11 ms·

Facebook and Twitter algorithms incentivize 'people to get enraged'

• mmcdermott 6y ago
  I have two reactions to these kinds of pieces. The first is to think "of course they are - outrage is the easiest form of engagement and social media is all about easy engagement as that means more eyes to sell." The second is that there is a delegation of responsibility in these articles. The tone is a "Facebook/Twitter made me act like a jerk." The algorithms may be tuned to surface content that will ruffle your feathers, but the reaction is yours as is the decision to engage with social media at all.
  • nonotreally 6y ago
    Fuck you. I didn't actually mean that, but I want you to notice that you felt the outrage. Yes, you can learn to regulate yourself. But everyone doesn't currently live in that world. Manipulating people on a really large scale is super easy right now because of how easy it is to rile people up.
    • eckza 6y ago
      And why do you think that is? Because nobody takes responsibility for their actions or emotions anymore. Why should they - they don't need to - we've pathologized everything, from behavioral issues to depression (nobody ever says "I am depressed", they say "I have depression", which is another thing entirely and delegates all responsibility to manage oneself to outside forces). And another pathology: "I acted like an idiot because an Internet Website made me feel things and I couldn't control myself. Now I need Someone Else to make decisions on my behalf". That's how personal liberty gets extinguished.
      • ClumsyPilot 6y ago
        "nobody takes responsibility for their actions or emotions anymore" Why do you think anyone did before? You were allowed to kill your wife if you caught her cheating. Is a century with two world wars giving you the idea that emotions were kept in check?
        • robertlagrant 6y ago
          > Is a century with two world wars giving you the idea that emotions were kept in check? Yes. On a grand scale, boys who were utterly terrified put that behind them and fought anyway.
          • ClumsyPilot 6y ago
            How about the fact that we had decades of war because ambition, greed and anger ruled the day?
            • robertlagrant 6y ago
              That's not a fact.
      • inetknght 6y ago
        > Because nobody takes responsibility for their actions or emotions anymore. In real life there's real consequences for lying and being a shadow manipulator is usually more difficult than not. On the internet there's real consequences to telling the truth and being a shadow manipulator is way easier than not.
      • eeZah7Ux 6y ago
        > nobody takes responsibility for their actions or emotions anymore Compared to when? > nobody ever says "I am depressed", they say "I have depression", which is another thing entirely and delegates all responsibility to manage oneself to outside forces Good. That's exactly what psychologists have been telling people for decades: do not victimize mental illness because self-blaming only pushes the problem further.
        • Rule35 6y ago
          > > delegates all responsibility to manage oneself to outside forces > Good. That's exactly what psychologists have been telling people for decades No, neither phrase says "I am bad because I'm depressed". But one pushes the person out of the locus of control. > > nobody takes responsibility for their actions or emotions anymore > Compared to when? Compared to when they couldn't broadcast it. Why perform helplessness if nobody is there to see? Ditto rage, etc.
          • eeZah7Ux 6y ago
            > But one pushes the person out of the locus of control. Mental illness does that. Also many other things, like going hungry. > Compared to when they couldn't broadcast it. In some mythical past or a real point in time? When people where never emotion-driven and completely rational 500 years ago? 1500? 5000?
            • Rule35 6y ago
              > > But one pushes the person out of the locus of control. > Mental illness does that. Also many other things, like going hungry. No, being hungry doesn't have to make you helpless, and doesn't for most people. Locus of control isn't about actual control, it's about feeling that your actions actually impact things. A prisoner in a dungeon could feel in control in a way that a free and wealthy person may not. The over-medicalization of problems (even if they are at root, medical) contributes to learned helplessness. And this is one of the biggest things to revert when helping a depressed person, to prove that they can indeed influence events. > > Compared to when they couldn't broadcast it. > In some mythical past or a real point in time? I first saw a sob story followed by a pay-me link on LiveJournal ~20 years ago. This is around when it became practical for people to beg to the world. Before this you either went to friends and family, or were just able to complain (not collect money) so there wasn't the same motive. And twenty years before that people pretty much didn't have any editorial reach unless they owned the media so the weaponized sob story was just employed by panhandlers and family. > When people where never emotion-driven and completely rational 500 years ago? 1500? 5000? You're having this argument with yourself because those are words you're trying to shove into my mouth. I'm talking about the ability to be performative effectively, not about emotion. These are actually two totally unrelated things. Many emotional people don't dump this on others, and many performative people aren't feeling what they claim to be suffering.
