. It soon became a world dependent on and created by venture capitalists who, by modeling their proteges after themselves, made a pool of leaders with each successive generation of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs becoming increasingly homogeneous. Common beliefs held here are based upon freedom, meritocracy, and doing anything to uphold these beliefs. As described by Max Fisher in his book The Chaos Machine, Silicon Valley has “a near-absence of rules, [which] they [the founders] believed, would lead to a self-governing community in which ideas rose or fell on merit. In reality, […] the loudest voices and most popular opinions dominated.”. One of the many products of this was social media, the online world created to uphold these notions. The catch is the long-term attention this binary utopia requires. Not only was attention valuable because it was what kept the “civilization of the mind” alive, as it is described in A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, but because it drives profit. Most of social media’s profit, and hence, the way social media can continue to operate, comes from charging other companies for ads. The price that ad space platforms charge has a direct relationship with the number of eyes on the platform, causing attention to become the currency of social media. For the founders’ vision to come true, they need our commitment to social media to parallel or even outpace our dedication to the real world.
Millions of engineers have worked on creating ways to draw users to social media, mostly by developing algorithms built to push content out in the most attention-seeking way. After years of extensive testing of different algorithms across platforms, the optimal way to do so was determined: algorithms that favor moral outrage.
Moral outrage is the foundation of human society. Like any species that lives in groups, we had to evolve a way of cooperating, but unlike other species, where the stronger and most aggressive males dominated, we had sophisticated language that allowed for complex communication. This allowed us to make a new form of society. Anthropologist Ernest Gellner called it “tyranny of the cousins.” Tribes were kept together by shared fealty to a moral code, which was not enforced by the strongest, but by all the adults (the cousins). Moral outrage is the foundation of our societies because it keeps us together. Fisher writes, “it [moral outrage] was how you alerted your community to misbehavior—how you rallied them, or were yourself rallied, to punish a transgression. And it was the threat that hung over your head from birth until death. […] This threat, often deadly, became an evolutionary pressure in its own right, leading us to develop ultra-fine sensitivities to the group’s moral standards.” This might seem extreme to some, but we’ve all seen the consequences. For example, we often feel betrayed when our friends or family aren’t angry at the same things we are angry at because it causes our sense of moral outrage to be compromised. This then may lead to an urge to punish them in a way that the ‘cousins’ would do so.
You might already be able to guess how social media takes advantage of moral outrage to take control of our attention. Moral outrage is so fundamentally ingrained in us; it demands our full and lasting attention. Think about how engrossing gossip is despite its harm. Our interest in gossip arises from an instinct to know everything about our community to make sure everything’s going fine, or to fix things if they’re not. Social media is not only a huge source of gossip, where secrets spread like wildfire, and the audience numbers in the millions, but the content is centered around promoting moral outrage. This creates a world that psychologist Joshua Grubbs defines as “homogeneity, ingroup/outgroup biases, and a culture that encourages outrage.”
What you see every time you open social media appeals to those instincts, whether it be political bullets about the state of the world fired at the opposing party or defending our favorite love interest because they are the only socially acceptable choice. Conspiracies and misinformation are especially created to prey on moral outrage by pitting us against each other. You may already know this through ragebait or clickbait, but it exists in even the most innocent of things. Sayings such as “if you know you know” and “only real ones know” open up a chasm between the group who knows and who doesn’t, and that chasm allows moral outrage to flourish.
This is the point where things start to deteriorate. While inside jokes and exaggerated attention-grabbing newspaper headlines have always existed, with social media, it is no longer viable. The danger of moral outrage is only the superficial issue with social media, because the real danger is convenience and hence, concentration.
Although preying on our moral outrage has been a centuries-long market, in all those centuries, it was in moderation. The newspaper came in the morning, and afternoon gossip came a few moments later and died off by the end of the day, limiting the amount of moral outrage we were exposed to. Newspaper headlines were equally or more inciting than now, but the difference is that they weren’t seeing headlines about the socio-economic state of the world or false media generated by artificial intelligence in the amounts we do now. It’s so easy to pull your phone out and take a quick peek at social media, especially when over eighty-nine percent of the world has access to a broadband-enabled smartphone, according to the Ericsson Mobility Report from November 2025, and when we check our phones about forty-seven times a day, according to Deloitte. Although there’s a high chance we’ll see some funny content, there’s an equal or higher chance we’ll see moral outrage-inducing content. And we’re seeing it right after snoozing our alarms, waiting for our coffee to brew, waiting for the subway on the way to work, waiting in line to pay at the grocery store—at nearly any moment across the 5.66 billion social media accounts globally, according to the data company Kepios.
The convenience of social media hasn’t just brought free speech closer to us; it has also brought the negative effects of moral outrage closer and closer. Familiarity breeds normalcy, and as social media becomes more and more familiar, our ability to handle the real world dwindles. Our attention spans may be getting shorter, but our appetites for gossip and moral outrage only get bigger. Every new video comes a split second after the last with the subsequent revelation of a new egregious action, which must mean that this is the speed at which the real world works, right? If the faces on our screens can change and disappear as quickly as they came, then so can the faces in front of us, right? The false reality that we see on social media extends beyond simply overwhelming amounts, but also absurd boundaries.
Our ability to balance our moral outrage with reasonable logic and day-to-day lives shrinks and shrinks and shrinks. The danger of social media lies not in the people spreading misinformation and creating such content, as they are just taking advantage of an algorithm that gets them a monthly paycheck and their next meal. The danger lies not in the moral outrage it spreads, because this evolutionary mechanic has as much blame as our thumb does for opening social media. The true danger is the convenience and concentration of social media.
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