Moral Panics on Social Media are Fueled by Signals of Virality

Moral panics have regularly erupted in society, but they appear to occur almost daily on social media. We propose that social media helps to fuel moral panics by combining societal threats with a powerful signal of social amplification—virality. Ten studies with multiple methods test a social amplification model of moral panics, in which virality amplifies the perception of threat posed by deviant behavior and ideas, prompting moral outrage expression. Naturalistic studies of Twitter (N=237,230) reveal that virality predicts moral outrage in response to tweets about controversial issues, even when controlling for specific tweet content. Multiple experiments (N=1,184) reveal the causal impact of virality on outrage expression and show that feelings of danger mediate this effect. Correlational surveys (N=1,302) show that social media users who pay attention to virality metrics perceive more dangerous extremists in society, report more psychological distress, and report expressing more outrage. This work connects classic ideas about moral panics with ongoing research on social media and provides a perspective on the nature of moral outrage.