---
title: Moral outrage
url: https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/moral-outrage/
description: Moral outrage is anger at someone who is seen to have broken a moral rule, combined with a wish to see them blamed or punished.
section: Learn
---

![Illustration: a dense, generic Cold War intelligence analyst's evidence wall of press photography, redacted reports and aerial reconnaissance imagery.](https://propagandaarchive.org/static/generated/detail/hero-evidence-wall.jpg)

[Learn](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/) · Emotion and fear

# Moral outrage

In brief

Posts attacking a political out-group are shared far more widely online, and platform rewards train people to express more outrage; the claim that moral-emotional words specifically drive sharing has not held up consistently.

On this page

- [In brief](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/moral-outrage/#in-brief)
- [What the research shows](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/moral-outrage/#what-the-research-shows)
- [Has it held up?](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/moral-outrage/#has-it-held-up)
- [How it shows up in political messaging](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/moral-outrage/#how-it-shows-up-in-political-messaging)
- [How to spot it](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/moral-outrage/#how-to-spot-it)
- [Persuasion or manipulation?](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/moral-outrage/#persuasion-or-manipulation)
- [Archive techniques that lean on this](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/moral-outrage/#archive-techniques-that-lean-on-this)
- [Related topics](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/moral-outrage/#related-topics)
- [Sources](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/moral-outrage/#sources)
- [Images](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/moral-outrage/#images)

On this page

*Area: [Emotion and fear](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/emotion-and-fear/) · Evidence:**mixed**([How we rate the evidence](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/evidence-ratings/)). Content attacking the other side reliably spreads further online, but the specific claim that moral-emotional words drive sharing has not held up consistently.*

## In brief

Moral outrage is anger at someone who is seen to have broken a moral rule, combined with a wish to see them blamed or punished. It spreads well: people share it, reward it and are rewarded for expressing it. On social media, posts that attack a political out-group are shared far more than posts that praise one's own side, and political messages built to provoke outrage take advantage of that.

## What the research shows

Molly Crockett's 2017 essay set out why outrage behaves differently online [1]. Drawing on existing research, she argued that digital media expose people to far more reported wrongdoing than they would meet in daily life, lower the personal cost of expressing outrage (a click rather than a confrontation), and raise its rewards, since public condemnation signals virtue to one's own group and is paid in likes and shares. Her argument was a framework for research, not a single experiment.

William Brady, Jay Van Bavel and colleagues tested one part of this idea in 2017 [2]. They analyzed 563,312 tweets about three divisive issues in the United States: gun control, same-sex marriage and climate change. Tweets containing "moral-emotional" words (words such as "hate," "shame" or "evil" that carry both moral and emotional meaning) were retweeted more, by roughly 20 percent for each additional such word. The extra spread happened mostly within ideological groups rather than across them, so outrage language appeared to travel inside each side's network.

Steve Rathje, Jay Van Bavel and Sander van der Linden then examined about 2.7 million Facebook and Twitter posts from news outlets and members of the US Congress [3]. The strongest predictor of engagement was language about the political out-group. Each word referring to the opposing side increased the odds that a post would be shared by about 67 percent, a much larger effect than negative-emotion or moral-emotion words. Out-group language was also closely tied to "angry" reactions on Facebook. The pattern held for liberal and conservative sources alike.

Why does outrage keep growing? Brady, Crockett and colleagues followed 7,331 Twitter users over time, covering 12.7 million tweets, and ran matching behavioral experiments [4]. Users who received more likes and retweets for outraged posts expressed more outrage in later posts. In other words, the platform's feedback trained people to post more outrage, in addition to whatever outrage they already felt.

## Has it held up?

The picture is mixed, and the reasons matter. The out-group finding looks solid: Rathje and colleagues found it across several data sets, platforms and both political sides [3]. The feedback-learning finding [4] combines observational data with experiments, which strengthens it.

