Users co-create the outrage storm they complain about.

Evidence

But the storm is co-created. After the election, I also saw many acquaintances jumping into the melee, pouring out long, emotional, and hastily written diatribes online that inevitably got a lot of attention. I’m no exception; my most-liked Facebook post of all time was an anti-Trump screed. In my opinion, this kind of hyper-accelerated expression on social media is not exactly helpful (not to mention the huge amount of value it produces for Facebook). It’s not a form of communication driven by reflection and reason, but rather a reaction driven by fear and anger. Obviously these feelings are warranted, but their expression on social media so often feels like firecrackers setting off other firecrackers in a very small room that soon gets filled with smoke. Our aimless and desperate expressions on these platforms don’t do much for us, but they are hugely lucrative for advertisers and social media companies, since what drives the machine is not the content of information but the rate of engagement. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 228

Categorization

• XREF: Central to defending Odell against the withdrawal misreading — she is critical of her own platform participation, not merely of the platforms. — connects to: Outrage fuels the very media systems and politics it claims to oppose. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1692