Are you angry about something you saw online? Be careful, your emotion might be used as part of a campaign.

Imagine you run a chain of businesses in the US and decide to update your signage. You’ve already begun making the change at some shops, but then some social media campaigners start claiming this is a traitorous instance of wokeism, demanding that you revert to the old logo. Easy to ignore, right? Not if the campaigners are joined online by thousands of others, and they call for a boycott of your operations. It’s absurd, but it’s costing you a lot of money, so you acquiesce before the damage becomes too great.

            This is an actual case. It happened to the restaurant chain Cracker Barrel. What’s going on? Is it some sort of madness? Is it collective bullying, called mobbing? Yes, but why? Welcome to angertainment, a fusion of anger and entertainment, enabled by social media.

            This is the first of many stories in Ed Coper’s new book Angertainment. Coper is a long-time activist in Australia, helping set up the online site GetUp that supports progressive campaigns. He then took his expertise to other countries and campaigns, thinking social media was the ideal platform for left-wing causes. But the political climate shifted. Right-wingers became adept at using social media, and before long it became risky for anyone visible in the mainstream to support causes stigmatised by the right-wing mobs. Coper’s main focus is on those commonly called conservative, right-wing or MAGA. He says they have mastered the use of social media for manufacturing outrage when it isn’t warranted.

The uses of anger

Anger, directed outward, towards others, is called outrage. It can be used for positive purposes, to oppose injustice. People become angry when they see things they believe are unfair, such as discrimination, abuse, murder and torture. When outrage is harnessed and directed towards the sources of injustice, it lies at the foundations of social movements against oppression and exploitation.

            Coper is concerned about anger used in a different way, when it is directed for partisan political purposes, facilitated by social media. The first part of Angertainment covers social research on how people’s views are shaped. This might have been a boring tour of findings, but Coper spices up the journey with stories and colourful commentary.

            Social media platforms are not set up to serve the public interest, but rather to make a profit. They are less like libraries and more like bookshops. And what do they sell? Attention, because that’s what advertisers pay for. The longer you stay on Facebook or Instagram, or the more you use Google, the more money they make. These companies hire talented psychologists who devise ingenious ways to hook users. They do this by intermittent reinforcement. If you post a comment, you usually get just a few likes, but occasionally you get a huge number. It’s like hitting a jackpot. Experimenting to see what strikes a nerve, users learn that extreme content gets more hits. Outrage sells.

            Coper says emotions are contagious, especially collectively experienced emotions, and are even more contagious when they are experienced online concerning political issues. Social media enables using group anger for harm. Part of the problem is that outrage is easier to express online, because individuals are distanced from others. Also, people overestimate how angry others are: they mimic an imagined angry crowd. They would rather engage with others who have extreme views politically. Then there’s information overload, which makes people pay more attention to extreme content. The net result is that the more time people spend on social media, the more susceptible they are to angertainment.

            Coper says political operators in the US feign outrage to manipulate the news, and all that’s needed is to call something woke, as in the case of Cracker Barrel, with “the entire political project these days being an exercise in performative humiliation of your opponents.” (p. 152)

            Here is his summary of the elements of right-wing hysteria campaigns:

“1. Create fear-based emotive narratives and provocative lies.
2. Seed them into existing fringe social media conspiracy networks.
3. Spread them using fake accounts to game social media algorithms.
4. Drown out positive sentiment with troll armies.
5. Advertise them into people’s feeds using innocuous brands.” (p. 178)

It’s hard for me to know how influential such campaigns are. Right-wing hysteria has been around for a long time, for example during the McCarthyist anti-communist campaign in the 1950s. Are things worse today than before? Maybe not, but social media is a new element, and online campaigns introduce new dynamics. This is where Coper’s examination is most valuable.

Ed Coper

            It’s also questionable whether the political left is today a model of rational behaviour, promoting discussion rather than outrage. Coper claims that one side in the culture wars (the left) treats an issue as something to be discussed, whereas the other side (the right) treats it as theatre, as a spectacle. Such an assessment misses the rational voices on the right and theatrics on the left. Despite this one-sidedness, there is much to learn from Coper’s treatment.