The narrower "moral contagion" claim, that moral-emotional words in particular boost sharing, has been challenged. Jonathan Burton, Nicole Cruz and Ulrike Hahn re-examined the 2017 analysis and additional data sets [5]. They found that the estimated effect was sensitive to how the analysis was done and did not appear consistently across topics and samples, and argued that the evidence did not isolate a specifically moral effect. Rathje's later work also suggests that what travels may be hostility to the other side more than moral vocabulary as such [3]. In short, the claim that outrage and hostility spread online is well supported; the claim that sprinkling moral words into a message reliably increases its reach is not.

Most of this research also studies sharing, not persuasion. A post that spreads widely among people who already agree may change few minds, and none of these studies show that outrage content converts opponents.

## How it shows up in political messaging

- **The Dreyfus affair, 1898.** Émile Zola's open letter "J'accuse...!", published on the front page of *L'Aurore*, accused the French army and government by name of framing Captain Alfred Dreyfus and covering it up [6]. It is a classic of activist outrage writing: a named wrongdoer, a named victim and a demand for accountability.

![Front page of L'Aurore, 13 January 1898, with Emile Zola's J'accuse](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/images/psych-moral-outrage-jaccuse-l-aurore-1898.jpg)

*Front page of*L'Aurore*, Paris, 13 January 1898, carrying Émile Zola's open letter "J'accuse…!" to the President of the Republic. Source: [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:J’accuse.jpg). Public domain.*

- **"Remember the Maine," 1898.** After the US battleship *Maine* exploded in Havana harbor, New York newspapers, most famously William Randolph Hearst's *Journal*, blamed Spain before any investigation had established a cause. The historian W. Joseph Campbell notes that the influence of this "yellow press" on the decision for war has often been overstated, but the coverage remains a standard example of outrage-driven journalism [7].

![Front page of the New York Journal, 17 February 1898, on the destruction of the USS Maine](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/images/psych-moral-outrage-ny-journal-maine-1898.jpg)

*Front page of the*New York Journal*, 17 February 1898, offering a $50,000 reward and headlined "Destruction of the War Ship Maine Was the Work of an Enemy." Source: [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Journal98.gif). Public domain (published before 1931).*

- **Atrocity stories in wartime.** Allied First World War posters such as [Remember Belgium — Enlist To-Day](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/remember-belgium-1915/) turned reports of German abuses into a call to enlist, and Germany answered with counter-messaging such as [Sind wir die Barbaren? (Are We the Barbarians?)](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/sind-wir-die-barbaren-1916/). In 1990 a 15-year-old identified only as "Nayirah" told a US congressional caucus that Iraqi soldiers had taken babies from incubators in Kuwait. She was later revealed to be the daughter of Kuwait's ambassador to the United States, her appearance had been arranged through a public relations campaign funded by a Kuwaiti government-backed group, and the incubator story was not substantiated [8].

![British recruiting poster Remember Belgium](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/images/remember-belgium-1915.jpg)

*"Remember Belgium: Enlist To-Day," British recruiting poster, 1915. From the FRAME gallery: [Remember Belgium — Enlist To-Day](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/remember-belgium-1915/)*

![German statistical chart poster, Sind wir die Barbaren?](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/images/sind-wir-die-barbaren-1916.jpg)

*"Sind wir die Barbaren?" (Are We the Barbarians?), German statistical chart issued in 1916 in answer to Allied atrocity charges. From the FRAME gallery: [Sind wir die Barbaren? (Are We the Barbarians?)](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/sind-wir-die-barbaren-1916/)*

- **US politics, both parties.** Rathje's data show that Democratic and Republican members of Congress alike drew the most engagement from posts attacking the other party [3]. Internal Facebook documents reported in 2021 showed that the company's ranking system had for a time weighted emoji reactions, including "angry," five times as heavily as a "like," a design that rewarded provocative content from any side [9].

## How to spot it

- The main message is who to be angry at, not what to do about a problem.
- A single incident is presented as proof of what the whole other side is like.
- Mentions of the opposing group outnumber mentions of the sender's own proposals.
- Key facts are missing, such as when something happened, who confirmed it, or what the accused said in response.
- The piece asks to be shared ("everyone needs to see this") more than it asks to be checked.

