Your feed’s probably doing exactly what it was designed to do: making you see red. It’s no secret that the stuff you engage with gets pushed to the top, but the mechanics behind that are getting darker by the day. Ed Coper, a man who knows a thing or two about how the sausage of political communication is made, has dropped a new book that dissects this trend. He calls it 'angertainment'—that perfect blend of fury and distraction that keeps you clicking, sharing, and losing sleep.

Coper isn't just some armchair critic; he’s the guy who worked with GetUp and the Climate 200 ‘teal’ independents to shake up the status quo. He tracks the history of public outrage from the 1999 Seattle WTO protests all the way to the present. He shows how the tech giants figured out the secret sauce. The logic is simple: if you’re outraged, you’re engaged. If you’re engaged, you’re watching ads.

The more contrarian or outrageous a post is, the more likely the platform will blast it in front of every eyeball it can find.

The more engaging, the more powerful. The more contrarian, the more visible. The more outrageous, the more persuasive.

The 2023 Indigenous Voice referendum serves as a prime example of this digital fever dream. What started as a move with broad public support ended up getting crushed by a wave of vitriol online. Coper highlights how misinformation—like wild claims that a ‘Yes’ vote would scrap Australia Day—spread like wildfire. Legacy media played its part in the race-baiting. The sheer speed at which AI-generated profiles and fringe groups pushed these fear-based memes made it nearly impossible for the average punter to tell fact from fiction.

Some might call it a bit rich for a political strategist to complain about aggressive campaigns. It’s a bit like a chef complaining about a messy kitchen. Yet, Coper insists we’re living in a uniquely toxic moment. He longs for a pre-internet world where social pressure forced us toward the middle ground. It’s a nice thought, but maybe a bit dewy-eyed. Don't forget that before we had TikTok fights, we had the Cronulla riots, which didn't exactly need an algorithm to get messy.

The profit margins of rage

  • The Price Tag: Coper’s book, Angertainment, will set you back $37 at your local bookstore.
  • The Mechanism: Platforms use financial incentives to reward content that triggers high emotional responses.
  • The Methodology: The research includes tracking the influence of AI-generated profiles during major democratic votes.
  • The Proposed Solutions: Coper suggests fixing the national economy to remove the root causes of grievance and stripping away the cash incentives that make rage profitable.
  • The Reality Check: These solutions are about as likely to happen as a billionaire deciding to pay higher taxes for the fun of it.

It’s easy to feel like the sky is falling, but perhaps the decentralisation of the internet is actually a saving grace. It’s a total cacophony out there, but it’s too noisy for any one message to dominate the airwaves like a radio broadcast used to in the bad old days. We have more voices, even if many of them are screaming at each other.

Coper’s book acts as a mirror. If you’re a communications pro or a teacher trying to explain to a Year 10 class why the internet feels like a digital bear pit, you’ll probably find this useful. If you were looking for a concrete roadmap out of this mess, you might leave feeling a bit hollow. We’re stuck in this distracted age for now. Whether we can actually climb out of the hole depends on whether we can learn to stop clicking on the very things that make us miserable.