8 ms·

Things the media does to manufacture outrage

290 points by akshat_h 11y ago

the_cat_kittles 11y ago
great write up. i've always felt that people on tv and writers on the net should really only talk about their own opinions- if there is something "people are outraged about", then have them on to discuss it.
gkoberger 11y ago
I hate when articles hide behind an invented "Twitter backlash", and then include 4-5 tweets with a handful of retweets. 6,000 tweets are sent every single second. You could build a narrative for anything with that logic. If your best example is a grammatically challenged tweet that racked up 4 favs and a retweet... you're probably inventing a controversy. Here's some insane examples from the first page of a Google News search for "Twitter Backlash": http://www.prweek.com/article/1372418/apple-faces-twitter-backlash-racism-allegation-australia-store http://www.prweek.com/article/1372418/apple-faces-twitter-ba... http://www.mirror.co.uk/3am/celebrity-news/ruby-rose-faces-backlash-twitter-6833436 http://www.mirror.co.uk/3am/celebrity-news/ruby-rose-faces-b... http://www.eonline.com/news/711079/raven-symone-angers-twitter-with-her-spring-valley-high-school-assault-comments http://www.eonline.com/news/711079/raven-symone-angers-twitt... http://www.her.ie/life/bloomingdales-forced-to-apologise-to-twitter-backlash-after-including-date-rape-message-in-christmas-catalogue/264317 http://www.her.ie/life/bloomingdales-forced-to-apologise-to-...
- ikeboy 11y ago
  http://combatblog.net/?p=8246 http://combatblog.net/?p=8246
- kelukelugames 11y ago
  Ah yes, remember #fuckParis? I can't believe that was real.
- bsbechtel 11y ago
  Ever try searching for trending outrage hashtags on Twitter? Generally it's 99.9% outrage over the outrage, with no real tweets expressing the original supposed outrage.
- aikah 11y ago
  "Twitterstorm", "Fury on social medias", the signature of "outrage as a business".
HappyTypist 11y ago
This is a consequence of writers at Business Insider and other brands being ranked by the number of clicks their pieces generate. Writing for them is more of a social science than journalism, with specific words and phrasing A/B tested and Web page designs optimised to get you to stay on the page just a tiny bit longer (so Google doesn't penalise them for bounce rate). Ever recall how BI articles end with an unrelated, click bait video?
- CM30 11y ago
  Pretty much this in a nutshell. Indeed, if you ever want to know (another) reason a lot of news sites seem to be posting articles to troll or bait their reader, that's because the per click model incentivises stirring up angry mobs rather than starting a civil debate. So for any writers without anything meaningful to say... well, just find the most obnoxious, audience baiting thing possible, back it up with a bunch of thinly sourced 'support' posts and watch your article trend on Reddit within an hour or two. Or maybe on Twitter. It's also why comment sections were virually unmoderated until recently... a civil debate brings less comments than a heated flame war between lunatics.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    > It's also why comment sections were virually unmoderated until recently... a civil debate brings less comments than a heated flame war between lunatics. I've heard second-hand information about my national media platforms that they're (the media companies) actually seeding flame wars in comments on purpose - angry people coming back to respond to other angry people = much more eyeballs = more ad dollars flowing in.
- _petronius 11y ago
  I also see it in major newspapers like The Guardian. Particularly around political stories, like Jeremy Corbyn and his new shadow cabinet, they seem predisposed to describe every comment made about them as putting the politicians "under fire" or some other such melodramatic term. And then when you read the actual quotes in the article, they are fairly tame, gentle criticisms. This happened twice just this week, once with the (constructive, rather softball) comments made by a union leader about Corbyn himself (to which the reaction was something along the lines of "oh no, he's losing the support of his base!"), to the rather mild back-and-forth about John McDonnell's sarcastic crack about Mao in Parliament (which the media basically manufactured into a fake story, all the while implying that McDonnell is a crypto-communist, while he is nothing of the sort). Anyway, rather than it being about a specific subject, I guess my point is that I am pretty down on journalists in general these days, because chasing the story and filling the news cycle (in any medium) seems to have taken priority over actually substantive reporting of things that matter.
tdkl 11y ago
Oh the drama. Close down Twitter, the 140 characters are exactly enough why those things get blown out of proportion. Also why ADD "journalists" adore Twitter.
ShirsenduK 11y ago
The saddest part is that the best public communication channel; Twitter; has been hijacked to become an attention seeking blow horn.
- irishcoffee 11y ago
  Allow me to introduce you to facebook. =pp
- kelukelugames 11y ago
  Medium's Twitter account tweets a lot of clickbait. It's sad.
- Yhippa 11y ago
  Reminds me of this article in general. The author sure did get a lot of mileage out of that one Tweet. This is a best case scenario for her as a writer. Free publicity!
- Retra 11y ago
  I'm baffled that you would think Twitter had the ability to be anything else. The site basically mandates that you compress all your messages into trivialize-able sound bites.
  - oska 11y ago
    Not true. Twitter allows you to makes a brief introduction to a linked article. I use twitter almost exclusively to follow individuals I respect, so I can be aware of new things they have written (or that they recommend).
    - Retra 11y ago
      You're not disagreeing with me. You're just saying that Twitter's propensity to allow people to advertise themselves to you happened to work.
- whoopdedo 11y ago
  Poe's law at work in this comment.
exstudent2 11y ago
What a great writeup! This is an example of an issue 100% created by the media. To be fair though there is a culture of "outrage" that exists. The media may be implicit in propagating it but they don't always create it. For example, this recently happened: http://hlrecord.org/2015/11/fascism-at-yale/ http://hlrecord.org/2015/11/fascism-at-yale/ I think it's important to study the media's role in creating and extending the reach of outrage, but it's equally important not to deny that there is a growing movement of people who are interested in limiting free speech and get very outrageous about it.
- ebola1717 11y ago
  That's a very uncompelling argument, not to mention patronizing. The criteria he sets up is literally "it's fascist if you want anything done about the things you're mad about," which is ridiculous because it removes any ability to change the status quo. If there were a professor who were openly defending fascism, calling for him to be removed would be fascist. In fact, if you change "Calling for people to be fired for expressing their beliefs" to "Calling for senators to be voted out of office for expressing their beliefs" then that's fascist. You can play this game for all his examples: > Calling to defund a newspaper for publishing an editorial you disagree with Divestment from companies funding apartheid, something student protesters commonly supported in the late 80s > Tearing down fliers that you disagree with Removing neo-Nazi propaganda posters > Calling for students to be expelled for wearing offensive Halloween costumes Calling for people to boycott Chick-Fil-A because of its owner's anti-gay agendas
