Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Anger keeps you scrolling
What feeds amplify
The angrier people get, the more likely they are to share and engage. A social internet that wants to keep people online as long as possible therefore amplifies the most extreme and controversial opinions. It shows disagreement, and the worst disagreement it can find.
The brain's sorting adds the next step. Whatever the worst opinions are, it assigns the same opinions to everybody on the other team.
One package of identity
Online polarisation also squeezes everything that makes a person an individual into one package: lifestyle choices, the comedians or shows they watch, religion, sense of fashion. Together these look like parts of opposing, mutually exclusive identities.
Disagreements about how to run society get so simplified and distorted that the people on the other team seem to be willfully making the world worse. They seem almost evil, beyond convincing by rationality, facts, or civil discussion. People on the other team may see the reader the same way.
Why does anger spread so well online?
In a 2012 study in the Journal of Marketing Research, Jonah Berger and Katherine Milkman examined thousands of New York Times articles and which ones landed on the most-emailed list. Articles that stirred high-arousal emotions such as anger and awe were more likely to be widely shared than articles that stirred low-arousal emotions such as sadness. Arousal, the physical activation that comes with an emotion, turned out to matter as much as whether the feeling was positive or negative.
How do feeds decide what to show?
Large feeds typically rank posts with machine learning models that predict how likely a given person is to click, reply, share, or linger on each one. The models are trained on logs of past behavior from millions of users. Posts with the highest predicted engagement float to the top, and the rest sink below the fold. The ranking therefore reflects what people reacted to, not a judgment about what is accurate or kind.
Why does the other team seem so extreme?
Political scientists Douglas Ahler and Gaurav Sood tested what Americans believe about the other party's members in a 2018 study in the Journal of Politics. Respondents estimated that about a third of Republicans earn over $250,000 a year, when the actual share was roughly 2 percent. The same study found people overestimated how many members of the opposing party belong to groups seen as stereotypical of it, such as union members for Democrats or evangelicals for Republicans.
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