Social media outrage dilutes real issues

The argument

Outrage spread rapidly across social media when Jennifer Lawrence made a joke about rape, when Macklemore wore an outfit deemed anti-Semitic, when Peter Rabbit allegedly bullied those with allergies, and over Raven-Symone's false claims about her racial heritage. What the list illustrates is not that each of these was beneath comment, but that all of them drew a response of roughly the same intensity as each other and as everything else. Social media has made expressing outrage far easier, and the ease is what produces the effect. It is much simpler to show disgust in a few clicks than to confront someone to their face, and because the cost of registering an objection has fallen close to zero, the threshold at which people register one has fallen with it. Outrage that once had to be worth someone's discomfort now has to be worth only a moment. Lowering the bar this way has robbed society of the ability to distinguish disagreeable acts from truly abhorrent transgressions, since both now generate the same visible response at the same speed. The loss is one of vocabulary rather than of feeling. When everything is deemed worthy of a social media backlash, essentially nothing is: a reaction that accompanies every offence conveys no information about which offences are serious. The language of outrage ceases to convey the appropriate horror at acts such as genocide and torture when the very same language is used to decry someone who orders a cheeseburger with dijon mustard but no ketchup. What ought to be reserved for atrocity has been spent on trivia, leaving nothing in reserve for the cases that genuinely require it.

Context

Outrage has always been a powerful social force for the betterment of society. Public outrage provided a deterrent for immoral behaviour. It encouraged people to behave in an acceptable way or face social ostracism. However, social media outrage is trivializing outrage and in the process, it is robbing us of the ability to condemn truly abhorrent acts.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Social media outrage is changing the way anger and outrage in society functions. Posts calling out someone for eating fried chicken "incorrectly" with a knife and fork may use the same language as those that denounce more abhorrent transgressions. But in the new world where moral outrage is primarily expressed online, language becomes less important. Now, it is not the language behind the outrage that is important, but the number of people partaking in the outrage. For example, posts expressing outrage over the racial bias of the police published under the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag may invoke the same language as those calling out minor offences, but the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag accumulates more than 17,000 tweets a day. Social media outrage does not rob us of the ability to express outrage at genuinely heinous acts. It just requires us to look beyond the language and place greater emphasis on the size of the outrage. In the era of social media, the level of outrage does not come from the message itself, but the volume at which it is being shouted.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The examples are chosen to look trivial, which assumes the judgement in dispute, and the premise offers no evidence that outrage was better calibrated before — public denunciation over small offences long predates social media. [Rejecting P2] That a shared vocabulary drains the words of force is asserted, and the counter's reply goes unanswered: readers distinguish by scale, source and volume rather than by wording alone, so a common register need not flatten the difference between a joke and an atrocity.