The outrage machine

Facebook’s own data scientists flagged the problem almost immediately: Posts that generated anger were disproportionately likely to contain misinformation and low-quality content. The company made adjustments over the following years, but not before that weighting had reshaped how billions of people saw information across the platform. Haugen told the British Parliament directly that “anger and hate is the easiest way to grow on Facebook.” A landmark MIT study published in Science tracked 126,000 news stories across Twitter over more than a decade and found that false information is 70% more likely to be shared than true information, and reaches its first 1,500 people six times faster. It wasn’t bots driving the behavior, it was humans.

In 2022, researchers at Wharton found that ad-supported platforms have a structural reason to moderate less aggressively than the public interest requires because engagement and safety online run contrary to each other on social media. Every post removed is a potential interaction that never happened and an impression never to be sold. 

When performed with fidelity, content moderation is expensive and revenue-negative, so I don’t think anyone was surprised when in early 2025 Meta announced it was ending its third-party fact-checking program, replacing it with a crowd-sourced community notes system, and rolling back content restrictions on political topics. Zuckerberg was candid about what the change meant: “We’re going to catch less bad stuff.” By midyear the company posted a 22% revenue increase.

Perhaps the more hyperlocal version you may be aware of is Nextdoor, which presents itself as a neighborhood resource but still drives revenue through ads and engagement and uses community volunteers to moderate their respective corners of the internet. A peer-reviewed study published this spring in the journal New Media & Society by University of Colorado Boulder researchers Toby Hopp and Patrick Ferrucci reports that regular Nextdoor users report significantly higher concern about crime and show greater openness to aggressive policing tactics than people who use the platform less or not at all, even as national crime data shows overall declines. 

Different platform, same revenue model, same engagement triggers, same human outcomes. Nextdoor’s own CEO once said in an interview that more neighbors using the platform means more ad inventory and more revenue for the company. 

Where so many people go to get a sense of whether your neighborhood is safe and whether your neighbors are trustworthy is being engineered by people whose incentive is not truth but engagement. Every conversation is filtered through algorithms optimized for engagement, data and revenue.

California’s June primary just wrapped, which means you’ve spent the past few months absorbing increasingly intense social content designed to trigger emotions across races up and down the ballot because that’s what still wins in the “pic for algo” game. While we are in this temporary lull of all caps posts with AI generated imagery and a sprinkle of unverified accusations intended to fuel online outrage, now is the time to remind ourselves that what registers as community conversation on social media is also always an ad product.

Today, misinformation is dressed up to look like the truth, created with AI tools that make it easier than ever to paint someone as a caricature, appropriating language that you’ve heard before in another context, and used by people you trust. The only antidote to yet another train wreck of social media politicking is human presence and putting in the work to pick up the phone, send an email or grab a coffee and have a real conversation. 

Our unfortunate reality is that the version of people and community you’re seeing online has been curated by people whose job is not to inform you but to keep you engaged long enough to get more data and sell an ad. Yes, scrolling and tapping on a screen from bed is a lot easier than reaching out. But this is the work that’s going to preserve your relationship to the people around you and your ability to make a clear decision when you vote in November and beyond.