The Hon Andrew Leigh MP
Assistant Minister for Productivity, Competition, Charities and Treasury
The Anger Machine: Rebuilding Community in the Age of Outrage
Joan Kirner Social Justice Oration,
State Library Victoria, Melbourne
Wednesday, 21 October 2026
Introduction
I acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation, the traditional custodians of the land on which we meet, and pay my respects to all First Nations people present. Thank you to Denis Moriarty and Our Community for the honour of inviting me to deliver this oration.
To a teenager with a growing interest in politics, Joan Kirner was a towering figure. Victoria’s first woman premier. Environmentalist. Education reformer. Essendon supporter. And that’s just one letter of the alphabet.
Her post-political legacy was equally significant. Joan Kirner was an inaugural co-convenor of EMILY’s List Australia, and a central figure in Labor’s 1994 decision to use quotas to bring about gender parity. As our party moved towards equality, it seemed that every time I chatted to a female colleague, she had a Joan Kirner story; a tale of how Kirner had encouraged her to run, supported her through a preselection, or picked up the phone to tell her to ignore an ugly attack.
Person by person, Kirner helped change Labor’s parliamentary ranks so they looked more like the nation we represent. I have seen that change in my own career. When I joined the federal parliament in 2010, Labor’s caucus was 36 per cent women. Now, it is 56 per cent women. The dynamics in the room have shifted too. Women and men in the caucus room are more supportive of one another, more inclined to show vulnerability, and kinder to one another. Gender parity hasn’t just changed the policies we put forward; it’s also changed the way we practice politics.
And it’s the practice of politics that I want to focus on today, because politics has become a seriously angry business. The Australian Federal Police now receives around a thousand reports of threats against federal politicians a year (Basford Canales 2026). Nine out of ten women seeking office say they have experienced online abuse or intimidation (Women for Election 2026). At the last Australian election, neo-Nazis were allegedly paid to heckle the Prime Minister.
Then on Monday, we had the heinous attack on Helen Haines, one of the kindest people in politics. I know everyone in this room is thinking of Helen and her family.
We don’t yet know the full circumstances of the attack in Wangaratta, but early reports suggest it was deliberate and politically motivated.
Meanwhile, Britain has seen two MPs murdered in a decade. The US has seen assassination attempts and actual assassinations. Last year, verbal and physical attacks on German politicians rose by 40 per cent. A study of US congressional speeches found that anger was at its highest level in 150 years (Davoine et al 2026).
What’s driving it? Various causes have been suggested, from inflation to inequality, housing to climate. These things matter, but their impacts vary a lot across countries, and the timing is hard to square with the sudden changes we’re seeing in politics. To explain a big global shift, you need a big global change. In my view, the most likely candidate is how people get our information.
According to the latest data, social media is now the number one source of news, displacing traditional news outlets (Egan et al. 2026). That fundamentally changes the kinds of stories that people see. Social media isn’t just another way of getting access to the same information; it’s serving up quite a different set of stories. Posts that go viral tend to be less considered and inquisitive; more outrageous and divisive. Social media is changing our politics fast, and unless we address its effects, it will do lasting harm to our democracy.
Tonight I want to ask four questions. How did connecting friends become a business that rewards outrage? What does that business do to our politics and relationships, and when does online hatred become physical violence? What happens when people switch off? And how can government and community life help us recover the habits of cooperation?
My argument is that social media has turbocharged anger. Online news is more likely to paint the world as a zero-sum contest, rather than a chance to work together. Changing that requires safer platforms and more opportunities to experience other people as neighbours, friends and fellow citizens.
1. How outrage became a business
Let’s start with what I mean by anger. Giving the Joan Kirner Social Justice Oration, it would be strange to claim that anger against injustice is somehow wrong. To be angry about racism, inequality or violence against women is to be human.
Philosopher Martha Nussbaum distinguishes between anger directed towards a remedy, and outrage aimed at seeing someone suffer (Nussbaum 2016; 2020). When we’re seeking a remedy, we’re trying to prevent the wrong happening again. When we’re making someone suffer, we’re giving over to our cruellest impulses. Anger directed at reform is noble. Anger directed towards revenge is destructive.
Nussbaum argues that when you’re in the grip of payback-anger, ‘it’s hard not to be stupid’. As the saying goes, ‘before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves’.
