Open Facebook or Twitter, and you are likely to be greeted by a bottomless feed of outrage over one thing or another. There are societal forces driving the rise in news content that incites moral outrage despite the fact that the world isn’t really getting worse.

But people have incentives to act like it is. New technologies give virtually anyone, at any given moment, a platform to express anger. These new ways of communication, from Twitter to Facebook, allow anyone to express outrage at the newest political dust-up or celebrity blunder.

The click-bait headlines that are good for capturing attention which are good for business are not actually good for finding or seeking the truth.

Moral outrage plays an essential role in human society. It drives people to expose and rise against injustice; determining how the rest of us express solidarity in the public sphere.

At its best, social media can channel moral outrage into action, as seen in the success of petition drives, and boycott campaigns. Sometimes, however, outrage can be misplaced or excessive, and when it is, this can have bad consequences for a healthy public discourse.

Social media—with its capacity to collate like-minded people into echo chambers promoting brevity at the expense of nuance, likes and re-tweets at the expense of knowledge—is helping outrage culture proliferate which turns productive discourse into dumb competition.

Casual observation reveals that some people don’t treat moral discourse as a way to collaboratively identify problems and ways to fix them. Rather, they treat it as a way to show off how moral they are.

For grandstanders, moral and political discourse is a vanity project. Most people – including myself – have been guilty of moral grandstanding at one time or another because if you want to show people how much you care about being morally upright, outrage will often do the trick. However, indiscriminate outrage dilutes its power to identify injustices.

In this culture of reflexive outrage, when discourse is a competition instead of seeking knowledge, no one is winning, but instead undermines thoughtful deliberation. We know it’s easy to support opinions, especially when they mirror our inner inclinations.

The stakes in this echo chamber of moral jostling, competition and virtue signaling are significant because this happens too often at the exclusion of a deeper interrogation of ideology, and the way that "progressive” thinking, have led to too much focus on individualized politics.

Listening is hard, and sitting still can be taxing, especially when someone is factually wrong, but we must learn to listen should we demand others do the same for us. It is time to re-think this individualizing of politics and to move away from lauding and condemning each other. To achieve change in our pursuit of justice, we need to educate those both inside and outside progressive movements.

This engagement and discourse needs to move beyond the immediacy of reacting on social media, and move towards a reflective engagement with political economy and ideology that focuses less on individual morality and conformity.

This, of course, doesn’t mean that we dabble in respectability politics that puts hope in wishful and polite appeals to the elite and oppressors, but channeling expressions of (legitimate) anger and outrage to build emancipatory politics that gives dignity to marginalised people and voices that have been historically silenced even within progressive spaces.