Chapter 10 Further Reading: The Business Model of Outrage — Engagement Over Truth

The following annotated bibliography provides 14 essential sources for deeper engagement with the economic incentives, empirical research, and structural dynamics of the outrage economy.

Foundational Economic Analysis

1. Smythe, D. (1977). Communications: Blindspot of Western Marxism. Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory, 1(3), 1–27.

Annotation: The foundational theoretical text for understanding advertising-based media economics. Smythe's "audience commodity" concept — the argument that in commercial media, the primary product produced and sold is not content but the audience's attention, packaged and sold to advertisers — predates digital media but directly anticipates the economics of social media platforms. Reading Smythe helps students understand why the structure of attention markets in 2025 differs only in degree, not in kind, from the structure of commercial television economics in 1977.

The paper is written in Marxist political economy vocabulary that some students will find unfamiliar, but the core insight transcends any particular theoretical framework: in advertising-based media, users are not customers but inventory. This insight is the foundation for the entire Chapter 10 analysis.

Best for: Political economy foundation; understanding the historical roots of attention economy theory; graduate-level seminar discussions.

2. Wu, T. (2016). The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads. Knopf.

Annotation: Wu's accessible history of the attention economy from 19th century newspaper advertising through early 21st century social media provides essential context for understanding why the current information environment takes the form it does. Wu traces how each successive communications technology — newspapers, radio, television, the internet, mobile apps — created new ways to harvest human attention and sell it to advertisers, and how each technology generation produced both engagement-optimization dynamics and periodic audience revolts against perceived manipulation.

The book is particularly valuable for establishing that the outrage economy is not a new phenomenon created by social media but the latest iteration of a century-long dynamic. Wu's account of the history of propaganda, advertising, and public relations is engaging and accessible for non-specialist readers.

Best for: Historical context for attention economy; accessible introductory reading; journalism students and practitioners.

Moral Contagion and Outrage Research

3. Brady, W. J., Wills, J. A., Jost, J. T., Tucker, J. A., & Van Bavel, J. J. (2017). Emotion shapes the diffusion of moralized content in social networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(28), 7313–7318.

Annotation: The core empirical paper for moral contagion research, demonstrating that moral-emotional language predicts tweet sharing rates with approximately 20% increase per additional moral-emotional word. This paper is methodologically careful, analyzing 563,000 tweets across three politically contested topics and finding consistent effects across political orientations.

Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the empirical basis for why emotionally charged political content spreads more rapidly than analytical content. The methodology section is accessible to students with basic statistics knowledge. Follow-up papers by Brady and colleagues extend the analysis to different platforms and contexts.

Best for: Empirical grounding for outrage economy claims; social media research methods; moral psychology applications.

4. Haidt, J. (2012). The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. Pantheon Books.

Annotation: Haidt's influential account of moral psychology provides the theoretical framework for understanding why moral outrage is such a powerful force in human social behavior. His moral foundations theory — identifying care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, sanctity/degradation, and liberty/oppression as the fundamental dimensions of moral psychology — helps explain why different political groups respond to different kinds of moral outrage content.

The Righteous Mind is essential for understanding both why moral contagion works and why it is differentially effective across political contexts. Haidt's argument that moral reasoning is primarily post-hoc rationalization of intuitive moral judgments has important implications for media literacy: people are not primarily consuming news to form rational beliefs but to affirm and communicate moral identities.

Best for: Moral psychology foundation; understanding polarization; why outrage works differently across ideological groups.

Fake News Economics

Annotation: An essential empirical analysis of fake news in the 2016 election by economists, applying rigorous economic analysis to questions of fake news prevalence, audience, and likely electoral impact. The paper's estimate that fake news would need to be 36 times as persuasive as a 30-second television advertisement to have determined the election outcome is frequently cited and important for calibrating the actual vs. perceived influence of specific fake news operations.

The paper also provides detailed data on the asymmetry of fake news content (pro-Trump fake news significantly outnumbered pro-Clinton fake news) and on the demographics of fake news consumers. Accessible to students with basic economics background.

Best for: Quantitative analysis of fake news impact; 2016 election case study; economic approach to misinformation.

6. Silverman, C. (2016, November 16). This analysis shows how viral fake election news stories outperformed real news on Facebook. BuzzFeed News.

Annotation: The most widely read journalistic analysis of fake news performance on Facebook during the 2016 election, establishing that the top 20 fake election stories generated more total Facebook engagement than the top 20 real election stories from major news outlets in the final three months of the campaign. This analysis launched the filter bubble and fake news moral panic of November-December 2016 and directly influenced platform policy responses.

The article should be read critically: it compares the most viral fake stories to the most viral real stories (not the typical content of each), and total engagement on the most viral stories does not directly measure reach to average users. Pairing this source with the Guess et al. study (Chapter 9 further reading) provides a balanced empirical picture.

Best for: Journalistic account of 2016 fake news ecosystem; case study in media coverage of media; understanding the viral fake news narrative.

Platform Economics and Responsibility

7. Tufekci, Z. (2018). YouTube, the great radicalizer. New York Times (Opinion).

Annotation: Tufekci's influential op-ed, based on her research experience on YouTube's recommendation algorithm, describes the "rabbit hole" dynamics of YouTube recommendations that lead users from moderate content to progressively more extreme material. Though subsequently qualified by academic research showing the radicalization pathway is less deterministic than Tufekci's account implies, the article remains important for its articulation of the structural incentive problem: an algorithm optimizing for watch time will systematically recommend more extreme content because more extreme content generates longer viewing sessions.

