Exit
T WAS THE STORY
people couldn’t stop
sharing. Nina Davuluri’s victory at the 2014
Miss America contest set off an
explosion of racist tweets, which
news sites quickly bundled into
stories that immediately seemed
everywhere online. One group’s
rage sparked another’s: On Facebook and Twitter, a cacophony of
irate individuals expressed outrage
at other people’s anger. A single
Buzzfeed story about the racist
posts, “A Lot Of People Are Very
Upset That An Indian-American
Woman Won The Miss America
Pageant,” was shared by more
than 62,000 people and has been
viewed over 5.3 million times.
The racist tweets, as well as the
outrage they produced online, underscore an important but often
ignored truth about the kind of
conversation that social media encourages: The wisdom of crowds is
no match for the rage of crowds.
Madison Avenue taught the
world that “sex sells.” But that
motto needs an update in the social media age, where information
travels in new ways and is carried
along by different people. Online,
rage rules. I hate, therefore I “like.”
(And since everyone wants a “like,”
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people aim to provoke.)
“Negative comments are much
more memorable and much more
noticed,” observed Stanford University professor of communication Clifford Nass in an interview
earlier this year. “In a world where
you’re trying to get noticed, going
negative is the way to go.”
As a growing body of research
shows, subtlety isn’t what succeeds
on social networks. Anger-induc-
Negative comments
are much more memorable
and much more noticed.
In a world where you’re
trying to get noticed, going
negative is the way to go.”
ing, emotionally-charged content
spreads best, and the success of
those posts may in turn be shaping
the way we think and communicate
with one another — lending an almost feverish pitch to our interactions online. Although social media
sites claim they’re about kumbaya
social connection, their design actually makes them extremely wellsuited to arousing our emotions.
Many have argued precisely the
opposite, saying that Facebook,