We can see the distinction in the work of Joan Kirner and EMILY’s List. The measure of success was to right a wrong by helping women gain power. It was not about humiliating the blokes who were resisting change, however misguided they might have been (see eg. Plibersek 2026).
Yet while righteous anger seeks to repair an injury, manufactured anger keeps finding reasons to renew outrage. Its business depends on keeping an audience aggrieved. Many content creators coldly and deliberately craft videos designed to provoke white-hot rage. Almost as disturbing as the volume of online anger is how much of it is confected and performative (Coper 2026).
We know that social media companies have been exploiting the connection between anger and attention. As an internal Facebook presentation warned: ‘Our algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness’ (quoted in Fisher 2022).
In the early days of social media, this wasn’t much of a problem. Feeds were largely chronological, and you only saw what your friends posted. So if your friend posted something outrageous, you’d see it, but not much more often than you’d be exposed to an angry rant from a mate over a beer at the pub.
Then the big online platforms began to see that they could increase viewing time – and hence advertising revenue – by showing you a selection of your friends’ posts, chosen by an algorithm trained on how other people responded. That meant that if people were more likely to like or share a particular kind of content (say, a vicious takedown), then the algorithm was more likely to put that kind of content into your feed if your friends posted it.
The next step was to move away from your friends’ content and let the algorithm select content chosen from its full database of material. TikTok’s launch in 2017 encouraged rivals to adopt feeds of recommended short videos. A former TikTok engineer told a BBC investigation that frequent algorithm changes aimed at gaining market share were accompanied by more borderline harmful material appearing during extended browsing (Spring and Radford 2026).
In 2020, Instagram launched Reels: like TikTok, a platform where people mostly watch content from strangers rather than friends. In 2022, Facebook’s default Home tab became more of a recommendation engine, while posts from existing connections were shifted to a separate Feeds tab (Meta 2022). In 2023, Twitter made its algorithmically curated ‘For You’ feed the default, putting recommendations from strangers ahead of the chronological posts from people users had chosen to follow.
Increasingly, it doesn’t matter who you follow, because the default feed is based on what the algorithm thinks you will click on. We’ve moved from social media to antisocial media; from a platform that gave you the best of your friends’ content to one based around the worst of the internet’s content.
By 2025, only 7 per cent of time spent on Instagram was devoted to viewing content from friends, according to figures presented by Meta. We still call it ‘social media’, but the name no longer fits. Just like a glovebox that no longer contains gloves and a film industry that rarely uses film, the name social media is an anachronism. It’s not a modern telephone; it’s the most addictive television we’ve ever created.
What kind of content gets prioritised by a recommendation feed? Researchers have shown that moral-emotional language is particularly effective at capturing attention. For example, a post saying ‘This policy is wrong’ may attract less attention than one declaring ‘This cruel policy is a disgrace’, even if both are criticising the same decision. Words that combine a moral judgement with emotion can draw the eye. Experiments found that such words could interrupt people already concentrating on something else (Fisher 2022).
A study of more than 563,000 political tweets found that each additional moral-emotional word was associated with about 20 per cent more sharing. The effect was stronger within ideological groups, potentially reinforcing their conviction that everyone decent shares their anger (Brady et al. 2017).
A recommendation feed can search millions of strangers for someone whose behaviour will appal you. And the more that the supply of posts grows, the more outrageous the content becomes. In 2013, about one million videos were posted to YouTube each day. Today, the figure is over 20 million. So an algorithm programmed to show you today’s most shocking content has 20 times as much material to work with as it did back in 2013.
Political enemies are especially effective at attracting engagement. A study of over 2 million Facebook and Twitter posts found that each additional word referring to the opposing political group increased the odds of sharing by 67 per cent (Rathje, Van Bavel and van der Linden 2021).
We’ve even had studies showing how the feedback loop works. Research combining millions of tweets with behavioural experiments found that users rewarded for expressing outrage became more likely to express it again (Brady et al. 2021). An angry feed teaches its audience how to write the next angry feed.
In another study, a group of conservatives were shown a false headline suggesting that murderous migrants had been caught entering the country. Asked whether it was accurate, just 16 per cent said yes. But when a different group were asked if they would share it on Facebook, 51 per cent said yes (Pennycook et al. 2021).
Change the medium, and you change the message. Internal research shared with the BBC found comments on the algorithmically-driven Reels had a 75 per cent higher prevalence of bullying and harassment than comments on the main friends-based Instagram feed, and 19 per cent more hate speech (Spring and Radford 2026).
