The rise of social media created a new world for social researchers. One focus has been on determining how quickly and broadly emotions spread online. Over a decade ago, researchers at Beijing University found that rage spread the fastest and farthest online. Researchers in the United States found that anger was a speed leader, but not the fastest in the study: awe was even faster than rage. But rage was quite fast. As might be expected, sadness was a slow spreader and had a limited expansion.
This research helped explain how social media made the world worse. Rage tends to be a strong motivator and sadness tends to be a de-motivator. The power of awe was an interesting finding, but some reflection shows this does make sense—it tends to move people to want to share. IRL, think of people eagerly drawing the attention of strangers to things like beautiful sunsets, impressive feats or majestic animals.
In general, awe is a positive emotion, and it seems to be a good thing that it travels far and wide on the internet. Rage can be a mixed bag but has largely proven to be a negative influence.
When people share their rage via social media, they are sharing with an intent to express (“I am angry!”) and to infect others with this rage (“you should be angry, too!”). Rage, like many infectious agents, also has the effect of weakening the host’s “immune system.” In the case of anger, the immune system is reason and emotional control. Anger tends to suppress reason and lower emotional control. This makes people even more vulnerable to rage and susceptible to the classic fallacy of appeal to anger. This is the fallacy in which a person accepts anger as proof that a claim is true. Roughly put, the person “reasons” like this: “this makes me angry, so it is true.” This infection also renders people susceptible to related emotions (and fallacies), such as fear (and appeal to force).
Because of these qualities of anger, it is easy for untrue claims to be accepted far and wide via the internet. This is, obviously enough, the negative side of anger. Anger can also be positive—to use an analogy, it can be like a cleansing fire that sweeps away brambles.
For anger to be a positive factor, it would need to be a virtuous anger (to follow Aristotle). Put a bit simply, it would need to be the right degree of anger, felt for the right reasons and directed at the right target. This sort of anger can mobilize people to do good. As a recent example, people were outraged by the actions of Trump’s ICE. In response, people protested and ICE started murdering citizens. This caused more protests and the Trump regime changed its tactics.
The challenge is, of course, to distinguish between warranted and unwarranted anger. This is a serious challenge—as noted above, people tend to feel that they are right because they are angry rather than inquiring as to whether their rage is justified or not.
It is wise to follow the advice of Aristotle and consider whether the anger is at the right people, at the right time, for the right reasons and to the right degree. But anger, ironically, makes it hard to engage in such assessment.
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