Social media titans Meta and TikTok deliberately permitted toxic content to proliferate on users' feeds after discovering that outrage drives engagement. Internal documents suggest these companies refined their algorithms to prioritize emotionally charged material, knowing that controversy keeps users scrolling and clicking longer.

Whistleblowers have come forward with damning evidence showing that executives at both companies chose profits over user safety. The revelations, reported by the BBC, expose a calculated strategy to exploit human psychology, allowing increasingly harmful content to spread as it generated the outrage metrics that these platforms' algorithms were designed to maximize for advertising revenue.