  - jensen123 11y ago
    In the examples you are listing, the activists are using force to change the world into something they want, as opposed to using free speech to try to convince others. A while ago, I read the book Hitler - Memoirs of a Confidant by Otto Wagener. It really surprised me. From this book, I get the impression that Hitler was an idealist who really wanted to create a better world (at least for the Germans who he saw as being totally unfairly treated by France etc. after WW1). It can still be fascism, even if you see yourself as doing good. Actually, I think well-meaning idealists are sometimes some of the worst people out there. They see themselves as good and being correct, and they get really nasty and intolerant towards people who see things differently. There's the old saying "the road to hell is paved with good intentions", but I often get the impression that many people don't really grasp this.
deleted 11y ago
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wwzuk 11y ago
Your best bet is just to get rid of all social media. I honestly think that the drama that social media encourages is unhealthy and subtly ruining people's lives. It gives the impression that certain political groups are more influential than they are. It encourages outrage culture and the censorship that follows that movement. It's a lazy tool for certain types of journalists. There's so many more constructive things to do than use social media. Delete your accounts, wait a month for any addictive urges to pass and enjoy life again.
- ikeboy 11y ago
  ... Do you not consider hn social media, and if not, why not?
  - probably_wrong 11y ago
    For me, "social media" implies that I can use the platform to wish you a happy birthday. It should also allow me to show the world what I care about (people I know, topics I like, etc) just by visiting my profile. HN allows neither, so I wouldn't count it as so. I'd probably classify it as "news site with comments", but not "social media".
    - ikeboy 11y ago
      So reddit wouldn't qualify.
pistoriusp 11y ago
We are the angry mob We read the papers everyday We like who we like, we hate who we hate But we're also easily swayed - Kaiser Chiefs, The angry mob
kelukelugames 11y ago
I hear more people complain about outrage than actual outrage. It's especially hilarious when I go to sensitivity training and a bunch of privileged co-workers complain about being afraid to have fun.
- exstudent2 11y ago
  Do you not see that by finding your co-worker's discomfort "hilarious" and labeling them "privileged" that you are doing your part to perpetuate and create outrage?
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - kelukelugames 11y ago
    Their discomfort comes from people telling them to stop checking sex jokes into the code base, posting comments about women's panties, making dick jokes, etc. Stopping inappropriate behavior is not outrage.
    - exstudent2 11y ago
      Honestly I have a hard time believing that a company that would have sensitivity training would allow any of that behavior to continue beyond a single offense. That being said, my point is that you are not helping anything regardless of the validity of the original complaints. You display flippant indignation by finding this "hilarious". Would it not help educate your co-workers to treat them reasonably instead of sarcastically confrontational? Has that approach ever yielded results? That's one of the main things about outrage culture. Outrage will never convince anyone that they're wrong, it will only make them double down on their original ideas.
      - kelukelugames 11y ago
        I apologize for displaying "flippant indignation" on an Internet forum.
javajosh 11y ago
Okay, now what? The media outlets and authors responsible for this will continue doing it - and probably got (and will get) high praise for the traffic numbers. She gets some more attention for calling attention to this, and increases our collective cynicism a little more (and rightly so). It's tempting to call this a victimless crime, but it's really not. The victims are those who are actually outraged, often by actually outrageous things, like US police taking people's money, beating them up, and killing them. Or by regulatory capture in energy and banking. Or by US foreign policy hypocrisy. Or any number of other things. Honestly, if there was some way for me to fine media outlets in general and specific authors in particular for this behavior, I would do it. It is wrong to shovel shit into people's minds especially if you have an official "press" designation. You've violated trust, and if the media doesn't police itself, then the media itself is going to be replaced with something that does.
petergatsby 11y ago
"World outrage" isn't a constant. The internet means information travels faster than ever before, but also inadvertently causes "interesting things" to outpace "the truth". Properties like Upworthy/Buzzfeed/ect. exacerbate this. Von D is right not to capitulate.
- will_pseudonym 11y ago
  It seems like you are missing the point. Von D didn't "not capitulate". Von D took part in the free advertisement campaign! P.S. So too, are we.
kmonsen 11y ago
Good article, but the name underage red must have been named just to provoke a response. Also, if you get offended by "underage red", maybe your mind is dirty is a bit weird defense. What is the name meant to imply? And finally, if we should be outraged by anything isn't underage red better than war on christmas?
lmorris84 11y ago
I'm always suspicious when news articles embed tweets as "evidence". The one case that sticks out for me was Tim Hunt losing his job because of his joke at a conference. I wonder if UCL also fell for media manufactured outrage in the decision to hastily get rid of him, or whether there really were tens of thousands of twitter keyboard warriors venting their offence all over the situation. Either way, for my own sanity I now have to avoid twitter and any article that even remotely looks like it might be about someone being offended about something.
tibiapejagala 11y ago
So it appears that media manufacture outrage for cheap clicks, therefore outrage is not a real problem. I don't follow this line of reasoning. Let's say the same media often create a fake sexism/ism scandal out of something innocent or unrelated. Can we conclude that sexism/ism is not a problem anymore? Aren't safe-spaces real? Is this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QqgNcktbSA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QqgNcktbSA staged? I don't remember things like that from my university years.
baby 11y ago
I was thinking earlier today that I felt like I was now understanding why my parents made me believe in Santa Claus. It's because you need to learn only on that you can't trust people like that. Maybe they should make a law or something that 1 out of every 100 news must be fake, so that people would be more compelled to check out facts. Also journalism = marketing now. Headlines, scoops, shocking videos...
- fchollet 11y ago
  > Maybe they should make a law or something that 1 out of every 100 news must be fake In the world I live in, the proportion is far higher. Especially if you are talking about the mainstream media. Hell, easily one of 100 peer-reviewed scientific papers is fake.
  - laotzu 11y ago
    >Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. . . . I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false. -Thomas Jefferson, Letter to John Norvell (11 June 1807).