## Persuasion or manipulation?

Anger at real wrongdoing is a legitimate part of politics; many reforms began with someone documenting an injustice and demanding a response. Honest outrage writing names a specific act, gives the evidence for it, lets the accused's account be heard, and points to a remedy. It becomes manipulative when the wrongdoing is invented or exaggerated, when one case is presented as typical of a whole group, or when the anger is used purely to generate engagement, with no claim that could survive checking. Research on sharing suggests another test: whether the message would still work if the reader stopped to verify it before passing it on.

## Archive techniques that lean on this

- [Outrage bait](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/outrage-bait/) — Outrage bait: builds content around a provocation so that readers' anger does the distribution.
- [Scapegoating](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/scapegoating/) — Scapegoating: directs outrage at a single group; out-group hostility is the strongest engagement predictor in the research above.

## Related topics

- [Negativity bias](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/negativity-bias/) — Negativity bias
- [Emotional contagion](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/emotional-contagion/) — Emotional contagion
- [Social identity](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/social-identity/) — Social identity
- [Group polarization](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/group-polarization/) — Group polarization
- [Disgust](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/disgust/) — Disgust
- [Fear messaging](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/fear-messaging/) — Fear messaging

## Sources

1. Crockett, M. J. (2017). Moral outrage in the digital age. *Nature Human Behaviour*, 1(11), 769–771. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-017-0213-3
2. Brady, W. J., Wills, J. A., Jost, J. T., Tucker, J. A., & Van Bavel, J. J. (2017). Emotion shapes the diffusion of moralized content in social networks. *Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences*, 114(28), 7313–7318. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1618923114
3. Rathje, S., Van Bavel, J. J., & van der Linden, S. (2021). Out-group animosity drives engagement on social media. *Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences*, 118(26), e2024292118. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2024292118
4. Brady, W. J., McLoughlin, K., Doan, T. N., & Crockett, M. J. (2021). How social learning amplifies moral outrage expression in online social networks. *Science Advances*, 7(33), eabe5641. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abe5641
5. Burton, J. W., Cruz, N., & Hahn, U. (2021). Reconsidering evidence of moral contagion in online social networks. *Nature Human Behaviour*, 5(12), 1629–1635.
6. Zola, É. (1898, January 13). J'accuse...! Lettre au Président de la République. *L'Aurore*.
7. Campbell, W. J. (2001). *Yellow journalism: Puncturing the myths, defining the legacies*. Praeger.
8. MacArthur, J. R. (1992). *Second front: Censorship and propaganda in the Gulf War*. Hill and Wang.
9. Merrill, J. B., & Oremus, W. (2021, October 26). Five points for anger, one for a 'like': How Facebook's formula fostered rage and misinformation. *The Washington Post*.

## Images

| Image | Source | Licence |
| --- | --- | --- |
| L'Aurore, 13 January 1898 | [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:J’accuse.jpg), Émile Zola / L'Aurore | Public domain (published 1898) |
| New York Journal, 17 February 1898 | [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Journal98.gif), New York Journal | Public domain (published before 1931) |
| Remember Belgium, 1915 | FRAME gallery, [Remember Belgium — Enlist To-Day](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/remember-belgium-1915/) (provenance in the entry) | See entry |
| Sind wir die Barbaren?, 1916 | FRAME gallery, [Sind wir die Barbaren? (Are We the Barbarians?)](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/sind-wir-die-barbaren-1916/) (provenance in the entry) | See entry |

### Image gaps

- Social-media posts and internal Facebook documents discussed on the page are copyright or private material; not hosted.

## Techniques

[Outrage bait](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/outrage-bait/) [Scapegoating](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/scapegoating/)

## Related

- [Negativity bias](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/negativity-bias/)
- [Emotional contagion](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/emotional-contagion/)
- [Social identity](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/social-identity/)
- [In-group favoritism](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/in-group-favoritism/)
- [Group polarization](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/group-polarization/)
- [Disgust](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/disgust/)
- [Fear messaging](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/fear-messaging/)
- [Outrage bait](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/outrage-bait/)
- [Scapegoating](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/scapegoating/)
- [Name-calling](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/name-calling/)