Before you read this article, consider what you saw in your social media feed this morning. Was it uplifting? Probably not. If you follow anyone political on Facebook, X (Twitter), or YouTube, your feed was likely dominated by outrage — things that made you angry, frightened, or contemptuous of people who don’t share your values.

That’s not an accident. It’s a business model.

How the Engagement Machine Works

Social media platforms are in the business of selling advertising. To sell advertising, they need users to spend as much time as possible on their platforms. To keep users engaged, their algorithms have been trained to show content that provokes a strong emotional response — because emotional reactions lead to clicks, shares, comments, and prolonged engagement.

Research has consistently found that the emotion most reliably triggered by social media algorithms is anger. Angry content generates more engagement than hopeful content. Divisive content outperforms consensus-building content. Content that portrays the other side as morally corrupt drives more interaction than content that acknowledges complexity.

The result: the most extreme, most inflammatory, most tribally charged political content rises to the top of everyone’s feed, regardless of whether it is accurate, representative, or useful to the actual task of democratic self-governance.

The Australian Context

Australia has historically had a more civil political culture than the United States. Our parliamentary system, compulsory voting, and strong public institutions have insulated us from some of the worst polarisation dynamics. But social media doesn’t respect national borders.

Australian political figures have learned the same lesson their American counterparts learned: extreme statements travel further than moderate ones. A politician who makes a nuanced point about immigration policy will receive modest coverage. A politician who says something inflammatory about immigrants will trend nationally. The rational response — if your goal is visibility — is to be inflammatory. And the algorithm rewards exactly that.

We are also increasingly importing American political content directly. American culture war debates about race, gender, guns, and religion flood Australian feeds via shared content, giving many Australians the impression that these debates are central to Australian political life — when in many cases they are peripheral or irrelevant to the actual challenges facing this country.

What You Can Do About It

The platform operators have shown little appetite for addressing this problem voluntarily — the engagement model is too profitable. Regulation is slow and technically challenging. But individual users have more power than they often realise.

Actively seeking out content that challenges your priors — and engaging with it thoughtfully rather than combatively — signals to the algorithm that you want something different. Unfollowing or muting accounts whose primary function is to make you angry reduces the reward signal for that content. And simply being aware of how the machine works makes you more resistant to its effects.

The algorithm knows you’re angry. The question is whether you’re going to keep giving it what it wants.