It's not dissimilar to traditional news media in that respect -- "if it bleeds, it leads" and all that. Humans like to pay attention to other humans, and are fascinated by bad behaviour and messy accidents. Newspapers and TV channels are always after something that provokes their readers and gets them emotionally engaged at a fight/flight level. And twitter and other social media that permit unrestricted engagement play to this -- that's precisely why they've grown so big.
(Facebook is in no way an improvement unless you lock it down to friends-only. After all, the difference between 4000 characters and 140 isn't that great, when you're trying to discuss complex issues, especially if you're not very articulate or thoughtful in the first place.)
This is definitely not true. As lunatic as they may seem, many of the people in these online mobs are at least somewhat reasonable, and if they were able to see context (for example, a comment or edit on the original post) it would pretty seriously attenuate the virality of stuff like this. Twitter is drive-by conversation: there's practically no possibility for context, for clarification, etc. Hell half the time I'm exposed to Twitter, I end up looking at fragments of conversation whose context is pretty damn painful to nail down. A shitty interface like that is a hell of a lot more efficient at instigating mobs over misunderstandings.
http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage
More from Merideth: http://maradydd.livejournal.com/530110.html
The phenomenon reminds me quite strongly of Orwell's Two Minutes Hate from 1984 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Minutes_Hate
Even if most people don't read more than a sentence or two, it's possible to look like a real human being, whereas on Twitter you get your 140 characters, and that's that. By the nature of the network, nobody cares or sees the ten tweets that come before/after the offending one.
There are people on both sides of an issue who are genuinely, mistakenly trying to have conversations. On Twitter, where the UI is designed to strip context away.
Imagine you are at a party of 100 people, all having their own small conversations in of two to five people. Then imagine someone throws a switch and every single thing said is heard by everyone in the room, but only fleetingly and with no time to imagine the context.
And sometimes Twitter's culture makes it really hard to find context. If someone responds directly to a tweet, you can see that in the conversation, but a manual RT destroys that chain.
The real solution is that we have to recognize that our lizard brains love beating the shit out of people. We've put on a layer of civilization that stops us from doing that in person, but it's just as bad to do it online. Once we recognize that we can be monsters, we can figure out how to stop doing it, or at least do it less.
At least on Facebook you can elucidate your thoughts, defend your opinions, and otherwise make an effort too look like a person who appreciates nuance, rather than someone whose entire intellectual capacity is captured in 140 characters.