gcatalfamo 11y ago
Business insider average titles: this is huge, this is big, this could be a big problem, this is insane, this is awesome, this is awful.. BI is technically...utter garbage...And kind of worrying
darkhorn 11y ago
You should see Turkish news on web sites. "Scientists are in shock! Shock shock shock! Evry european talks about this! Here is what everybody should give attention!"
- deleted 11y ago
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ams6110 11y ago
I don't read the mainstream media. I don't use Facebook, Twitter, etc. I don't really notice any of this.
nkozyra 11y ago
I don't understand ... The article references the author's tweet, notes it got little traction and then decides it was the source of the stories and speaks for the rest of the people that likely (and more 'successfully') tweeted about it. Some fairly weak logic.
danso 11y ago
I can't be the only person who sees the irony in that this great post is written by someone who works for Upworthy, an outlet who more than any other spawned the science of using superlatives in clickbait headlines to increase Facebook engagement.
- hallman76 11y ago
  "Irony" aside it's still an educational article for those of us that haven't seen this spelled out so clearly before.
Maarten88 11y ago
Another angle to this is that there are agencies, who manipulate media and stir up controversies like these just to get attention for their clients' brands and products.[1] This whole story (including this post) may just as well be part of a smart promotion stunt for Sephora lipstick. Some agency might be getting paid for generating all this attention, stirring up controversy around the brand, with the media and bloggers masterfully manipulated into cooperation. There's no way to know... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust_Me,_I%27m_Lying https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust_Me,_I%27m_Lying
chatman 11y ago
Noam Chomsky's "Manufacturing Consent" is very similar and an insightful read.
sago 11y ago
I think it is utterly disgusting what the media do to manufacture outrage. They ought to apologise unreservedly. But what can we do about it? A lot! We, as consumers with power, ought to boycott any of them that don't get the message.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  Let's get angry! Let's have an outrage about media manufacturing outrage! Oh wait...
  - sago 11y ago
    Quite. Ultimately lots of disagreements have this cyclic structure. Like people accusing those who call for tolerance of being intolerant of intolerance. Or those who oppose science by accusing scientists of not doing science right. Or those telling people to think for themselves, and find out the truth (from the sources they deem to be correct). Or people who claim that those campaigning against racism are the real racists for making everything about race. There's probably some deep point, but I can't be bothered to think about it. It's easier to just be enraged at how stupid people are. Those stupid f*ers who can't even have a civil discussion!
necessity 11y ago
I like how she exempts herself from "the evil media", while being in the media to start with.
peeters 11y ago
The Starbucks fiasco was fascinating and frightening to me. Timeline: - Nov 5: Breitbart reports "Starbucks faces criticism from politicians and campaign groups today after it decided to remove all references to the festive season from its Christmas red cups' - Nov 8: Huffington Post picks up the Breitbart story and reports "Some Christians Are Extremely Unhappy About Starbucks' New Holiday Cups" Note the difference in headlines. This started as a Tory MP and a professional Christian shit-stirring group in the U.K. criticizing the move. It is rapidly generalized to "Christians". In an age of people consuming news in 140 characters or less, news outlets really have a responsibility to apply the same journalistic integrity to their headline as to the rest of the article. They are there to report the news, not cause the news.
- netheril96 11y ago
  > news outlets really have a responsibility to apply the same journalistic integrity to their headline as to the rest of the article. They are there to report the news, not cause the news. And those without integrity, who manufacture news, will earn more.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    "Once one agent learns how to become more competitive by sacrificing a common value, all its competitors must also sacrifice that value or be outcompeted and replaced by the less scrupulous. Therefore, the system is likely to end up with everyone once again equally competitive, but the sacrificed value is gone forever. From a god’s-eye-view, the competitors know they will all be worse off if they defect, but from within the system, given insufficient coordination it’s impossible to avoid." http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
pdkl95 11y ago
TL;DR - just watch [4] The internet has a serious problem with fame. Before the internet, fame was usually something that required an investment in media access. Everybody knows about the big Hollywood movie because they paid for a lot of advertising/etc. A low-budget film could potentially be more popular if people knew about it, but the meager (or nonexistent) advertising budget usually guaranteed it would never[1] become famous. This is what the internet changed. It's fundamental power is that anybody can publish because the network doesn't differentiate between "publishing" hosts and "consumer" hosts. All peers are supposed[2] to be equal in capability. The internet is media access. What used to require significant investment of time and/or money now happens to people regularly when they post something casually on the internet: they can become famous. Unfortunately, our social norms are still adapting to this change. As this article shows, trivial posts are incorrectly interpreted and the author ends up wading through flames and insults. This is because what started as a casual post is now addressing an audience. For a very good explanation of this type of change-in-relationship, I suggest watching "This is Phil Fish"[4]. As this is HN, many of you probably know the drama involving Phil Fish and his game "Fez", but tht doesn't matter because this video is about everybody who is not Phil Fish: the audience that supplies the projection, tokenism, and hatred that fuels the media when they want cheap hits/impressions. -- [1] I am ignoring the phenomena of some movies gaining a cult following a long time after their initial release for simplicity and questionable relevance (time). [2] NAT has destroyed a lot of this equality, creating a situation where you have to get the permission of a 3rd party (port forwarding at the router, some centralized server, etc). If we allow this digital imprimatur[3] to continue to exist, then the internet has truly reverted back to "TV". [3] https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/digital-imprimatur/ https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/digital-imprimatur/ [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmTUW-owa2w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmTUW-owa2w
- AndrewKemendo 11y ago
  Thanks for that link, definitely puts a lot of what I have felt for a long time into a well thought out analysis.
TeMPOraL 11y ago
