Manufacturing Moral Anger, Networks of Conspicuous Morality

This article develops the concept of 'manufacture of dissent ' and ‘moral outrage networks ’ to describe a structural shift in the contemporary public sphere: moral emotion is no longer primarily episodic, locally regulated, and socially costly, but increasingly produced as a network function embedded in platform architectures. Drawing on the classical insight that collective anger can unify fractured worlds more effectively than justice or wisdom, the argument traces how digital media transform indignation into scalable infrastructure through the conversion of reaction into metrics, and metrics into revenue. In this environment, anger circulates more efficiently than truth because online communication is increasingly organised around affect management rather than deliberation, persuasion, or shared inquiry. Moral outrage becomes syntactic: titles, captions, hashtags, memes, and comments operate as portable triggers that recruit strangers into temporary moral collectives, while the design logic of visibility rewards escalation, certainty, and denunciation. The article reframes propaganda beyond the binary of truth and lies by showing how audiences participate in the production and amplification of outrage as a form of distributed labour, and how the attention economy privileges high-arousal moral signals (‘angry people click more’) as a reliable mechanism of engagement. It proposes seven hypotheses describing the infrastructuralisation of moral emotion, the dominance of feelings over facts in networked persuasion, the role of indignation in identity formation, the convergence of platform governance and political authority into anger management regimes, and the emergence of outrage exploitation systems that sustain perpetual moral trial. The result is a moral public sphere without durable morality: a simulation of righteousness detached from slow interpretation, mutual responsibility, and civic repair. Until digital communication is redesigned to reward restraint rather than reaction, moral anger will remain a primary organising principle of mass society, corroding trust and replacing democratic deliberation with cycles of manufactured indignation.