A 2017 NYU study analyzed over half a million tweets and found that each moral or emotional word used increase virality by 20%. Posts with indignant disagreement received twice as much engagement as other content on Facebook. The algorithms reward the incendiary and indignant. The social feed is the Internet and serves as reality for many users who don’t have the media literacy or self control to turn it off or to realize one thing: the feed is a program meant to keep them engaged in order to serve ads for lipstick, vitamins, and leggings.

In other words, incendiaries result in greater stakeholder value for social platforms because people share the content, stay on the platform longer, and view more ads, which are the revenue drivers for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram.

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