In his book Angertainment, Ed Coper says that when it comes to contagion, ‘Anger is measles… we have a natural preference for extreme negative moral emotions online’ (Coper 2026). Whistleblower Frances Haugen told the UK Parliament ‘Anger and hate is the easiest way to grow on Facebook’. The Oxford Dictionary’s most recent Word of the Year was ‘rage-bait’.
2. What outrage does to us
The second question concerns the consequences of that repeated exposure to anger. Across countries with different histories and grievances, movements have found an audience by portraying political opponents and minorities as enemies. Social media gives divisive politics a powerful means of recruitment, and provides a powerful tool for the enemies of democracy to undermine our system.
For decades, politics has worked by seeking to find common ground at the centre – using discussion and debate to resolve differences. It hasn’t been perfect, but a century or two of liberal democracy in developed nations has seen an unprecedented level of economic growth, longevity and participation in democracy.
Populists see a different path. Their approach is to characterise politics as a contest between ‘us’ and ‘them’ – a pure core versus a vile adversary. Opponents become enemies and traitors – not just wrong, but illegitimate. Compromise becomes betrayal.
Politics works best when we understand that other people’s gains needn’t be our losses. But outrage thrives on the opposite assumption: that another’s gains come at our expense. The more politics becomes a contest over who deserves our resentment, the more our solidarity erodes – and the harder it becomes to imagine what we might achieve together.
To test how social media amplifies hostility, a randomised experiment in the last US election altered the ranking of X posts expressing partisan hostility and antidemocratic attitudes. Viewing more hostile and antidemocratic posts made people dislike their political opponents more, and the effects did not differ detectably between Democrats and Republicans (Piccardi et al. 2025).
Online anger can erode the taboo against political violence. In the US, there is a clear dose-response relationship between social media and attitudes to political violence. Among those using social media for less than half an hour a day, just 6 per cent think political violence is sometimes justified. That rises to 10 per cent among those using social media for 1-2 hours a day, and to 22 per cent for those using social media more than 5 hours a day (More in Common 2026). Worryingly, Americans greatly overestimate their opponents’ support for political violence.
A New York Times investigation suggested that virtually every member of the US Congress has experienced a violent threat over the past decade, with some containing specific details about their home and others naming their children (Corasantini 2026). My Western Australian colleague Anne Aly recently revealed that she had received 19 death threats in a single week.
Online hatred can become physical violence when repeated exposure to dehumanising messages turns prejudice into a sense of grievance, and grievance into a belief that violence is justified.
In 2016 and 2017, Myanmar’s military carried out a campaign of mass violence against the Rohingya, killing thousands, committing widespread sexual violence and forcing more than 700,000 people to flee the country. The chair of the United Nations Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar concluded that Facebook played a ‘determining role’ in the genocide, as the primary platform used to spread false rumours and Islamophobic disinformation (Miles 2018).
In 2019, an Australian man murdered 51 people at two Christchurch mosques. He had been radicalised by watching YouTube videos, and broadcast the attack on Facebook Live.
In 2022, a white supremacist murdered ten Black people at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York. He had been radicalised by 4chan and used Twitch to broadcast the killings, drawing inspiration from earlier racist attacks.
The patterns appear to be systematic. A study in Germany found that anti-refugee sentiment on Facebook predicted attacks on refugees. In weeks when Facebook Germany experienced major server outages, hate crimes fell (Müller and Schwarz 2021).
None of this should take away responsibility from those who perpetrate violence. But we also need to understand the systems that let people radicalise, recruit, intimidate and broadcast violence. Facebook’s own leaked research found that ’64 per cent of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation tools’ (Horwitz and Seetharaman 2020).
The same machinery that turns political opponents into enemies can turn relations between men and women into a battlefield. The algorithms that reward hostility towards outsiders can also reward hostility towards the opposite sex.
We can see this in the data. For generations, men’s attitudes towards women had been steadily becoming more progressive. Survey after survey had found that younger men were more pro-feminist than older men.
Not any more.
A survey this year of over 3,000 Australians asked whether feminism should be resisted with violence (Meger 2026). Among Gen Z males, 23 per cent said yes – the highest share of any age cohort. Boomer men were half as likely to share that view. The survey found that engagement with ‘manfluencer’ content was particularly strongly associated with misogyny.
