New evidence to support my theory of social media outrage
tl:dr Prof Smith previously provided a theory of internet outrage that can be (loosely) summarized as “The main issue is that social media, especially twitter, amplifies the voices of people who are already Like That IRL.” New research mostly supports his theory. Showing strong evidence that social media amplifies the impact of dickish posts relative to non-dickish posts and that people who are Like That online are mostly the same people who are Like That IRL. One finding that is loosely inline with the spirt of his theory, but not predicted by the original version is that people do seem to become more dickish as a result of using social media where dickishness is rewarded. The theory has been tweaked to accommodate this.
