Outrage Machine Quotes

“These trigger-chains of moral retribution are beneficial to each of the propagators: They’re financially beneficial to news organizations, which can ensure ad clicks on a trending story. They are beneficial to the platforms that keep us cringing at Bob’s fate, because they keep us glued to our feeds. They’re beneficial for individual users who reshare the post, who increase their follower count and burnish their reputations.”
― Tobias Rose-Stockwell, Outrage Machine: How Tech Amplifies Discontent, Disrupts Democracy—And What We Can Do About It

“But what happens next is worse: context creep. Those who’re most offended by this initial post want to share it with others, and in doing so they inject it with their own editorial bent. Something that was already taken out of its original context is now placed in an entirely new one.”
― Tobias Rose-Stockwell, Outrage Machine: How Tech Amplifies Discontent, Disrupts Democracy—And What We Can Do About It

“But that process is as much determined by public opinion as by platform owners. The moral container was only set after a public outrage. In this way, the expression of outrage is very much a part of setting boundaries around what we allow platforms to do. Outrage forces moderators to set the defaults.”
― Tobias Rose-Stockwell, Outrage Machine: How Tech Amplifies Discontent, Disrupts Democracy—And What We Can Do About It

“Twitter is not a place where people lose limbs. Social media cancellation rarely has violent consequences, and the casualties of war do not at all compare to people's hurt feelings and damaged reputations.”
― Tobias Rose-Stockwell, Outrage Machine: How Tech Is Amplifying Discontent, Undermining Democracy, and Pushing Us Towards Chaos

“What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it. —Herbert Simon, Designing Organization for an Information Rich World”
― Tobias Rose-Stockwell, Outrage Machine: How Tech Amplifies Discontent, Disrupts Democracy—And What We Can Do About It

“Empathy always plays a distinct role in propaganda, explicitly asking the viewers to feel the suffering of the enemy’s victims and calling on them to respond with condemnation and moral outrage.”
― Tobias Rose-Stockwell, Outrage Machine: How Tech Amplifies Discontent, Disrupts Democracy—And What We Can Do About It

“The second was that moral extremes often have terrible outcomes for societies.”
― Tobias Rose-Stockwell, Outrage Machine: How Tech Amplifies Discontent, Disrupts Democracy—And What We Can Do About It

“As social media forces us further into our corners of anxiety and outrage, we see our worst political and social fears realized.”
― Tobias Rose-Stockwell, Outrage Machine: How Tech Is Amplifying Discontent, Undermining Democracy, and Pushing Us Towards Chaos

“Metrics are a type of abstraction. They flatten complex things into simple things. Because of this, every time a behavior is turned into a number, pieces of that behavior are lost.”
― Tobias Rose-Stockwell, Outrage Machine: How Tech Is Amplifying Discontent, Undermining Democracy, and Pushing Us Towards Chaos

“Information lacking context often leads to conflict.”
― Tobias Rose-Stockwell, Outrage Machine: How Tech Is Amplifying Discontent, Undermining Democracy, and Pushing Us Towards Chaos

“Certainty plus ambiguity generates controversy.”
― Tobias Rose-Stockwell, Outrage Machine: How Tech Is Amplifying Discontent, Undermining Democracy, and Pushing Us Towards Chaos

“If you can find the control panel for empathy, you can absolutely push the buttons of outrage.”
― Tobias Rose-Stockwell, Outrage Machine: How Tech Is Amplifying Discontent, Undermining Democracy, and Pushing Us Towards Chaos