Worth posting Scott's civil and thoughtful take on this subject: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/ -- And now for my less civil and less thoughtful rant: This is why I think journalism and media is one of the biggest thing that's turning the world to shit. The key observation from the article: > 3. The narrative told by the media in step 2 is considered reality. Every time they lie - and they lie often, regardless whether you want to call it "bias" or "agenda", it's done on purpose; you can't not notice that level of intellectual dishonesty - every time they lie, people believe them. And no, lying in headline and "correcting" it in the middle of the article doesn't cut it, almost nobody reads the damn article. People go on believing what they read, and then they demand changes accordingly, and then they vote accordingly, and stupid policies get instituted and people get hurt. As the good old LW quote goes[0], "Promoting less than maximally accurate beliefs is an act of sabotage. Don't do it to anyone unless you'd also slash their tires." Except in case of media it's really sabotage. It can take your job, your career or your home at a whim. It changes national and international policies. Take Europe and the immigration crisis. You know what's actually the problem there? It's not just immigrants, and it's not just xenophobia. It's media feeding off each other, causing outrage after outrage, overblowing the issue to the point of turning half of otherwise sane people into aggressive xenophobes, and the other half into high-horse riding apologists. I tend to get strange looks when I say there's a problem with media, because Free Media is obviously a Key Element to the Democratic Process (and Democratic = Good). But you know what also is free to do whatever the fuck it wants? Cancer. And it doesn't end well for the host organism. So maybe we need to reevaluate what do we really gain from having this feedback loop running unchecked. I'm not saying, get rid of media. I ask only one thing, I ask it from editors and from journalists: have some fucking integrity. Don't publish blatant lies. And yes, I know that's in a way not your fault, Moloch - "the abstracted spirit of discoordination and flailing response to incentives" - publishes whatever he wants. But if you want to stand up to him, I'm willing to join. I'd be happy to pay for a news source whose primary goal would be to present facts and just facts, the way they are. No spin, no lies, no reporting scientific papers as if they proved the opposite of what they actually do - just the raw truth. -- Another thing. It used to be that the best way to filter out lies and propaganda was to run articles through Reddit and/or Hacker News - lots of people with random biases, combined with quite a good chance of there being a person directly involved with the thing described, was usually enough to sanitize the news story. But I'm worried this is slowly stopping to work too. Outrage is exactly what's eating us. I've seen too many times HN jumping to conclusions. Hell, I've personally been guilty of this myself far more than I'm willing to admit. And don't even get me started on Reddit. [0] - http://lesswrong.com/lw/uy/dark_side_epistemology/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/uy/dark_side_epistemology/
c2the3rd 11y ago
This article is far too shallow in its diagnosis. Yes, the media manufactures outrage for attention. This is not the problem. The media has done the same for as long as it has existed. The problem is that real people are willing to believe and act upon this "outrage", sometimes in an extreme manner, to avoid being on the "wrong side". The action I care about isn't the media writing a libellous "story" about how "outraged" people are at some action of mine, though they are scum for it. What I care about is when people use it as justification to call my boss/family/friends and go after me personally. It's not the media that doxxes, makes death threats, and gets people fired. Who does that is a population that increasingly cannot tell the difference between words and violence, a population that sees bad thoughts as assault and disagreement as evil. Even the smallest infraction is justification for ruining lives. Brendan Eich was ousted from his position at Mozilla for his donation years ago. A pizzeria owner was threatened with death for merely saying he wouldn't serve gays. The mob retaliations are completely disproportionate to the "crime". That's why people are afraid of the new outrage. They know one violation of the ever changing set of rules can now cause a mob to go nuclear on everything they hold dear.
- wisty 11y ago
  The article is mostly about the backlash, which is not pretty either. Historically, internet users were young, educated, and urban (or old, and working in a research lab, tech company, or university) - probably mostly Democrats in the US. Over the last few years (as you now need the internet to do banking and pretty much anything else) it's now roughly equalised. It wasn't that long ago that people were shocked that "Mom" was on Facebook. In 2010-2013, the conservative networks (news sites, social network cliques, forums, etc.) really started to form. As an example, Twitchy (a fairly popular conservative "news" site made up of embedded tweets and commentary) was founded in 2012. There's always been Libertarian and right-wing internet users, but now it's reached the same fever pitch as the left-wing outrage machine. It's no longer just Libertarians talking about how the government is the source of all evil, or an alt-right conspiracy theorist, it's that Jane Sixpack can now access the internet just as easily as a college kid. I suspect the bulk of people on the internet used to think the outrage machine was a bunch of well-meaning idiots. But when it's the extreme Republicans (who were previously a tiny minority on the internet) pulling the same shit, it starts to be obvious why this is a problem.
icanhackit 11y ago
Where possible I encourage friends and family to approach news as a single recent frame from a long-playing narrative, a blurb tacked onto the end of history. Without history you have no context. My agenda is to get them to ignore the 24/7 news cycle and review topics from a historical standpoint - Wikipedia and podcasts make this easier than ever before. They're imperfect sources, but if you want to crawl through dozens of topics for no cost, they're fantastic tools. From there you can purchase books on topics that you'd like to learn more about. Something about the Middle East? You need at least a hundred years of historical knowledge to understand what is playing out. Ideally more. But it's not that simple; you need to understand the politics of countries that are recent but significant players. And this is the problem: people believe it's reasonable to form an opinion on complex matters from consuming a few soundbites and massaged footage. How is that at all reasonable? Answer: it isn't.
- deleted 11y ago
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avn2109 11y ago
From the article: "Is the world more easily “outraged” than it used to be? I don’t think so, but then again, there’s no real way to tell." Presumably one could go build google N-gram timeseries plots for various n-grams associated with what the article calls "outrage culture" and then look for big bumps in the curve. I'm not close enough to the phenomenon to guess the correct buzzwords. Maybe "problematic" or "offensive"?
kriro 11y ago
1) Reverse engineer how/why news sites search the twitter stream 2) Craft tweets that are likely to be picked up 3) Sit back and enjoy (for extra credit, mail predictions about the news to someone in a sealed envelope)
deleted 11y ago
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290 points by akshat_h 11y ago

