What the social media algorithm actually rewards — and why kindness is a smarter response than you think.

Fear | Hate | Anger

Those are the three emotions that power the entire social media economy.

Not curiosity. Not generosity. Not connection.

The system found human nature’s weakest points and built a business model on top of them.

Last week I gave a presentation at the Cultivate Wellbeing Congress, a session on ethical marketing for animal care professionals.

One of the questions they asked me to cover was how to handle animal cruelty content online: how to report it, how to respond to it, and what actually helps versus what makes things worse.

That same week I had watched Louis Theroux’s Inside the Manosphere on Netflix.

I hadn’t planned to write about both in the same piece. But the more I sat with them, the more clearly they were pointing at the same thing.

I am not a marketing expert in the traditional sense. But because I work closely with small businesses across their tech, systems and digital presence, I tend to be part of most things - websites, automations, brand voice, email marketing, content. Values-led, practical support that actually fits how small businesses work rather than the world of paid ads and growth hacking. So while I would never claim the title, I do understand this landscape (and I have a lot of thoughts about it ; ).

What Theroux actually found

Theroux spent some time with a group of male influencers who have built large, devoted online followings by promoting increasingly extreme views about masculinity, women, and the world.

I am not going to name any of them, or open up conversations about the vile vitriol they spout, because that is not what this piece is about.

What I am going to talk about is what the documentary made me think about, and if you have children, work with young people, or simply spend any time online, it will resonate.

The documentary explores the entrepreneurial side of content creation, specifically how these influencers disseminate content through short, clickbait clips that maximise audience engagement and monetisation. There is a constant drive to create more, and increasingly extreme content, to maintain their popularity.

Not just more content. More extreme content. Because the algorithm demands escalation.

We have been here before

A few years ago, a particularly vile, self-appointed alpha male was inescapable in secondary school corridors. If you have children of that age, you will know exactly who I mean.

Young boys were watching him, quoting him, and absorbing his deeply toxic worldview. The appeal was the promise: escape the system, live outside the matrix, and the money, Lamborghini and women follow.

It is a compelling pitch if you are sixteen, if talking to girls feels impossible (or you’ve tried and been shamed in the response) and you cannot quite work out why. When you are already struggling to navigate a world alongside women, someone offering you a framework, however warped, for feeling in control of that is going to find an audience.

What made it particularly effective was the way it was constructed. It was never just one thing. The motivation and self-improvement content sat alongside the toxic worldview from the start - the idea that you are smarter than the system, that most people are too weak to see the truth, and that women are something to be managed rather than understood. All of it delivered together, so that the appeal and the poison arrived at the same time.

It made young men feel chosen, seen, special - while simultaneously feeding them something deeply damaging. By the time the emotional investment was there, unpicking one from the other felt almost impossible. That is not an accident. It is a strategy.

My two children were at different schools at the time, and the contrast in how each school handled it has stayed with me.

My son’s school took the immediate hard line: the name was banned, any mention resulted in an instant suspension. My daughter’s school took a different approach entirely. They ran an assembly. They dedicated form time to open discussion. Boys and girls were given the space to talk, to ask questions, to make their point and hear others.

I know which approach I thought was more useful.

Pretending something doesn’t exist doesn’t make it go away. These young people were already watching this content. They were already being shaped by it, often without the tools to understand what was actually happening or the intent of the person promoting it.

And that intent certainly wasn’t their wellbeing.

The truth is that when kids and adults say things that are hurtful or aggressive, it usually comes from somewhere. Vulnerability, mostly. A need to belong, to feel strong, to have an answer for something that feels confusing or threatening. That doesn’t make the impact any less real for the person on the receiving end. But it does mean that shutting the conversation down is rarely the answer. Helping people understand how these figures operate, what drives the content, and who actually benefits is a more honest response to a problem that isn’t going to quietly disappear.

The machine isn’t broken. It is working perfectly.

Social media platforms are businesses. Their income comes from advertising. Advertising revenue depends on how long people spend on the platform. And the thing that keeps people on the platform longer than anything else is strong emotional reaction.

Research has shown that anger spreads faster and further than almost any other emotion online. This is not new. Tabloid newspapers have been employing exactly this approach for decades - it is a proven method of playing to our fears, and it worked long before social media existed. The difference now is the scale, the speed, and the fact that the feedback loop is instant.

Algorithms promote emotionally provocative or controversial content by focusing on metrics like likes and shares, creating feedback loops that amplify polarising narratives. The algorithm has no opinion on whether the content is accurate, kind, or good for the people watching it. All it sees is activity. And activity gets rewarded with a wider reach.

