The Examined Path Through Twitter and X — the politics of outrage

The architecture of Twitter — the feed, the like, the retweet — was tuned by attention research to amplify emotional content, and outrage performs best. This is not a conspiracy; it is an optimization problem solved in a particular direction. The public discourse that results was not intended, but it was not unforeseeable.

The course sequence, in order.

Each step builds on the last.