Accessible and well-written, this is appropriate for introductory courses alongside its academic critiques.

Best for: YouTube radicalization dynamics; accessible overview of algorithmic recommendation problems; entry point to academic literature.

8. Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. PublicAffairs.

Annotation: Zuboff's comprehensive theoretical account of "surveillance capitalism" — the economic logic by which platforms harvest behavioral data to predict and influence human behavior for commercial purposes — provides a radical extension of the attention economy analysis. Where Smythe analyzed the sale of attention, Zuboff analyzes the sale of predicted behavior: platforms do not just monetize attention but use behavioral data to construct "prediction products" that enable advertisers to influence future behavior.

The book is long and theoretically dense, but Chapters 3-7 provide the most directly relevant material for Chapter 10's concerns. Zuboff's critique is more sweeping than most academic treatments and has been challenged for overstating the precision of behavioral prediction, but her core analysis of the economic logic of data extraction is important.

Best for: Advanced theoretical analysis; graduate courses; students interested in platform power and data ethics.

Native Advertising and Trust

Annotation: The FTC's guidance document for influencer disclosure practices, applicable to social media native advertising, provides the regulatory standard against which actual practice can be measured. Reading this alongside research on actual influencer disclosure compliance reveals a significant gap between regulatory intention and market practice.

Supplementing this with the FTC's 2015 "Native Advertising: A Guide for Businesses" provides a comprehensive picture of the regulatory framework for native advertising. Both documents are brief and accessible.

Best for: Regulatory framework understanding; policy analysis; journalism law and ethics.

10. Wojdynski, B. W., & Evans, N. J. (2016). Going native: Effects of disclosure position and language on the recognition and evaluation of online native advertising. Journal of Advertising, 45(2), 157–168.

Annotation: One of the most frequently cited academic studies on native advertising disclosure effectiveness. Wojdynski and Evans found that the majority of readers did not notice disclosure labels for native advertising, and that even when noticed, disclosure had only modest effects on readers' perceptions of content credibility. The study documents the gap between the regulatory assumption (clear disclosure = informed reader) and the psychological reality (disclosure is often missed or discounted).

The paper is methodologically accessible and provides concrete evidence for the trust transfer problem described in Section 10.4.

Best for: Empirical grounding for native advertising trust effects; advertising and persuasion research; media effects.

Alternative Models and Solutions

11. Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. (Annual). Digital News Report. University of Oxford.

Annotation: The Reuters Institute's annual Digital News Report, based on surveys of tens of thousands of news consumers across 40+ countries, provides the most comprehensive comparative data available on news consumption patterns, platform use, subscription rates, trust in media, and media literacy. For Chapter 10's concerns, the report provides essential data on subscription adoption rates, reasons for non-subscription (primarily cost), and the relationship between media business models and reader trust.

The annual reports are freely available online. Different years provide data on different topics — the 2022 report focused heavily on news avoidance, the 2023 report on AI in news, and earlier reports more extensively on the advertising-subscription transition.

Best for: Comparative international data; industry analysis; understanding news economic transitions.

12. Pickard, V. (2020). Democracy Without Journalism? Confronting the Misinformation Society. Oxford University Press.

Annotation: Victor Pickard's critique of commercial media economics argues that the structural problems of the digital information environment — misinformation, outrage, declining local journalism — are fundamentally rooted in the market logic of American media. He argues for a reinvestment in public media infrastructure as the systemic solution to the misinformation crisis.

Pickard's analysis is more explicitly normative and politically left-leaning than most of the other sources in this bibliography, and his proposals for substantial public media investment face significant political and economic objections. But his structural critique — that market-based media cannot be relied upon to produce democratic information ecosystems — is rigorously argued and deserves serious engagement.

Best for: Policy analysis; media economics critique; public interest media models; debate over structural vs. regulatory solutions.

13. Ovadya, A. (2019). What's credible on the internet? We're not sure anymore. (Policy paper). Center for Social Media Responsibility.

Annotation: Aviv Ovadya's policy writing on the "outrage machine" and "synthetic media" threats provides accessible policy-oriented analysis of the structural dynamics described in Section 10.2. Ovadya coined the "infocalypse" term to describe the potential for AI-generated synthetic media to overwhelm our capacity to distinguish true from false information.

Ovadya's work bridges academic research and policy practice, and his writing is accessible and provocative. His thinking on the outrage machine specifically (different from the broader synthetic media concern) is directly relevant to Chapter 10's structural analysis.

Best for: Policy-oriented students; connecting academic analysis to technology policy; future of information quality.

14. Christoffersen, A., & Dahlgreen, W. (2022). Trust in News: Report from the 2022 Reuters Institute Digital News Report. Reuters Institute, University of Oxford.

Annotation: This focused report from the Reuters Institute examines trust in news across 46 countries, finding substantial variation in public trust correlated with media ownership models and regulatory environments. Countries with stronger public broadcasting and higher levels of media literacy education tend to show higher levels of institutional media trust. The report provides comparative empirical grounding for Chapter 10's claims about public media and alternative economic models.

The finding that trust in media is lowest in the United States — where commercial media is most dominant — and higher in countries with stronger public media traditions is directly relevant to the chapter's analysis of how economic models affect information quality outcomes.

Best for: International comparative analysis; trust in media empirics; evidence for public media arguments.