Social Media Users Urged to Pause Before Sharing Outrage-Inducing Content

Outrage-Inducing Misinformation More Likely to Spread on Social Media, Study Finds

New research reveals that misinformation triggering moral outrage spreads more readily on social media platforms, even among users who would normally recognize false information. The comprehensive study, analyzing over a million social media posts, demonstrates how emotional reactions override accuracy concerns in online sharing behavior.

Researchers from Northwestern University, Princeton, Yale, and St. John’s University examined user behaviors across Facebook and Twitter (now X), finding that misleading content consistently generated stronger outrage responses than factual news across both platforms.

“There’s a class of misinformation that we should pay special attention to because it tends to put us in a motivational state where we’re not actually going to be paying that much attention to accuracy. And this would be misinformation that evokes moral outrage,” explains William Brady, assistant professor of management and organizations at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management and lead researcher on the project.

The team’s analysis spanned multiple years (2017 and 2020-2021) and included over one million Facebook posts and 44,529 tweets from 24,007 users. They classified content as misinformation if it linked to sources previously identified by independent fact-checking organizations as producers of false or misleading information.

Three key patterns emerged from the research. First, misinformation consistently triggered stronger moral outrage than accurate information. On Facebook, misleading content received more anger emoji reactions, while on Twitter, it generated more outraged comments according to sentiment analysis.

Second, this outrage directly correlated with increased sharing behaviors. Posts evoking stronger emotional reactions received more shares and retweets regardless of their accuracy.

Most concerning was the third finding: outrage significantly increased users’ willingness to share content without verifying its accuracy. The more anger reactions a Facebook post accumulated, the more likely users were to reshare it without first reviewing the linked article—an effect particularly pronounced with misinformation.

“We actually find people are not terrible at discerning between misinformation versus trustworthy news,” Brady notes. “But here’s the key: if you give them an outrage-evoking article with misinformation, that ability they have goes out the window; they are more likely to share it anyway.”

The researchers attribute this behavior to what they call a “group identification mindset,” where political and social identity overrides individual critical thinking. When users encounter content that aligns with their group’s perceived grievances, the emotional response takes precedence over accuracy considerations.

“When we’re in a context where our political-group identities become salient, it starts to make us think about ourselves more in terms of the group’s outrage rather than in terms of the self,” Brady explains. “That is why people are thinking less about accuracy and are more likely to express outrage on behalf of the group.”

This phenomenon creates challenges for current approaches to combating misinformation. Common strategies like accuracy nudges, fact-checking, and “prebunking” assume users fundamentally care about truthfulness. However, this research suggests these methods may be less effective against emotionally charged content.

The study also highlights how even users who disagree with misinformation might inadvertently amplify it. By engaging with false content—even to dispute it—users signal to platform algorithms that the content is engaging, potentially increasing its visibility.

“When you engage with misinformation—even in disagreement—you’re actually contributing to the increase of misinformation in the ecosystem because you’re letting the algorithm know that it’s drawing engagement,” Brady warns.

These findings have significant implications for content moderation efforts, particularly during political cycles when emotionally charged content proliferates. Platform operators and policymakers may need to develop specialized approaches for handling content that combines misinformation with outrage-inducing elements.

“If you want to predict the misinformation that is most likely to spread through a network, then you need to be measuring its potential to elicit outrage among political groups,” Brady concludes. “Because that’s the misinformation that spreads the most and that people are not reflecting on very much.”

As social media continues to serve as a primary information source for many, understanding these emotional drivers of misinformation spread becomes increasingly crucial for maintaining healthy public discourse.