      • nonotreally 6y ago
        > "I acted like an idiot because an Internet Website made me feel things and I couldn't control myself. Now I need Someone Else to make decisions on my behalf". I don't think this is crazy. We're products of our environment. Our environment now includes TikTok and Facebook. This isn't a question of "is this how it should be", rather a statement of how it is. If you're a man, ask yourself "why don't I wear a dress?". I assume it isn't because you weighed the pros and cons, but rather because of the environment you're born into and inhabit. Personal responsibility for an individual is great. But if we're designing optimal societies, we should pay attention to how incentives are being used to manipulate us. If your claim boils down to "I am strong enough to control myself" it reminds me of "ads don't work on me". _I just don't buy it_. If that were true you wouldn't eat Oreos, or use Bounty paper towels, or own a Song or Samsung tv. The truth is that we are all heavily influenced by our peers, our environment and now, social media.
    • eeZah7Ux 6y ago
      > Yes, you can learn to regulate yourself. But everyone doesn't currently live in that world Humans are not going to turn into stoics anytime soon. Also, decades of advertisement are teaching billions of people to "follow your dreams", "your opinion is important", "just do it", "indulge yourself", "act on impulse". It's not surprising that selfishness, ruggedness, entitlement, contentiousness come out of it. Furthermore, our ability to "regulate ourselves" depends on many aspects often out of our immediate control: being in good mental and physical health, not under social and financial pressure, not hungry or cold, not treated badly in our workplaces or society and so on. It's easy to act "stoic" when your life is good.
  • bryanrasmussen 6y ago
    ok, so Facebook/Twitter has obviously already decided it is to their benefit that people act like jerks. So what if they figured out that they could determine who was most likely to be goaded into acting like jerks - like - hey, user 20018 just lost their child, they joined a group for support for people with family members dying of cancer, and their football team lost last night! Start pushing our most highly provocative content at user 20018 stat! At some point there is a delegation of at least some responsibility - when is that?
    • Applejinx 6y ago
      It looks like they delegate (or have formerly delegated) this type of intention, to paying customers. That of course doesn't mean the userbase: you'd call it 'advertisers' but Facebook got in some trouble over selling off extremely granular access to targeted advertising, to state actors, foreign governments etc: basically whoever's willing to pay enough. So, if you're trying to create domestic terrorists, it's extremely valuable to be fed information just like your example represents, to sell off access to that demographic. Facebook doesn't have to consider it 'provocative content', they see it as 'feeding a demographic to a paying customer'. If you're smart enough about your targeting, you can turn it to 'provoke susceptible people into committing acts of terrorism at rates substantially higher than the baseline likelihood of this'. So it's the foreign intelligence agency that is thinking of 'provoking', and Facebook sort of shrugs and fills the order for targeted demographics, without itself thinking much about whether anything is 'provocative'.
      • bryanrasmussen 6y ago
        good point, the poster I was responding to suggested that delegation of responsibility was happening from the user of facebook not taking responsibility for their own actions, but I guess there is delegation at several levels.
  • iNate2000 6y ago
    Right. And my reaction has been to mostly stay away from Facebook and Twitter. But I’m not the one rioting.
  • zarkov99 6y ago
    Well, yes, but this isn't a new problem and society long ago decided that sometimes it has to protect people from themselves. We prosecute drug dealers, we punish cigarette manufacturers, we enforce seat belt laws. I think we will be better off when we understand that social media in its current form is much worse than cigarettes, perhaps even, all things considered, worse than drugs.
  • ramblerman 6y ago
    I think you are breaking this down into a sociological statement vs one of individual responsibility. The first is more useful because the system as a whole may have emergent properties. E.g. think of the opioid crisis and the extra profit incentives for doctors, sales reps creating a vicious cycle. Hence this is also the best place to frame, and fix the problem. Of course promoting individual responsibility is good, "don't do drugs" but it is usually not enough.