great write up. i've always felt that people on tv and writers on the net should really only talk about their own opinions- if there is something "people are outraged about", then have them on to discuss it.

gkoberger 11y ago

I hate when articles hide behind an invented "Twitter backlash", and then include 4-5 tweets with a handful of retweets. 6,000 tweets are sent every single second. You could build a narrative for anything with that logic. If your best example is a grammatically challenged tweet that racked up 4 favs and a retweet... you're probably inventing a controversy. Here's some insane examples from the first page of a Google News search for "Twitter Backlash": http://www.prweek.com/article/1372418/apple-faces-twitter-backlash-racism-allegation-australia-store http://www.prweek.com/article/1372418/apple-faces-twitter-ba... http://www.mirror.co.uk/3am/celebrity-news/ruby-rose-faces-backlash-twitter-6833436 http://www.mirror.co.uk/3am/celebrity-news/ruby-rose-faces-b... http://www.eonline.com/news/711079/raven-symone-angers-twitter-with-her-spring-valley-high-school-assault-comments http://www.eonline.com/news/711079/raven-symone-angers-twitt... http://www.her.ie/life/bloomingdales-forced-to-apologise-to-twitter-backlash-after-including-date-rape-message-in-christmas-catalogue/264317 http://www.her.ie/life/bloomingdales-forced-to-apologise-to-...

ikeboy 11y ago
http://combatblog.net/?p=8246 http://combatblog.net/?p=8246
kelukelugames 11y ago
Ah yes, remember #fuckParis? I can't believe that was real.
bsbechtel 11y ago
Ever try searching for trending outrage hashtags on Twitter? Generally it's 99.9% outrage over the outrage, with no real tweets expressing the original supposed outrage.
aikah 11y ago
"Twitterstorm", "Fury on social medias", the signature of "outrage as a business".

HappyTypist 11y ago

This is a consequence of writers at Business Insider and other brands being ranked by the number of clicks their pieces generate. Writing for them is more of a social science than journalism, with specific words and phrasing A/B tested and Web page designs optimised to get you to stay on the page just a tiny bit longer (so Google doesn't penalise them for bounce rate). Ever recall how BI articles end with an unrelated, click bait video?

CM30 11y ago
Pretty much this in a nutshell. Indeed, if you ever want to know (another) reason a lot of news sites seem to be posting articles to troll or bait their reader, that's because the per click model incentivises stirring up angry mobs rather than starting a civil debate. So for any writers without anything meaningful to say... well, just find the most obnoxious, audience baiting thing possible, back it up with a bunch of thinly sourced 'support' posts and watch your article trend on Reddit within an hour or two. Or maybe on Twitter. It's also why comment sections were virually unmoderated until recently... a civil debate brings less comments than a heated flame war between lunatics.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  > It's also why comment sections were virually unmoderated until recently... a civil debate brings less comments than a heated flame war between lunatics. I've heard second-hand information about my national media platforms that they're (the media companies) actually seeding flame wars in comments on purpose - angry people coming back to respond to other angry people = much more eyeballs = more ad dollars flowing in.
_petronius 11y ago
I also see it in major newspapers like The Guardian. Particularly around political stories, like Jeremy Corbyn and his new shadow cabinet, they seem predisposed to describe every comment made about them as putting the politicians "under fire" or some other such melodramatic term. And then when you read the actual quotes in the article, they are fairly tame, gentle criticisms. This happened twice just this week, once with the (constructive, rather softball) comments made by a union leader about Corbyn himself (to which the reaction was something along the lines of "oh no, he's losing the support of his base!"), to the rather mild back-and-forth about John McDonnell's sarcastic crack about Mao in Parliament (which the media basically manufactured into a fake story, all the while implying that McDonnell is a crypto-communist, while he is nothing of the sort). Anyway, rather than it being about a specific subject, I guess my point is that I am pretty down on journalists in general these days, because chasing the story and filling the news cycle (in any medium) seems to have taken priority over actually substantive reporting of things that matter.

tdkl 11y ago

Oh the drama. Close down Twitter, the 140 characters are exactly enough why those things get blown out of proportion. Also why ADD "journalists" adore Twitter.

ShirsenduK 11y ago

The saddest part is that the best public communication channel; Twitter; has been hijacked to become an attention seeking blow horn.

irishcoffee 11y ago
Allow me to introduce you to facebook. =pp
kelukelugames 11y ago
Medium's Twitter account tweets a lot of clickbait. It's sad.
Yhippa 11y ago
Reminds me of this article in general. The author sure did get a lot of mileage out of that one Tweet. This is a best case scenario for her as a writer. Free publicity!
Retra 11y ago
I'm baffled that you would think Twitter had the ability to be anything else. The site basically mandates that you compress all your messages into trivialize-able sound bites.
- oska 11y ago
  Not true. Twitter allows you to makes a brief introduction to a linked article. I use twitter almost exclusively to follow individuals I respect, so I can be aware of new things they have written (or that they recommend).
  - Retra 11y ago
    You're not disagreeing with me. You're just saying that Twitter's propensity to allow people to advertise themselves to you happened to work.
whoopdedo 11y ago
Poe's law at work in this comment.

exstudent2 11y ago

What a great writeup! This is an example of an issue 100% created by the media. To be fair though there is a culture of "outrage" that exists. The media may be implicit in propagating it but they don't always create it. For example, this recently happened: http://hlrecord.org/2015/11/fascism-at-yale/ http://hlrecord.org/2015/11/fascism-at-yale/ I think it's important to study the media's role in creating and extending the reach of outrage, but it's equally important not to deny that there is a growing movement of people who are interested in limiting free speech and get very outrageous about it.

