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How Moral Outage On Social Media Can Turn Into Bullying

Twitter can sometimes turn into a place where posters feel comfortable writing offensive or bullying language in fewer than 140 characters — and the responses shouting those commenters down can come just as swiftly.

But they’re not always proportional. Does every insensitive comment need to be responded to with thousands of protests and, maybe, similarly-questionable language?

Takuya Sawaoka is a Stanford University graduate student in psychology. He recently worked with a team researching "call-outs" against questionable posts on social media and how they may actually become bullying itself — and sympathy for the original poster may grow.

He joined The Show to talk about the research.

Steve Goldstein was a host at KJZZ from 1997 to 2022.