  • vishnugupta 6y ago
    Not just the social media but also the print and TV news. At least here in India about 80% of all the news is rage inducing. Because that’s what drives the TRP which in turn means more advertising money. And then we have artificially induced rage through sports, mostly cricket, where spectators get riled up and vent it out on, where else, Twitter.
• nlh 6y ago
  Social commentary: As I was scanning HN headlines, I thought this said "engaged" instead of "enraged" :) But my instinctual reaction was the exactly the same: "Hmm yeah I guess they really are manipulating us - that's the world we live in now I guess."
  • hjek 6y ago
    The sad thing is that the difference between the 'g' and the 'r' in this case is genocide: > U.N. human rights experts investigating a possible genocide in Myanmar said on Monday that Facebook had played a role in spreading hate speech there.[0] [0]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-myanmar-rohingya-facebook-idUSKCN1GO2PN https://www.reuters.com/article/us-myanmar-rohingya-facebook...
• tqi 6y ago
  Unlike newspaper front pages and magazine covers? (FWIW I agree that FB/Twitter should take responsibility, but I also think journalists should reflect on their role as well. After all, it's their headlines being ranked...)
  • flohofwoe 6y ago
    Same basic mechanism, but social media is a lot more efficient because (mis-)information travels much faster and reaches more people in shorter time, so you don't get the "cool down effect" of a slower transport medium.
    • kmeisthax 6y ago
      This is only partially true: in prior media eras, low-quality journalism was notorious for doing what Facebook and Twitter are now. We only notice it because we've come out of an almost century long period in which the most effective broadcast mechanism was regulated by the FCC. This is an accident of engineering; the only reason why the FCC was even allowed to what is blatant government censorship is because of the scarcity of radio spectrum. This died the moment cable news networks became widespread. The only restriction on what, say, Fox News, CNN, or MSNBC can publish is their carriage agreement with the cable companies, which usually just dictates genre, not content. Social media is that but laundered across millions of users who "choose" what to share and like out of what platform algorithms recommend. Prior to television, there was radio, which was also regulated under a similar regime. However, newspapers ruled the roost before that, and they had practically no limits on speech save for extremely weak defamation laws. They also were instrumental in spreading a lot of outright bullshit. "Yellow journalism" is an anagram of "clickbait", after all; and the press were perfectly happy to engage in exactly the same tactics we see today... for pretty much the same reasons. Selling lurid descriptions of political foes and foreign threats makes more money than level-headed explanations of the same controversies. I'm not sure if either scenario could be described as "good". The FCC effectively engaged in a soft censorship regime through the means of spectrum scarcity. This meant that every information passed through [the five filters](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model) of ownership, advertising, sourcing, flak, and (at the time) anti-Communism. On the other hand, it's clearly obvious that a good subset of any group of political ideologues is either incapable of or uninterested in making level-headed assessments about themselves. Self-critique is heresy in the eyes of someone more extreme than you are, and we live in times where the extremes might be right about at least one thing.
• GoodJokes 6y ago
  We find out new things every day!
• alexfromapex 6y ago
  I think there is a presupposition that being enraged is always bad. If the government is not working and all online dissent is oppressed by algorithms no one will be able to effect change and then you will have an enragement bubble so to speak. That bubble bursting will be much worse than people simply being enraged and voicing their concerns.
  • flohofwoe 6y ago
    Did you miss the genocide in Myanmar? That doesn't look much like "people voicing their concern": https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-46105934 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-46105934
    • SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
      I'm not aware of any information suggesting that Facebook's engagement algorithms specifically were responsible for this. The criticisms in this article are about how Facebook needs to ban certain categories of violent content, not simply tweak the newsfeed to deprioritize them.
  • pjc50 6y ago
    As I've said before, the question is whether they're real concerns. The concerns of, say, Belarus citizens protesting against their government seem pretty real. The concerns of people spreading rumours against ethnic minority groups in Myanmar and other places are based in falsehood. As were the Qanon crowd.
• magiiique 6y ago
  It's an interesting one. The objective function for serving content surely isn't literally to get people angry, rather to "promote engagement" or whatever, which turns out to be the same thing. Can you ban a company from trying to optimise its key metrics? No. So what do you do? If the enraging content is there anyway, what's wrong with pointing people to it? If you're allowed to sell dynamite to the public in your shop, why not point angry customers to it? To me the whole model is broken, and picking individual bits of it that aren't is not the constructive approach.
