Scroll through your social media feed right now. Chances are, within the first ten posts, you’ll see someone furious about something. Maybe it’s a political scandal. Maybe it’s a bad take from a celebrity. Maybe it’s just someone being wrong on the internet. Whatever it is, the post is designed to make you feel something—and that something is almost always anger.

We’ve built an entire economy around outrage, and we’re all complicit in it.

It wasn’t always this way. Early social media was annoying in different ways—oversharing, humblebragging, FarmVille requests. But it wasn’t optimised for anger. That came later, when platforms figured out that nothing drives engagement quite like making people mad.

The logic is brutally simple. Happy posts get a like and maybe a share. Neutral posts get ignored. But posts that make you angry? Those get comments. Quotes. Debates. The algorithm sees all that activity and decides this must be important content, so it shows it to more people, who get angry and engage, which feeds the cycle.

News organisations figured this out too. A headline that says “Government announces modest policy change” gets maybe a few clicks. But “Government’s shocking betrayal of everyday Australians” gets thousands. The factual content might be identical, but the framing determines whether anyone actually reads it.

I’m not immune to this, by the way. I’ve clicked on outrage bait more times than I can count. I’ve read entire articles just to get angry about them. I’ve even shared things because I was mad, knowing full well I was feeding the machine. We all have.

The problem isn’t that people get angry about things—some things deserve anger. The problem is that the infrastructure of online discourse is now designed to manufacture and amplify anger, whether it’s justified or not. We’ve created systems that profit from our worst impulses.

Think about how this changes incentives for everyone involved. If you’re a content creator, you learn quickly that nuanced, thoughtful takes get ignored while hot takes get shared. If you’re a journalist, you know the outrage headline will perform better than the boring-but-accurate one. If you’re a politician, you discover that picking fights on Twitter gets more coverage than announcing policy.

The result is a race to the bottom. Everyone has to be more outraged, more extreme, more provocative than the last person, just to be heard. Moderation becomes invisible. Complexity becomes boring. And the people who refuse to play the game get drowned out by those who embrace it.

What’s particularly insidious is how this warps our perception of reality. When your feed is full of outrage, it’s easy to believe the world is in constant crisis. Every day brings a new emergency, a new betrayal, a new reason to be furious. It’s exhausting, and it’s often disconnected from what’s actually happening in your life.

I think about this when I talk to people offline. The conversations are so different from what I see online. People have concerns, sure, but they’re not in a state of permanent rage. They’re getting on with their lives, dealing with normal problems, occasionally paying attention to the news but not treating every headline like the end of the world. The disconnect is jarring.

The outrage economy also makes it harder to solve actual problems. When everything is presented as an apocalyptic crisis, we lose the ability to prioritise. When every disagreement becomes a battle between good and evil, we lose the ability to compromise. And when anger is the default emotional state, we lose the ability to have productive conversations.

Some argue that outrage is necessary—that it motivates people to act, to care about injustice, to demand change. There’s truth to that. Plenty of important social movements have been fuelled by righteous anger. But there’s a difference between strategic outrage directed at specific injustices and constant, diffuse rage about everything all at once.

The latter doesn’t lead to action. It leads to burnout.

So what’s the alternative? I don’t have a perfect answer, but I think it starts with recognising what’s happening. Every time you feel that surge of anger at something you saw online, pause and ask: am I being manipulated right now? Is this genuinely important, or is someone trying to extract engagement from me?

It also means supporting the people and platforms that resist the outrage economy. The journalists who write boring, accurate headlines. The creators who make thoughtful content even when it doesn’t go viral. The platforms experimenting with algorithms that don’t prioritise conflict.

We probably can’t dismantle the outrage economy overnight—too many powerful interests benefit from it. But we can at least stop feeding it quite so much. We can choose to engage with content that treats us like adults capable of nuance, rather than rage machines waiting to be activated.

The internet doesn’t have to be this way. We made these choices, collectively and individually. We can make different ones.

Or we can keep scrolling, getting angrier, feeding the algorithm, wondering why everything feels so broken all the time.

Your choice.