A similar pattern is showing up in other countries. In Germany, the share of young men who agree that ‘a woman’s place is in the home’ has risen from 5 per cent to 22 per cent over five years. In Britain, the share of young men who think that women are equally capable as leaders has dropped from 80 per cent to 50 per cent. Men in their twenties now have similar gender attitudes as men in their seventies (Coper 2026).
When social media portrays relations between the sexes as an intergroup conflict, men are more likely to turn to misogyny (Bingley et al. 2026). To see how quickly this can happen, researchers established accounts on TikTok, modelled on potentially vulnerable teenage boys searching for videos on loneliness and self-improvement. Over the course of five days, the share of misogynistic videos in their feed rose from 13 per cent to 56 per cent (Regehr et al. 2024). Incels, pick-up artists and red-pill communities tend to blame women for the challenges faced by men.
Alongside this, the rise in online pornography is having real world consequences. The average age at which Australian children first encounter online pornography is 13 (eSafety Commissioner 2025). In the pre-internet era, pornography was found in magazines and X-rated movies, which published in a regulated environment. Online pornography operates in a largely unregulated environment, in which creators vie to produce more shocking videos.
One study found that more than one-third of online videos contained physical aggression, directed at women 97 per cent of the time (Fritz et al. 2020). Pornography affects people’s sexual experiences, with 61 per cent of Australian women aged 18 to 35 reporting having been choked during sex (Douglas, Sharman and Fitzgerald 2024). Seeing intimacy as a contest for dominance makes it harder to form lasting relationships. Ultimately, that’s bad for both women and men.
3. What happens when we switch off
The third question is whether stepping away makes a difference. Randomised experiments help distinguish the effects of social media from the characteristics of people who use it.
A Danish experiment involving 1,095 people assigned some participants to give up Facebook for a week. Those taking a break reported greater life satisfaction and more positive emotions (Tromholt 2016). A 2018 US experiment tested four weeks of Facebook deactivation. Those randomly assigned to deactivate spent more time socialising with family and friends, reported higher wellbeing and became less politically polarised (Allcott et al. 2020). More recent Facebook experiments have found smaller effects, perhaps because users simply shifted onto other social media platforms (Allcott et al. 2024).
A more radical experiment completely blocked mobile internet access for a fortnight, with participants still able to use calls and texts. This produced two interesting results. First, it found improvements in attention and wellbeing, with more time spent offline and greater social connectedness. Second, compliance was low – only one in four people in the treatment group kept the block active for the duration of the experiment (Castelo et al. 2025).
Together, these randomised experiments provide evidence that social media can diminish wellbeing, displace human connection and fuel political polarisation. They also provide a rigorous basis for government action. Merely suggesting that people log off has been shown to be an inadequate response; much as admonitions to motorists ‘to please drive safely’ are woeful substitutes for road rules.
4. Safer platforms, stronger communities
That brings me to the fourth question: what should we do? As UK social activist Beeban Kidron puts it, ‘We are at tech’s tobacco moment’ (Kidron 2026). Governments must change the conditions under which platforms operate. We can also strengthen the relationships that make it more attractive to stop scrolling.
Australia’s social media minimum age took effect at the end of last year. It places responsibility on age-restricted platforms to take reasonable steps to prevent under-16s holding accounts. Penalties are targeted at platforms, not children and parents (eSafety Commissioner 2026).
Last month, our government released draft laws for a proposed digital duty of care. For children, platforms would be required to take steps to prevent or minimise exposure to serious harms, including pornography, content promoting eating disorders, and bullying and abuse. For adults, platforms would be obliged to give users a choice between an algorithmic feed and a feed showing posts from friends. Put simply, if you want social media that lives up to its name, you’ll be able to choose it.
Regulation can make the online world less hostile. But it cannot, by itself, make the offline world more welcoming. That’s why we also need to make the world IRL a more inviting place to spend our time. Volunteering, donating and joining are three ways to connect with one another.
My maternal grandparents, Roly and Jean Stebbins, were inveterate volunteers through their church: driving people to the doctor, welcoming refugees into their home, writing letters for Amnesty International and supporting First Nations families. I saw the good they did in their Ivanhoe community, but I also saw the joy they drew from this work.
Science backs this up. A British study found that when people began volunteering, their wellbeing improved. Even accounting for volunteers’ prior happiness, giving your time is good for your mood (Lawton et al. 2021).
