People will share misinformation that sparks “moral outrage” – Ars Technica:

It turned out that most people could discern between true and fake news. Yet they were willing to share outrageous news regardless of whether it was true or not—a result that was in line with previous findings from Facebook and Twitter data. Many participants were perfectly OK with sharing outrageous headlines, even though they were fully aware those headlines were misinformation.

[…]

The urge for signaling a moral stance quite often takes precedence over truth, but misinformation is not exclusively due to flaws in human nature. “One thing this study was not focused on was the impact of social media algorithms,” Brady notes. Those algorithms usually boost content that generates engagement, and we tend to engage more with outrageous content. This, in turn, incentivizes people to make their content more outrageous to get this algorithmic boost.

We’re hard-wired, as are many other animals (mammals who live in groups mostly) to be angry when we see unfair behavior. It’s likely an evolutionary response that allows community to manage sharing resources when they’re scarce.

It’s a pretty trivial to see how this creates a feedback loop with machine driven social medium algorithms that are designed to optimize viewer engagement to keep people scrolling and seeing more and more advertisements. 

More and more I’m only actively interacting on social media platforms that don’t use machine driven algorithms to create a feed. Bluesky and Mastodon are the two main examples of platforms that will only show you what you set them up to show you… and that’s where I’ve been spending most of my time. It’s been surprisingly freeing. If you have tried it, and you’re frustrated with the posturing online, you might like it there too.