Social media outrage explained – "each moral or emotional word in a tweet increases the likelihood of it being retweeted by 20 per cent" 👇🏻pnas.org/content/early/… 
"People believe that they are spreading good by expressing outrage – that it comes from a place of morality and righteousness"
“If you punish somebody for violating a norm, that makes you seem more trustworthy to others, so you can broadcast your moral character by expressing outrage and punishing social norm violations,”
"Brain-imaging studies show that when people act on their moral outrage, their brain’s reward centre is activated – they feel good about it"
The problem is that this moral outrage machine can quickly turn abusive, where small moral infractions can be disproportionately punished, effectively silencing people, pushing them off online platforms and further reducing the diversity of online voices and opinion.
A separate study showed that bots can effectively be used to generate more empathetic behaviour online, simply by reminding users that there are real people and consequences involved arstechnica.com/science/2016/1…
And more good news is that posts challenging bullying behaviour and hate-speech online are starting to garner more shares than the original abusive content cst.org.uk/news/blog/2018…