ebola1717 11y ago
That's a very uncompelling argument, not to mention patronizing. The criteria he sets up is literally "it's fascist if you want anything done about the things you're mad about," which is ridiculous because it removes any ability to change the status quo. If there were a professor who were openly defending fascism, calling for him to be removed would be fascist. In fact, if you change "Calling for people to be fired for expressing their beliefs" to "Calling for senators to be voted out of office for expressing their beliefs" then that's fascist. You can play this game for all his examples: > Calling to defund a newspaper for publishing an editorial you disagree with Divestment from companies funding apartheid, something student protesters commonly supported in the late 80s > Tearing down fliers that you disagree with Removing neo-Nazi propaganda posters > Calling for students to be expelled for wearing offensive Halloween costumes Calling for people to boycott Chick-Fil-A because of its owner's anti-gay agendas
- jensen123 11y ago
  In the examples you are listing, the activists are using force to change the world into something they want, as opposed to using free speech to try to convince others. A while ago, I read the book Hitler - Memoirs of a Confidant by Otto Wagener. It really surprised me. From this book, I get the impression that Hitler was an idealist who really wanted to create a better world (at least for the Germans who he saw as being totally unfairly treated by France etc. after WW1). It can still be fascism, even if you see yourself as doing good. Actually, I think well-meaning idealists are sometimes some of the worst people out there. They see themselves as good and being correct, and they get really nasty and intolerant towards people who see things differently. There's the old saying "the road to hell is paved with good intentions", but I often get the impression that many people don't really grasp this.

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wwzuk 11y ago

Your best bet is just to get rid of all social media. I honestly think that the drama that social media encourages is unhealthy and subtly ruining people's lives. It gives the impression that certain political groups are more influential than they are. It encourages outrage culture and the censorship that follows that movement. It's a lazy tool for certain types of journalists. There's so many more constructive things to do than use social media. Delete your accounts, wait a month for any addictive urges to pass and enjoy life again.

ikeboy 11y ago
... Do you not consider hn social media, and if not, why not?
- probably_wrong 11y ago
  For me, "social media" implies that I can use the platform to wish you a happy birthday. It should also allow me to show the world what I care about (people I know, topics I like, etc) just by visiting my profile. HN allows neither, so I wouldn't count it as so. I'd probably classify it as "news site with comments", but not "social media".
  - ikeboy 11y ago
    So reddit wouldn't qualify.

pistoriusp 11y ago

We are the angry mob We read the papers everyday We like who we like, we hate who we hate But we're also easily swayed - Kaiser Chiefs, The angry mob

kelukelugames 11y ago

I hear more people complain about outrage than actual outrage. It's especially hilarious when I go to sensitivity training and a bunch of privileged co-workers complain about being afraid to have fun.

exstudent2 11y ago
Do you not see that by finding your co-worker's discomfort "hilarious" and labeling them "privileged" that you are doing your part to perpetuate and create outrage?
- deleted 11y ago
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- kelukelugames 11y ago
  Their discomfort comes from people telling them to stop checking sex jokes into the code base, posting comments about women's panties, making dick jokes, etc. Stopping inappropriate behavior is not outrage.
  - exstudent2 11y ago
    Honestly I have a hard time believing that a company that would have sensitivity training would allow any of that behavior to continue beyond a single offense. That being said, my point is that you are not helping anything regardless of the validity of the original complaints. You display flippant indignation by finding this "hilarious". Would it not help educate your co-workers to treat them reasonably instead of sarcastically confrontational? Has that approach ever yielded results? That's one of the main things about outrage culture. Outrage will never convince anyone that they're wrong, it will only make them double down on their original ideas.
    - kelukelugames 11y ago
      I apologize for displaying "flippant indignation" on an Internet forum.

javajosh 11y ago

Okay, now what? The media outlets and authors responsible for this will continue doing it - and probably got (and will get) high praise for the traffic numbers. She gets some more attention for calling attention to this, and increases our collective cynicism a little more (and rightly so). It's tempting to call this a victimless crime, but it's really not. The victims are those who are actually outraged, often by actually outrageous things, like US police taking people's money, beating them up, and killing them. Or by regulatory capture in energy and banking. Or by US foreign policy hypocrisy. Or any number of other things. Honestly, if there was some way for me to fine media outlets in general and specific authors in particular for this behavior, I would do it. It is wrong to shovel shit into people's minds especially if you have an official "press" designation. You've violated trust, and if the media doesn't police itself, then the media itself is going to be replaced with something that does.

petergatsby 11y ago

"World outrage" isn't a constant. The internet means information travels faster than ever before, but also inadvertently causes "interesting things" to outpace "the truth". Properties like Upworthy/Buzzfeed/ect. exacerbate this. Von D is right not to capitulate.

will_pseudonym 11y ago
It seems like you are missing the point. Von D didn't "not capitulate". Von D took part in the free advertisement campaign! P.S. So too, are we.

kmonsen 11y ago

Good article, but the name underage red must have been named just to provoke a response. Also, if you get offended by "underage red", maybe your mind is dirty is a bit weird defense. What is the name meant to imply? And finally, if we should be outraged by anything isn't underage red better than war on christmas?

lmorris84 11y ago

I'm always suspicious when news articles embed tweets as "evidence". The one case that sticks out for me was Tim Hunt losing his job because of his joke at a conference. I wonder if UCL also fell for media manufactured outrage in the decision to hastily get rid of him, or whether there really were tens of thousands of twitter keyboard warriors venting their offence all over the situation. Either way, for my own sanity I now have to avoid twitter and any article that even remotely looks like it might be about someone being offended about something.

tibiapejagala 11y ago

So it appears that media manufacture outrage for cheap clicks, therefore outrage is not a real problem. I don't follow this line of reasoning. Let's say the same media often create a fake sexism/ism scandal out of something innocent or unrelated. Can we conclude that sexism/ism is not a problem anymore? Aren't safe-spaces real? Is this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QqgNcktbSA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QqgNcktbSA staged? I don't remember things like that from my university years.

baby 11y ago

I was thinking earlier today that I felt like I was now understanding why my parents made me believe in Santa Claus. It's because you need to learn only on that you can't trust people like that. Maybe they should make a law or something that 1 out of every 100 news must be fake, so that people would be more compelled to check out facts. Also journalism = marketing now. Headlines, scoops, shocking videos...

fchollet 11y ago
> Maybe they should make a law or something that 1 out of every 100 news must be fake In the world I live in, the proportion is far higher. Especially if you are talking about the mainstream media. Hell, easily one of 100 peer-reviewed scientific papers is fake.
- laotzu 11y ago
  >Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. . . . I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false. -Thomas Jefferson, Letter to John Norvell (11 June 1807).

gcatalfamo 11y ago

Business insider average titles: this is huge, this is big, this could be a big problem, this is insane, this is awesome, this is awful.. BI is technically...utter garbage...And kind of worrying

darkhorn 11y ago

You should see Turkish news on web sites. "Scientists are in shock! Shock shock shock! Evry european talks about this! Here is what everybody should give attention!"