Creators who want reach learn this quickly, and many talk about it openly. Rage baiting (deliberately creating content designed to provoke anger or outrage) is a widely discussed and acknowledged strategy. Entire videos are dedicated to explaining how it works and why controversy drives views more effectively than almost anything else. It is not a secret. It is a technique.

This is not a bug. It is the business model working exactly as designed.

What I find genuinely upsetting about all of this is that the three emotions powering the whole machine are fear, hate and anger. The system has looked at human nature, found its weakest points, and built an economy on top of them. That is worth being angry about.

Just do not hand that anger back to the platform that caused it, and in turn amplify this toxic and hurtful behaviour.

Sharing to condemn still causes harm.

This brings me back to the question I was asked at the congress. Animal cruelty content circulates widely online, often amplified by well-meaning people who want to raise awareness or express outrage. The intention is good. The effect is not.

Stopping to watch, even briefly, registers as engagement and tells the platform to push the content further. Sharing it, or commenting on it, however appalled your caption, amplifies its reach. The algorithm doesn’t read your caption. Again, it just counts the engagement.

What to do instead: scroll past without stopping. Screenshot it. Report it directly to the RSPCA, ASPCA or the relevant authority in your country. Do not share it to raise awareness. You are not raising awareness. You are extending its reach and handing the platform more data about what keeps people watching.

The same principle applies to any content that exists to provoke. Engaging with it, even in opposition, feeds it.

Most of it is much more ordinary than the Manosphere

The Manosphere is an extreme example. Cruelty content is a specific one. But the same mechanics are at work in much more ordinary online behaviour every day.

The post that picks an unnecessary fight. The opinion designed to provoke rather than inform. The comment that adds nothing except heat to an already warm thread. The person who reposts something outrageous with “I can’t believe this,” which of course only extends its reach.

Outrage drives comments. Comments drive engagement. Engagement drives revenue. We are not passive victims in this cycle. Every reaction emoji, share, and comment reinforces the system.

Even engaging negatively with content you disagree with counts as engagement. The algorithm doesn’t distinguish between a supportive comment and an angry one. Both tell it the same thing: this content is worth pushing further.

The single most effective thing you can do with content that makes you furious is nothing.

Don’t comment. Don’t share. Don’t even leave an angry emoji. Scroll past.

Starve it of the oxygen it is looking for.

The same mechanism works in reverse

This is where it gets more interesting, and more within your control.

If the algorithm rewards reaction, you can choose what kind of reaction you contribute to. The same system that amplifies outrage also amplifies warmth, if enough people create it.

Kindness is not naive here. It is actually a more effective act of resistance than commenting in anger, because it redirects the machine rather than feeding it.

In the presentation I gave last week, I talked about this in the context of small animal care businesses: rescue organisations, wildlife charities, welfare campaigns.

Like and comment on their posts. Share their good news. Celebrate recoveries, adoptions, conservation wins. Cross-support the people doing good work in your field. The mechanism that spreads harmful content spreads good content just as effectively. You just have to choose to use it that way.

The same is true for any small business owner reading this.

Think about the last time someone you know did something worth celebrating eg. finished a course, launched something they had been building for months, wrote something honest and quietly brilliant, or got through a hard year. I’m confident we all have many connections whose work deserve more people seeing it!

Share it. Write a sentence about why it matters to you. Tag them. It costs two minutes. For them, it can mean something that lasts considerably longer than that.

Think about the businesses, causes, or communities you genuinely believe in. Write about them. Not a formal endorsement, just a real one. One honest paragraph from someone who means it is worth more than most paid advertising.

Think about a colleague who helped you recently, a client who was a pleasure to work with, or a stranger online who said something that actually made you think.

Tell them.

Publicly, if it feels right. These small moments of specific, genuine appreciation are rarer than they should be, and people remember them.

If enough of us did this regularly, not occasionally but as a habit, we would start to shift what the feed looks and feels like for the people in our orbit.

Not overnight. But genuinely, over time.

You don’t have to feed it

The platforms are not going to redesign their algorithms out of the goodness of their hearts. Regulation might eventually apply some pressure, but slowly and imperfectly. The system isn’t going to fix itself.

But the system is made of individual decisions.

Yours, taken consistently, do contribute to what the internet looks and feels like for the people around you.

You don’t have to be on social media more. You don’t have to post every day. But if you are going to show up, there is a version of that which leaves things slightly better than you found them.

Kill them with kindness. The algorithm is counting on you not to.