• dangerboysteve 6y ago
  prof Scott Galloway has been screaming about this for some time on his Pivot podcast with Kara Swisher.
  • mslate 6y ago
    The irony is palpable
• blululu 6y ago
  I do wish that we had more solid research to back this claim. As it stands the claim that people are incentivized to be enraged is a single person’s opinion that resonate with people’s current beliefs. There are a number of other trends going on at a macro level and it seems like this one is an obvious culprit but nobody is doing the work to collect and analyze the data to back this up.
  • hnxs 6y ago
    Why would anyone fund said research?
    • blululu 6y ago
      Universities. The incentives are well aligned and there are plenty of labs doing research in this space.
      • hnxs 6y ago
        Why, not who. Why aren’t they funding this research?
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• humanlion87 6y ago
  I would also include Reddit in this list. The homepage (if you visit incognito or not being signed in) seems to be tailored to bubble up all the "outrageous" events.
  • solosoyokaze 6y ago
    I find the behavior of moderators on Reddit far more enraging than any content that gets boiled up. It's like the mods of /r/politics and other similar default subs are there to cause political friction and rage by being openly and aggressively partisan to a very particular slice of the political spectrum. I say this as someone well to the left of the zeitgeist on those subs, but you'll of course hear the same thing from people to the right of them.
    • BitwiseFool 6y ago
      Don't forget about the dozens of powermods who enable other subreddits to transform into political echo chambers. A great example is r/InsanePeopleFacebook turning into a showcase of Donald Trump and Tomi Lahren tweets.
      • dencodev 6y ago
        Politicalhumor posts seem to contain zero humor at least half the time. It's just anti Trump screenshots.
    • spaaz 6y ago
      Try /r/stupidpol, that's good for political discussion from all sides - though it's a Marxist sub, it welcomes discussion and debate from other points of view.
      • solosoyokaze 6y ago
        There are a lot of good subs out there, but the default and high traffic subs have mods with dubious motivations.
    • 6y ago
• tims33 6y ago
  The social media platforms prefer to call it engagement. They never hid this fact and somehow it didn't bother their user base as much as it should have.
  • Zhyl 6y ago
    Engagement started as 'we want to make our party as good as possible so that you want to come and bring all your friends' and ended up being Kathy Bates in Misery.
• rvz 6y ago
  Obviously. Public gossip, rumours, hype and outrage sells and gives more eye balls and clicks.
• flyingfences 6y ago
  There was a good article [0] in The Atlantic yesterday linking this centralized algorithmic vitriol to the decline of democracy in America. The article also suggests some techno-legal fixes that I'm leery of, but I think its diagnosis of the issue is spot-on. [0] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/04/the-internet-doesnt-have-to-be-awful/618079/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/04/the-int... (paywalled)
  • azangru 6y ago
    What does a "decline of democracy", especially if applied to the US, mean? (Yes, I've skimmed the article; still don't understand.)
    • flyingfences 6y ago
      In short, Tocqueville's notion was that democracy works in America (in contrast to the 1st Republic) because we Americans handle almost everything at as local a level as possible and are willing to get along and work together to do what needs to be done; social media outrage has brought local matters to the national scope and has made us uncompromising enemies, rather than allies, of our neighbors, which has crippled our ability to productively and effectively deal with governmental and political matters. I.E., the article regards a decline in the efficacy of democracy in America rather than a decline in the practice of democracy in America.
      • Dma54rhs 6y ago
        Unfortunately you export it over the world as well, all these stupid fights spill over the oceans.
• Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  Definitely. They allowed Trump's posts because it got people enraged, every tweet causing a storm of tweets from all camps, all going after each other and trying to 'debate', but in the end it became a meaningless cauldron of activity with a net effect of zero... ...for the participants anyway, for Twitter, any engagement, any activity, any pair of eyes on their service translates to money, both directly (ad impressions) and indirectly (engagement correlates with stock price). In the past year - less Trump, more Covidiots - Twitter's stock price has doubled.
• ryanmarsh 6y ago
  The word I use for this in casual conversation (not claiming credit for) is "aggro porn". I read once that anger is a powerful (useful) reward circuit in the brain, the problem is it increases stress hormones which have deleterious effects over time. I'm sure it's intentional but I presume it's also somewhat inevitable that platforms with user generated and user amplified content will represent the reward circuits of the brain. Which, at 30,000 ft. makes it obvious which circuits Instagram, Tiktok, Reddit, et.al., even Hacker News are triggering.
