Why does anger hit differently online? A UBCO researcher looked into it

A researcher in Kelowna took on the uncomfortable task of sifting through angry comments online to nail down the unwritten rules about how people interpret messages online.

Clare Wiznura’s master’s thesis at UBC Okanagan found that even online people are more restrained when speaking directly to someone, and are more likely to go all-caps and exclamation marks when posting generally, according to a press release.

Wiznura collected angry posts or comments from social media like Reddit, YouTube and TikTok then made a survey to see how people interpreted the comments.

“One of the biggest differences we saw was how controlled people were when they believed they were speaking directly to someone,” Wiznura said in the release. “Even when participants were clearly upset, they were more measured. They asked questions. They avoided using all capital letters and insults. That restraint largely disappeared in more general online spaces.”

Context changed how people viewed punctuation, emojis, capitalization or lack thereof, as well as whether something was insulting or blaming.

She found that general comment sections were more aggressive and emotionally charged, but when people were speaking directly to each other they were more restrained.

“This aligns with something we intuitively know,” Wiznura said. “Online, there’s often a decreased sense of social presence. People feel more comfortable being mean in ways they likely wouldn’t be in person, even though we know these are still real people on the other side.”

People taking the survey said they weren’t able to tell whether someone was actually angry or not without context, like the relationship between the people exchanging comments.

“The same words could be interpreted very differently depending on the situation,” Wiznura said. “People repeatedly said, ‘If this was the context, then, yes, it’s angry. If it’s another context, maybe not.’ That makes emotional language much harder to categorize than we often assume.”

A large portion of the internet has mastered the art of eliciting angry responses with “rage bait” posts.

Since Oxford University Press named “rage bait” as its Word of the Year for 2025, it’s timely that Wiznura’s research looked into those types of posts that are intended to spark some anger to boost engagement.

“Rage bait has become a significant factor in how anger circulates online,” Dr. Christine Schreyer, Professor of Anthropology and Wiznura’s supervisor, said in the release.

“People may not be angry themselves, but they are deliberately provoking anger in others. Clare’s research highlights how important it is to account for that dynamic when studying language and emotion in digital spaces.”

While most of us would rather ignore the endless stream of anger online, Wiznura said that it’s important to examine how people behave online.

“We’ve known for a while that online spaces impact how we communicate. Understanding how anger works in those environments is a necessary step toward engaging with each other more thoughtfully,” Schreyer said.