Ask HN: How will the Fear of Outrage affect the economics of content creation?
Paramount just admitted outrage tanked Ghost in the Shell. YouTube advertisers are leaving amid outrage over hate-speech videos being monetized. Paid and advertising supported content are affected by this phenomena. Companies are afraid of the storms of outrage, and power dynamics are reversed, with companies increasingly being hostage to outbursts.
Maybe the following is incorrect, but it seems the outrage "virus" spreads something like this: 1) Patient Zero encounters "Trigger Event" ( content or comment they find offensive or objectionable ), and reacts by sharing the outrage they feel on social media, 2) Susceptible and sensitive members of their audience catch the contagion and share it too, 3) Then echo chambers, content mills, alt and mainstream media, successively, amplify the signal until outrage reaches "fever pitch", 4) The outrage fever boils over and erupts into real world effects, like threatened or actual of boycotts, and the "quarantining and removal" of "contaminated" content. 5) The fever breaks and things return to normal, but content creators and their works have been affected.
Sometimes the outrage spreads based on fake information. Sometimes the facts are wrong. But by the time it is cleared up, the damage has propagated, sometimes even unrelated content is swept up in the purge, because of the fear of sparking further outbreaks.
It seems that outrage can be a pretty effective force for censorship and throttling the revenue stream for creators and publishers. And that new metrics like "projected risk of outrage" could likely have a chilling affect on the commissioning of new works, or the publishing of certain perspectives and content. Also, someone who could reliably create trigger events and dispatch them in sensitive populations would have a lot of power ( there is probably even services that offer this, lurking someplace ).
My question is: is this going to continue? Is it a good thing that the "interwebs / apps" system reacts like this? And what opportunities are there for people in tech to create improvements in how this operates?