Resistance

Best of all, he provides ideas for resistance to angertainment. These are basic things — like listening. Rather than attack someone because of what they say or represent, ask them what they think and listen to them. Stories, especially about shared human experience, reduce in-group favouritism.

            Coper says teaching people how to identify fake news doesn’t work. Better is to help people learn how the system operates, how angertainment is created and how it causes harm. That is precisely Coper’s aim in writing his book.

            A key skill worth acquiring is being able to ignore, to disengage. Social media algorithms are designed to foster engagement. Ignoring bait to engage is not easy, but it does counter the algorithms.

            On the other hand, Coper also says that angertainment needs to be directly countered, and for this he recommends finding compelling big ideas, ones that deal with people’s grievances. And while angertainment remains so prevalent, and changing the system is a long-term project, Coper says we should work within the system by promoting good content.

            This sounds almost contradictory: ignore provocations and disengage from social media, but also promote good content. Well, there are bound to be several ways to respond. Perhaps the biggest challenge is to get people off social media long enough to read a book. Who’s going to read Angertainment — engaging as it is — when they can’t resist doomscrolling? And for those of us not hooked on social media, how can we help others to kick the habit? I don’t have any good answers, but there are initiatives in schools to get students off their devices.

            Coper explains how social media campaigns can spill out into the mass media, but it can work the other way too, with confected outrage initiated in the mass media taken up in social media. Nevertheless, Coper is on to something important, something that people need to know more about.

Outrage dynamics

As I read Angertainment, one thing puzzled me: what’s the connection between angertainment, understood as weaponising popular outrage, and the sort of outrage dynamics that I had been studying for the past 20 years? In what I called the backfire model, powerful groups regularly use several methods to reduce public outrage from their actions. Consider torture, something most people see as horrible. Governments involved in torture typically use five sorts of methods to reduce public outrage.

1. Secrecy. When people don’t know about something, they can’t be outraged by it.
2. Devaluation. The victims of torture are called traitors, terrorists or criminals. When someone is seen as despicable, as less than human, as undeserving, then what is done to them doesn’t seem so bad.
3. Reinterpretation. Perpetrators lie about what happens, minimise the consequences, blame others, and frame themselves as defenders of what is right.
4. Official channels. When torture is exposed, and there is clamour to hold perpetrators responsible, official channels like investigative bodies and courts give the impression of offering justice, but often give only a semblance of it.
5. Intimidation. Perpetrators threaten and attack those who speak out. Torture victims are often afraid to testify, fearing further harm.

All these methods were used by the US government and its supporters in the case of torture at Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq, exposed in 2004.

            Now consider the outrage that drives angertainment. How are these five methods involved? A little reflection shows that each one is involved in its opposite. Consider the campaign against Great Northern, an Australian beer company, over its offer to match donations to buy private land for national parks. (Coper, pp. 182-184)

1. Cover-up. Well, there’s no cover-up of the alleged wrong (support for the land purchases). Instead, it is trumpeted far and wide.
2. Devaluation. The perpetrator (Great Northern) is the one denigrated and belittled — as woke.
3. Reinterpretation. What the target of the campaign did (match donations) is blown up into something of great significance. This is the opposite of lying about or minimising the action.
4. Official channels. These aren’t used to give an appearance of justice. Instead, they are ignored or rejected. An attack, based on a judgement, is mounted immediately without waiting for an investigation or adjudication.
5. Intimidation. The target, the alleged perpetrator (Great Northern), is the one subject to intimidation.           

What can we do with this analysis? It provides a set of criteria for deciding whether outrage is over something important. The key is to look at the target of the campaign. Is it a powerful organisation doing something harmful? Or something else?

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au

Thanks to Kelly Gates, Marina Granato, Suzzanne Gray, Anneleis Humphries, Olga Kuchinskaya and Elliot Temple for helpful comments.