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ams6110 11y ago

I don't read the mainstream media. I don't use Facebook, Twitter, etc. I don't really notice any of this.

nkozyra 11y ago

I don't understand ... The article references the author's tweet, notes it got little traction and then decides it was the source of the stories and speaks for the rest of the people that likely (and more 'successfully') tweeted about it. Some fairly weak logic.

danso 11y ago

I can't be the only person who sees the irony in that this great post is written by someone who works for Upworthy, an outlet who more than any other spawned the science of using superlatives in clickbait headlines to increase Facebook engagement.

hallman76 11y ago
"Irony" aside it's still an educational article for those of us that haven't seen this spelled out so clearly before.

Maarten88 11y ago

Another angle to this is that there are agencies, who manipulate media and stir up controversies like these just to get attention for their clients' brands and products.[1] This whole story (including this post) may just as well be part of a smart promotion stunt for Sephora lipstick. Some agency might be getting paid for generating all this attention, stirring up controversy around the brand, with the media and bloggers masterfully manipulated into cooperation. There's no way to know... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust_Me,_I%27m_Lying https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust_Me,_I%27m_Lying

chatman 11y ago

Noam Chomsky's "Manufacturing Consent" is very similar and an insightful read.

sago 11y ago

I think it is utterly disgusting what the media do to manufacture outrage. They ought to apologise unreservedly. But what can we do about it? A lot! We, as consumers with power, ought to boycott any of them that don't get the message.

TeMPOraL 11y ago
Let's get angry! Let's have an outrage about media manufacturing outrage! Oh wait...
- sago 11y ago
  Quite. Ultimately lots of disagreements have this cyclic structure. Like people accusing those who call for tolerance of being intolerant of intolerance. Or those who oppose science by accusing scientists of not doing science right. Or those telling people to think for themselves, and find out the truth (from the sources they deem to be correct). Or people who claim that those campaigning against racism are the real racists for making everything about race. There's probably some deep point, but I can't be bothered to think about it. It's easier to just be enraged at how stupid people are. Those stupid f*ers who can't even have a civil discussion!

necessity 11y ago

I like how she exempts herself from "the evil media", while being in the media to start with.

peeters 11y ago

The Starbucks fiasco was fascinating and frightening to me. Timeline: - Nov 5: Breitbart reports "Starbucks faces criticism from politicians and campaign groups today after it decided to remove all references to the festive season from its Christmas red cups' - Nov 8: Huffington Post picks up the Breitbart story and reports "Some Christians Are Extremely Unhappy About Starbucks' New Holiday Cups" Note the difference in headlines. This started as a Tory MP and a professional Christian shit-stirring group in the U.K. criticizing the move. It is rapidly generalized to "Christians". In an age of people consuming news in 140 characters or less, news outlets really have a responsibility to apply the same journalistic integrity to their headline as to the rest of the article. They are there to report the news, not cause the news.

netheril96 11y ago
> news outlets really have a responsibility to apply the same journalistic integrity to their headline as to the rest of the article. They are there to report the news, not cause the news. And those without integrity, who manufacture news, will earn more.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  "Once one agent learns how to become more competitive by sacrificing a common value, all its competitors must also sacrifice that value or be outcompeted and replaced by the less scrupulous. Therefore, the system is likely to end up with everyone once again equally competitive, but the sacrificed value is gone forever. From a god’s-eye-view, the competitors know they will all be worse off if they defect, but from within the system, given insufficient coordination it’s impossible to avoid." http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

pdkl95 11y ago

TL;DR - just watch [4] The internet has a serious problem with fame. Before the internet, fame was usually something that required an investment in media access. Everybody knows about the big Hollywood movie because they paid for a lot of advertising/etc. A low-budget film could potentially be more popular if people knew about it, but the meager (or nonexistent) advertising budget usually guaranteed it would never[1] become famous. This is what the internet changed. It's fundamental power is that anybody can publish because the network doesn't differentiate between "publishing" hosts and "consumer" hosts. All peers are supposed[2] to be equal in capability. The internet is media access. What used to require significant investment of time and/or money now happens to people regularly when they post something casually on the internet: they can become famous. Unfortunately, our social norms are still adapting to this change. As this article shows, trivial posts are incorrectly interpreted and the author ends up wading through flames and insults. This is because what started as a casual post is now addressing an audience. For a very good explanation of this type of change-in-relationship, I suggest watching "This is Phil Fish"[4]. As this is HN, many of you probably know the drama involving Phil Fish and his game "Fez", but tht doesn't matter because this video is about everybody who is not Phil Fish: the audience that supplies the projection, tokenism, and hatred that fuels the media when they want cheap hits/impressions. -- [1] I am ignoring the phenomena of some movies gaining a cult following a long time after their initial release for simplicity and questionable relevance (time). [2] NAT has destroyed a lot of this equality, creating a situation where you have to get the permission of a 3rd party (port forwarding at the router, some centralized server, etc). If we allow this digital imprimatur[3] to continue to exist, then the internet has truly reverted back to "TV". [3] https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/digital-imprimatur/ https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/digital-imprimatur/ [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmTUW-owa2w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmTUW-owa2w

AndrewKemendo 11y ago
Thanks for that link, definitely puts a lot of what I have felt for a long time into a well thought out analysis.