• ffggvv 6y ago
  i think they’re tailored to optimize for clicks. and the users themselves are the ones the click these enraging stories and therefore train the ml algorithms to show more of that
• ceejayoz 6y ago
  Of course, so do articles about the algorithms. It's turtles all the way down.
• kaiju0 6y ago
  I think this falls in line with the quip of ask a question and get crickets. Make an incorrect statement as fact and it will piss someone off enough to give you the answer to your initial question. All engagement metrics are based on actions and time. The long detailed answer and spewing vitriol increase both.
• arshbot 6y ago
  Ironic that this post wants us to be concerned about other platforms optimizing posts that make their users concerned
• akudha 6y ago
  Nobody is forcing us to read the news, participate in social media etc. We can pick and choose what news to consume and from where (yeah, most news sites are crap, I get that). There is no way these sites are gonna police themselves and there is no way for us to expect the govt to control them. There is just too much ad money and too much access to data, they are not going to give that up. But there is an easy solution to this. Just refuse to participate and consume only the absolute bare minimum news, social media etc. Social media is not email or SMS, they are not necessary for daily life. One can easily live without Facebook/Twitter/Instagram etc (and many do), unlike say GMail.
  • swiley 6y ago
    Youtube at least started forcing news on everyone last year. It was really obvious for me since I never watched news on youtube. There would be two or three rows of normal stuff and then a "covid/politics" row full of CNN/CNBC/BBC/whatever saying the world is ending. I've solved the problem personally by blocking youtube and now I have more time for my girlfriend and side projects.
• temp8964 6y ago
  Jack Dorsey donated $10 Million to the Antiracist Research Center. It makes me feel he made an outrage machine which outraged himself.
  • cronix 6y ago
    Zuckerberg donated $300 million to "protect American elections." https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/mark-zuckerbergs-dollar300-million-donation-to-fix-elections-must-overcome-facebooks-past/ar-BB18BjpC https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/mark-zuckerbergs-d...
  • im3w1l 6y ago
    Aren't antiracists a big part of the outrage dynamics though? Take this research center, I assume they spend time and money research how everything is you like is actually terrible and reasons for you to be outraged.
• nayuki 6y ago
  CGP Grey made a great video on the self-perpetuating cycle of outrage back in 2015: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc
• collyw 6y ago
  You should try a 4chan /pol "you rage you loose" thread.
• combatentropy 6y ago
  The article is pretty light on how these platforms do so. Do they not simply bubble up popular posts: ones with likes, retweets, and comments? That might mean a politicized post, but it also could be a positive one about the kindness of a stranger or some cute picture of your kids. These platforms may well be incentivizing enraging posts. I just don't know how they're doing it, and this article did not help me understand it.
• ISL 6y ago
  I have often felt that if everyone were rate-limited to two or three upvotes/likes per day, the world might be a more-meaningful place.
  • loveistheanswer 6y ago
    Hate spreads virally on social media. Perhaps we need some "social distancing measures" such as thise you suggested to "slow the spread" of hatred on social media.
• strict9 6y ago
  One simple thing twitter can do to reduce enraging behavior and harassment: De-prioritize "reply guys" that always reply to a a popular account with an incendiary comment. They get a ton of comments and few likes/RTs (ratio'd) yet reply guys are usually the top response to a popular tweet. Seriously twitter, why set reply guys as the top response to every tweet? It encourages hostility, and this is but one example.
  • Rule35 6y ago
    Because they're what everyone wants - the counterpoint. They get ratioed because they aren't preaching to the choir. You know what posts don't have them? Ones that don't offer them anything. It's generally incendiary posts that are picked apart, and that's because they're easy and worthwhile. They have an audience that would otherwise avoid the message.
• BikiniPrince 6y ago
  I solved this issue by removing people on fb who post political messages. It is surprising how tame, relaxing and good natured my fees is. Good luck trying to foster some inflammatory thread.
  • loveistheanswer 6y ago
    What percentage of your social network did you have to block to achieve that?
