Platforms built to capture attention now engineer outrage at scale, converting identity-based grievances into viral moral panics, a dynamic Douglas Murray warns about in The Madness of Crowds, and that the attention economy’s algorithms actively amplify.

A decade ago, the big social platforms promised connection and democratised speech. What they optimised, however, was engagement, clicks, comments, time on site. The surest way to juice those metrics is not calm deliberation but highly emotional content. That is why our feeds privilege the sensational over the proportionate and why today’s public square behaves like a permanent alarm bell.

Murray’s core worry, that our culture has replaced shared truths with frenzied identity tribes eager for ritual denunciations, meets its perfect accelerant in recommender systems that learn our triggers and give us more of them. As Andrew Sullivan has noted, users who rely on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube get algorithmically “shielded…from ‘alternative views, unpleasant facts, discomforting arguments, and contextualising statistics’,” slicing the public into self-affirming bazaars. Spend a day “watching video after video” about one kind of alleged abuse and the system will dutifully “reinforce” your priors, “regardless of objective reality”, a design that, Sullivan argues, incubates “web-induced mass hysteria.”

Platforms didn’t invent the new moral dogmas that Murray critiques, but they operationalised them. They automated the search for heresy and built the megaphones for public shaming. In Murray’s pages, you see how reputations can be ended not by refuting arguments but by coating people in accusations and letting the smell do the rest, as with the mobbing of Charles Murray at Middlebury, where protesters shut down a talk and injured his faculty host rather than engage the ideas. That theatre of denunciation now plays out in the feeds, hourly.

Algorithms maximise for measurable reactions, not truth. Negative high-arousal emotions, anger, fear, disgust, spread faster and last longer than nuance. So the stack rewards content that creates threat: the insinuation that the wrong joke, the wrong adjective, the wrong silence equals moral rot. In Murray’s terms, a just fight against bigotry mutated into a “St George in retirement” crusade. Having slain real dragons, we invent new ones, and the platforms ensure we always see a dragon to slay.

It isn’t a conspiracy. It’s product–market fit. When outrage “performs”, creators learn to package grievances for virality. Brands and institutions learn to perform penance in press releases. Bystanders learn to keep their heads down. The attention economy becomes a virtue economy, and a profitable one. The consequences extend far beyond online debate. Left unchecked, these feedback loops do more than distort discourse; they deform institutions.

The same incentive structures Murray tracks, where reputational fear beats evidence, have migrated into human resources (HR) handbooks, newsrooms, and schools. The result is not diversity of thought but an internalised compliance: people speak for the feed, not for the record. Murray chronicles how difficult topics are fenced off by label and taboo, with denunciation replacing debate. The Bell Curve controversy is emblematic of a wider pattern in which the mere association with contested research is treated as disqualifying.

Social systems that once checked excess, editorial judgment, peer review, open debate, are themselves pulled into the current. Journalists who try to restore “missing facts or context” risk professional ostracism inside newsrooms primed for the next online storm. The platform logic becomes workplace logic.

Murray details how meaning has migrated from shared ends to personalised identities, with social status conferred by where one ranks in a rolling hierarchy of grievance. That framework is tailor-made for outrage feeds. If “allyship” functions as a public loyalty oath, then non-participation is treason, a perfect trigger for the pile-on. If the culture insists that disagreement equals harm, then the algorithm rightly predicts you’ll click on and share your daily ration of harms. And if success in earlier equality campaigns made subsequent waves search for novel dragons, then an economy that monetises attention will always supply them.

This isn’t to deny the existence of real injustices. It is to note how a generalised moral panic can be manufactured by a stack that rewards the escalation of language and intent. The work of persuasion and reform can happen. It just happens less, because it is slower, quieter, and non-addictive.

Two losses stand out in Murray’s account, and the platforms make them harder to recover.

First, forgiveness. When the archive never forgets and the crowd never relents, wrongdoing is a one-way ratchet. Even a changed life cannot find a way back if the interface offers only exposure and punishment. That is not a culture of justice; it is a culture of ruin. (Murray devotes significant space to the loss of forgiveness as a civic virtue; it is telling that “forgiveness” appears as a thematic index in his book’s back matter, a hint at how centrally the absence of mercy figures in our new public rites.)

Second, proportionality. In a feed, the trivial and the grave are rendered in the same font, weighed by the same metrics. The daily micro-dramas that produce dopamine look, to the brain, like matters of state, until actual matters of state arrive and find a populace numb, exhausted, and cynical.