Giving can also strengthen our sense of connection. In a small randomised experiment, people given five or twenty dollars and instructed to spend it on someone else reported greater happiness that evening than those told to spend it on themselves (Dunn, Aknin and Norton 2008). The ‘helper’s high’ holds for giving money as for giving time.
Our government has set a target of doubling philanthropy by 2030. Part of that is to make giving a more normal part of life – from sponsoring a friend’s fundraising campaign to joining a giving circle to putting a charity in your will. Boosting philanthropy is also important in allowing charities to invest in their work, and plan beyond their next appeal.
Joining a group, whether it is a Men’s Shed, a netball team or even a political party, allows people to get to know others, and to encounter the challenges of working with those who think differently from ourselves.
Joan Kirner’s career provides an admirable example of this. In 1986, she and Victorian Farmers Federation president Heather Mitchell helped establish Landcare in Victoria. People approaching the environment from different directions found work they could do together (Landcare Australia n.d.). They showed that people can disagree about politics while restoring the same creek.
There is evidence for cooperation across bigger divisions. In Iraq, displaced Christian men were randomly assigned to all-Christian football teams or teams including Muslims. Integration changed how they approached their sport. Those with Muslim teammates became more willing to join a mixed team the next season and to train with Muslims six months later (Mousa 2020).
Friendship may well be the most underrated health intervention around. A review of 148 studies found that stronger social relationships were associated with 50 per cent higher odds of survival over the study periods. These observational findings show how closely connection and wellbeing are intertwined (Holt-Lunstad, Smith and Layton 2010).
Friendship can also help to tamp down anger. A friend’s foolish opinion sits alongside everything else we know about them. A stranger’s foolish post can become all we know. Protecting friendships gives us practice in seeing a whole person, and in remaining connected through disagreement.
Switching off our devices can help us reconnect with one another. Go out to dinner with a friend, and agree that the first person to touch their phone pays the bill. Start a book club where the reading is optional but the conversation is compulsory. Invite friends over for a potluck dinner, with everyone bringing a dish and a stranger. Organise a summer get-together on your street.
The best organisations make joining less awkward by pairing a first-time volunteer with someone experienced, and giving newcomers a role before expecting them to find their place. Flexible shifts and accessible venues widen who can participate.
Our government is supporting that work through simpler administration and measures such as our tax-deductible category for community foundations, recognising that local giving helps sustain places where people meet and cooperate (Leigh 2026).
This is a positive-sum view of the world, not the zero-sum view offered by the outrage feed. It also reflects the way that humans have prospered throughout our history. Whether it’s creating a beautiful building, organising a festival or winning an AFL game in the final quarter (sorry, Dockers fans), the big achievements of our species involve cooperation. Together, we can do far more than any of us could achieve alone.
Conclusion
The prospect of humans giving over our time to watching and condemning is a sad, narrow vision of our future. Our democracy and our society require us to find what we have in common and build on it. Multiculturalism isn’t just about multiple groups, but how we interact together (Bongiorno 2026). As my colleague Tony Burke puts it, a successful multicultural society resembles an orchestra: each instrument has its own distinctive sound, but together they produce music that none could make alone.
Democracy is more than free and fair elections; it also asks of us that we engage with other people. It asks that our solidarity transcends whatever dislike we have of the politics of our opponents. In gender, race relations and politics, zero-sum thinking risks taking us to a poorer, narrow future (Leigh 2025). Positive-sum thinking is the path to a future of abundance and engagement.
In its highest form, this is what theologians call agape, the general love of humanity, and a commitment to the wellbeing of others (Leigh 2016). It is a selfless, unconditional love, and because of that, it is the hardest kind of love. It’s one thing to love your neighbour. It’s quite another to love your enemy.
Joan Kirner’s generosity is a reminder of what is possible when we encourage the better angels of our nature. She built connections across politics, served the public faithfully, and worked to build a more equal Australia. Her legacy wasn’t just laws, it was in her connections with people – particularly the many women she encouraged into public life.
The challenge for us today is to build on that work: to reject the easy temptations of outrage and revenge, to scroll less and stroll more, to find ways to care for others and to build a kinder, more loving world.
Acknowledgements: In preparing this speech, I am grateful to Rys Farthing for reading suggestions and the Parliamentary Library for research assistance. Blair Arnold, Ed Coper, Simon Jackman, Sebastian Leigh, Theodore Leigh and Nick Terrell provided valuable comments on earlier drafts.
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ENDS