TeMPOraL 11y ago

Worth posting Scott's civil and thoughtful take on this subject: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/ -- And now for my less civil and less thoughtful rant: This is why I think journalism and media is one of the biggest thing that's turning the world to shit. The key observation from the article: > 3. The narrative told by the media in step 2 is considered reality. Every time they lie - and they lie often, regardless whether you want to call it "bias" or "agenda", it's done on purpose; you can't not notice that level of intellectual dishonesty - every time they lie, people believe them. And no, lying in headline and "correcting" it in the middle of the article doesn't cut it, almost nobody reads the damn article. People go on believing what they read, and then they demand changes accordingly, and then they vote accordingly, and stupid policies get instituted and people get hurt. As the good old LW quote goes[0], "Promoting less than maximally accurate beliefs is an act of sabotage. Don't do it to anyone unless you'd also slash their tires." Except in case of media it's really sabotage. It can take your job, your career or your home at a whim. It changes national and international policies. Take Europe and the immigration crisis. You know what's actually the problem there? It's not just immigrants, and it's not just xenophobia. It's media feeding off each other, causing outrage after outrage, overblowing the issue to the point of turning half of otherwise sane people into aggressive xenophobes, and the other half into high-horse riding apologists. I tend to get strange looks when I say there's a problem with media, because Free Media is obviously a Key Element to the Democratic Process (and Democratic = Good). But you know what also is free to do whatever the fuck it wants? Cancer. And it doesn't end well for the host organism. So maybe we need to reevaluate what do we really gain from having this feedback loop running unchecked. I'm not saying, get rid of media. I ask only one thing, I ask it from editors and from journalists: have some fucking integrity. Don't publish blatant lies. And yes, I know that's in a way not your fault, Moloch - "the abstracted spirit of discoordination and flailing response to incentives" - publishes whatever he wants. But if you want to stand up to him, I'm willing to join. I'd be happy to pay for a news source whose primary goal would be to present facts and just facts, the way they are. No spin, no lies, no reporting scientific papers as if they proved the opposite of what they actually do - just the raw truth. -- Another thing. It used to be that the best way to filter out lies and propaganda was to run articles through Reddit and/or Hacker News - lots of people with random biases, combined with quite a good chance of there being a person directly involved with the thing described, was usually enough to sanitize the news story. But I'm worried this is slowly stopping to work too. Outrage is exactly what's eating us. I've seen too many times HN jumping to conclusions. Hell, I've personally been guilty of this myself far more than I'm willing to admit. And don't even get me started on Reddit. [0] - http://lesswrong.com/lw/uy/dark_side_epistemology/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/uy/dark_side_epistemology/

c2the3rd 11y ago

This article is far too shallow in its diagnosis. Yes, the media manufactures outrage for attention. This is not the problem. The media has done the same for as long as it has existed. The problem is that real people are willing to believe and act upon this "outrage", sometimes in an extreme manner, to avoid being on the "wrong side". The action I care about isn't the media writing a libellous "story" about how "outraged" people are at some action of mine, though they are scum for it. What I care about is when people use it as justification to call my boss/family/friends and go after me personally. It's not the media that doxxes, makes death threats, and gets people fired. Who does that is a population that increasingly cannot tell the difference between words and violence, a population that sees bad thoughts as assault and disagreement as evil. Even the smallest infraction is justification for ruining lives. Brendan Eich was ousted from his position at Mozilla for his donation years ago. A pizzeria owner was threatened with death for merely saying he wouldn't serve gays. The mob retaliations are completely disproportionate to the "crime". That's why people are afraid of the new outrage. They know one violation of the ever changing set of rules can now cause a mob to go nuclear on everything they hold dear.

wisty 11y ago
The article is mostly about the backlash, which is not pretty either. Historically, internet users were young, educated, and urban (or old, and working in a research lab, tech company, or university) - probably mostly Democrats in the US. Over the last few years (as you now need the internet to do banking and pretty much anything else) it's now roughly equalised. It wasn't that long ago that people were shocked that "Mom" was on Facebook. In 2010-2013, the conservative networks (news sites, social network cliques, forums, etc.) really started to form. As an example, Twitchy (a fairly popular conservative "news" site made up of embedded tweets and commentary) was founded in 2012. There's always been Libertarian and right-wing internet users, but now it's reached the same fever pitch as the left-wing outrage machine. It's no longer just Libertarians talking about how the government is the source of all evil, or an alt-right conspiracy theorist, it's that Jane Sixpack can now access the internet just as easily as a college kid. I suspect the bulk of people on the internet used to think the outrage machine was a bunch of well-meaning idiots. But when it's the extreme Republicans (who were previously a tiny minority on the internet) pulling the same shit, it starts to be obvious why this is a problem.

icanhackit 11y ago

Where possible I encourage friends and family to approach news as a single recent frame from a long-playing narrative, a blurb tacked onto the end of history. Without history you have no context. My agenda is to get them to ignore the 24/7 news cycle and review topics from a historical standpoint - Wikipedia and podcasts make this easier than ever before. They're imperfect sources, but if you want to crawl through dozens of topics for no cost, they're fantastic tools. From there you can purchase books on topics that you'd like to learn more about. Something about the Middle East? You need at least a hundred years of historical knowledge to understand what is playing out. Ideally more. But it's not that simple; you need to understand the politics of countries that are recent but significant players. And this is the problem: people believe it's reasonable to form an opinion on complex matters from consuming a few soundbites and massaged footage. How is that at all reasonable? Answer: it isn't.

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avn2109 11y ago

From the article: "Is the world more easily “outraged” than it used to be? I don’t think so, but then again, there’s no real way to tell." Presumably one could go build google N-gram timeseries plots for various n-grams associated with what the article calls "outrage culture" and then look for big bumps in the curve. I'm not close enough to the phenomenon to guess the correct buzzwords. Maybe "problematic" or "offensive"?

kriro 11y ago

1) Reverse engineer how/why news sites search the twitter stream 2) Craft tweets that are likely to be picked up 3) Sit back and enjoy (for extra credit, mail predictions about the news to someone in a sealed envelope)

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