There's a difference between wanting to be angry and feeling that anger is the correct response to an outside stimulus.

I don't wake up thinking "today I want to be angry", but if I go outside and see somebody kicking a cat, I feel that anger is the correct response.

The problem is that social media is a cat-kicking machine that drags people into a vicious circle of anger-inducing stimuli. If people think that every day people are kicking cats on the Internet, they feel that they need to do something to stop the cat-kicking; given their agency, that "something" is usually angry responses and attacks, which feeds the machine.

Again, they do not do that because they want to be angry; most people would rather be happy than angry. They do it because they feel that cats are being kicked, and anger is the required moral response.

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lazide 3 hours ago | parent [-]

And if you seek out (and push ‘give me more’ buttons on) cat kicking videos?

At some point, I think it’s important to recognize the difference between revealed preferences and stated preferences. Social media seems adept at exposing revealed preferences.

If people seek out the thing that makes them angry, how can we not say that they want to be angry? Regardless of what words they use.

And for example, I never heard anyone who was a big Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, or Alex Jones fan who said they wanted to be angry or paranoid (to be fair, this was pre-Trump and awhile ago), yet every single one of them I saw got angry and paranoid after watching them, if you paid any attention at all.

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InsideOutSanta 2 hours ago | parent [-]

>If people seek out the thing that makes them angry, how can we not say that they want to be angry?

Because their purpose in seeking it out is not to get angry, it's to stop something from happening that they perceive as harmful.

I doubt most people watch Alex Jones because they love being angry. They watch him because they believe a global cabal of evildoers is attacking them. Anger is the logical consequence, not the desired outcome. The desired outcome is that the perceived problem is solved, i.e. that people stop kicking cats.

	▲	lazide 41 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		The reason they feel that way (more) is because of those videos. Just like most people who watch Alex Jones probably didn’t start by believing all the crazy things. We can chicken/egg about it all day, but at some point if people didn’t want it - they wouldn’t be doing it. Depending on the definition of ‘want’ of course. But what else can we use? I don’t think anyone would disagree that smokers want cigarettes, eh? Or gamblers want to gamble?