“[...]On average, we will stare at something negative and outrageous for a lot longer than we will stare at something positive and calm. You will stare at a car crash longer than you will stare at a person handing out flowers by the side of the road, even though the flowers will give you a lot more pleasure than the mangled bodies in a crash. Scientists have been proving this effect in different contexts for a long time – if they showed you a photo of a crowd, and some of the people in it were happy, and some angry, you would instinctively pick out the angry faces first.

[...] There is growing evidence that this natural human quirk has a huge effect online. On YouTube, what are the words that you should put into the title of your video, if you want to get picked up by the algorithm? They are – according to the best site monitoring YouTube trends – words such as ‘hates, obliterates, slams, destroys’. A major study at New York University found that for every word of moral outrage you add to a tweet, your retweet rate will go up by 20 percent on average, and the words that increased your retweet rate most were ‘attack’, ‘bad’ and ‘blame’. A study by the Pew Research Center found that if you fill your Facebook posts with ‘indignant disagreement’, you’ll double your likes and shares. So an algorithm that prioritises keeping you glued to the screen will – unintentionally but inevitably – prioritise outraging and angering you. If it’s more enraging, it’s more engaging. If enough people are spending enough of their time being angered, that starts to change the culture.

[...] If enough people are spending enough of their time being angered, that starts to change the culture. As Tristan told me, it ‘turns hate into a habit.”