Outrage Overload

A Connors Forum podcast

Outrage 013 – How moral misinformation uses emotion to generate outrage – Ritsaart Reimann

There’s been a drum beat, suggesting that social media and information silos, echo chambers, are a driving force behind our divisiveness and polarization.

New research suggests this may be overstated.

It may have more to do with the very nature of how we come to know or believe things in the political realm.

In this episode, I sit down with researcher Ritsaart Reimann who looked at decades of research to propose some hypotheses for what’s going on as well as some ideas for improving the situation.

The insights will change how you think about politics and social media, political identities, and disinformation.

Ritsaart Reimann is a doctoral candidate at Macquarie University. He is broadly interested in social epistemology, and specifically in the dynamics and implications of (dis)trust in digital spaces. His research focuses on the challenges that virtual environments pose to placing our trust wisely, as well as the sorts of competencies that are called on to identify trustworthy online interlocutors, and to be trustworthy ourselves.

Transcript