• annoyingnoob 6y ago
  I always thought Techdirt should be called Daily Outrage. When its all about eyeballs on pages of course things that draw attention will be prioritized.
• atum47 6y ago
  I made sure to follow people who post nice content about games, indie games, algorithms, aí, ml, pixel art, 3d stuff... And even though twitter keep finding ways of showing me what f** Bolsonaro did or what was the latest news on Big Brother. I deleted my account and never looked back. Same with Facebook.
• khawkins 6y ago
  People are getting increasingly enraged because there is a palpable culture shift happening in the western world, creating a giant rift in fundamental principles, societal perspectives, and interpretation of current events. When we can't agree on any of these things, the other side seems radical and unhinged when interpreted through our own set of values/principles. The "enrage machine" is simply a product of this phenomenon. Sure, you can try and reduce the rage by censoring and banning minority views off the platform, but the underlying problem is still there. The angry division is still there, whether you're hearing it on social media, cable news, talk radio, or Thanksgiving dinner.
• zitterbewegung 6y ago
  100 years ago we would have called this yellow journalism. If you want to make a system that is solely on getting eyeballs to look at advertisements the best way to do that is controversy. If you really understand social media how to get an advertisement for free on CNN is to say something controversial enough on Twitter that CNN will show a story of it. What we are witnessing is the disruption of original sources of information (TV / Newspapers / Magazines) into a more algorithmic system. A bunch of people do things like "blame the algorithm" but instead you have to consider that it is a cybernetic system with both artificial agents and people interacting with each other and the accountability doesn't disappear at the part of the algorithm the accountability is with the organizations that deploy it.
  • lordloki 6y ago
    We should still call it yellow journalism. The fact that reporters at large media companies will search for outrage on Facebook and Twitter in order to get more hits is a failure of modern journalism. Reporters basing so much of their time on social media skews their objectivity just as much as it would anyone else. It's basically become a feedback loop of anger and it's not contained to twitter and facebook any longer.
    • koonsolo 6y ago
      Social media is entertainment. News is entertainment. If you want to get informed, read a book written by an expert or someone with real life experience.
      • kodah 6y ago
        > News is entertainment Maybe that is the case today but I don't really see people around here as the types to let status quos be.
      • 4ggr0 6y ago
        > News is entertainment I'd say it strongly depends on what sites you visit. Boulevard-, sports- and celebrity-news etc. definitely are entertainment. But journals which uncover wrong-doings, research difficult topics, write long articles?
• balozi 6y ago
  If you are going to claim that people are incentivized to do something, you had better state what those incentives are. Are there editors left at Yahoo?
  • loveistheanswer 6y ago
    Is it not implicitly obvious that money is the incentive?
• pkamb 6y ago
  I hate on Twitter that the `What's Happening` info box loads a half second before your feed. I'm sure that's a deliberate "growth hack" for the outrage machine. I should figure out how to block elements like that, which of course in the current internet landscape have completely randomized DIV class names.
  • hntrader 6y ago
    > how to block elements like that TweetDeck
  • alteria 6y ago
    You should be able to block those elements with uBlockOrigin or similar browser extensions. I blocked a bunch of the "trending" stuff since it never really contributed positively to my site experience.
• nipponese 6y ago
  How is this different than traditional news headline construction, other than it being done manually?
• Tycho 6y ago
  This story is on Yahoo!, which serves numerous stories on its homepage from outrage rags like HuffPost, TheDailyBeast, The Independent, and The Guardian. And, what's more, doesn't allow users to customize their feed by filtering out such sources. They do seem to have a button to 'show less from' sources, but it doesn't seem to work, and doesn't offer to remove them completely. Is this just shoddy product engineering? I'm not sure, I suspect that they know that people will click low quality outrage stories in spite of themselves - you can't resist the temptation to click them when you see them, which is a big part of the reason why I would rather not see them in the first place.
• gdsdfe 6y ago
  Let's not forget YouTube in this
• thoughtstheseus 6y ago
  I’m going to take a moment to plug The Congressional Research Service. They produce reports on every topical issue. Free, readable, and timely. Stop reading the news/social media and get informed (by a variety of higher quality sources).
• brutal_chaos_ 6y ago
  Enraged is an easy form of engagement. Perhaps rage is the junk food of emotions...