Ultra-yodelling — What a monkey taught me about social media
High in the rainforests of Central America, a howler monkey (Alouatta caraya, for the taxonomically inclined) tilts its head and lets out a yodel that could startle milk back into a cow. It’s a guttural, three-octave spanning call that won’t be ignored. Scientists clock its range at around 90 decibels which is about as loud as a jackhammer. The “ultra-yodel” is meant to grab the attention of other monkeys and signal group belonging.
I read about it in a study by Anglia Ruskin University last week and laughed out loud. I wasn’t laughing at the monkey, but at the mirror it held to our social media habits. The monkey screams into the trees. We scream into the feed. Only, what are we really calling for? The howler monkey made me think, perhaps our own ultra-yodels aren’t all about getting to the biggest crowd but about finding our people.
If the internet is a jungle, social media is the treetop where every user with a keyboard and a WiFi signal is promised an opportunity to be heard over the din. Facebook, Instagram, X, whatever TikTok’s mutating into, more than enable our noise; they demand it. And they’ve stripped the cost of being loud — those social limits that once kept our shout matches in check.
In the past, if I stood on a soapbox in Piccadilly Circus and screamed about my breakfast, I’d strain my vocal cords, piss of a few bypassers, and get a fine for disturbing the peace. My broadcast would have taken effort. I might have printed a few flyers, maybe even rented a megaphone. Online, I can type “FRIED EGGS ARE LIFE”, hit send, and watch the likes roll in. My throat is fine. The effort of amplification is a functioning index finger. Granted, I probably won’t get many likes because “FRIED EGGS ARE KILLERS” written elsewhere is currently gobbling them up. When the loudness is free, discourse devolves into a contest of who can bellow the maddest.
A study from MIT found that tweets with high emotional valence, especially anger, spread faster and farther than neutral ones. Similarly, the Knight First Amendment Institute noted that where engagement is valued over truth, creators end up sharing more divisive content. Post a thoughtful thread on tax changes and we get a handful of likes from policy wonks and a bot. Call the opposing party “lizard people” and we’re trending already.
The platforms’ designs don’t care about our nuance; they’re rigged to reward outrage. A study published in PNAS NEXUS showed that posts that spike our adrenaline do indeed get priority in the feed.
“Amplification of moral outrage is a clear consequence of social media’s business model, which optimises for user engagement,” says Molly Crockett, an associate professor of psychology at Yale, who studies how algorithms that reward outrage change user behaviour. The consequence, according to co-author William Brady, is that “some people learn to express more outrage over time because they are rewarded by the basic design of social media.” We subconsciously conform to expressions we come across online.
There’s a ‘but’ coming. Because for all our learning of norms, I find it reassuring that we’re still plastering our profiles with far more birthday cakes and sunsets (and other positive content) than pure rants. Research has shown that we actually overestimate the number of mad-fuelled posts because calling someone an “absolute disgrace to humanity” for using the wrong recycling bin hooks us more than a koala licking ice cream. We remember disgrace over cuteness. Outrage, for many of us, is coiled up for the political and social jabs. Which helps explain why fake news on these topics spread more widely the louder and nastier they gets. In the jungle it doesn’t matter if we’re right; it only matters if we’re being heard.
The fallout is predictable. Nuance is drowned. Complex ideas, say the trade-offs of universal healthcare or the ethics of artificial intelligence, require context and a willingness to dive into the grey areas. Good luck fitting that into 250 characters when “HEALTHCARE IS SLAVERY” or “AI WILL DOOM US ALL” suck up all the oxygen.
Here’s the thing that I find truly bewildering. We’re yodelling along although 74 percent of us believe social media content rarely even reflects society. Four in ten adults who get their news from Facebook and the like groan about the inaccuracy. Granted, youngsters have a different take, trusting the social racket almost as much as national news. Yet, by and large, social platforms are perceived of as noise boards for opinion rather than in-depth information. It made me wonder — if we’re savvy enough to spot the fakery, perhaps we’re not joining for the truth at all. Perhaps we’re just popping in for a huddle with our tribe. We yodel, like the howler, to mark ourselves as members of the tribe.
Bernard Rimé, a professor of psychology at the Universite Catholique de Louvain in Belgium, found that naturally we want to share how we feel when triumph or tragedy strike. We have an impulse to chime in on the latest earthquake or a plane crash and in doing so create a shared collective knowledge. There’s a thrill to it and a sense of relief. The plane crash becomes less terrifying (or at least less isolating) when we blab about our fear. And this communal sense-making is something we’ve always done. Long before the internet, we would speculate with colleagues at work or with neighbours at the fence. Social media simply turbocharges our exchange by giving us an always on, always open platform for swapping thoughts. And by doing so we learn whom we agree with most, who might form part of our tribe.
A friend of mine, now residing in the English countryside after years of living in the city, opens Instagram daily to feel less adrift, finding other drifters to relate with. On Reddit, strangers trade in advice, skimming the replies to gauge who’s on their side. Whether we’re into obscure hobbies like knitting with straw or rallying around a shared cause, kindred spirits are found all over social media. For a group-oriented species like Homo sapiens, that kind of bonding is essential. And it’s good for our mental health too.
A 2023 study in Child Psychiatry & Human Development noted that teens who have a strong sense of belonging online show lower risks of psychological strain. Really, people of any age feel positive about using social media so long as our participation strikes us as meaningful. In that light, our yodel’s not just noise, it’s meaning. It’s saying, I belong here too.
There are risks, of course. A group identity that starts to fuse with our own, can nudge some people toward radical behaviours in the name of pack loyalty. So Ellen, a retiree from Bristol, might join a Facebook group to muse about UFOs — a harmless quirk at first. But months later, after enough ping pong with posts on government cover-ups, sharing suspicions and inside jokes, she’s emailing the council to investigate her list of secret bases.
Fortunately, Ellen is an outlier; true echo chambers, while much discussed, are relatively rare. As media scholar Axel Bruns argues “they are likely to [exist] only on the fringes of the political spectrum”. “Most of us tend to use social media for a much broader range of purposes, where we also encounter a much more diverse collection of users,” he writes.
So how do we sit comfortably in the canopy without losing ourselves in the noise? The options are neither sexy nor easy. Platforms could tweak their algorithms to put less weight on the rage bait, but let’s not hold our breath. X’s pivot under Elon Musk leans harder into messy, opinionated yodelling. That leaves it up to us. We could stop rewarding the loudest yodels by muting the screamers and seek out the groups with something more balanced to say. If it seems as though we’ve found our people, we can stay vigilant, challenging what’s shared and questioning whether it aligns with our values.
“When you engage with misinformation, even in disagreement, you’re actually contributing to the increase of misinformation in the ecosystem because you’re letting the algorithm know that it’s drawing engagement,” explains William Brady, assistant professor of management and organisations at the Kellogg School of Management.
It’s a long shot, though I’ve seen gleams. A friend no longer reposting sensationalist videos and sharing essays from Aeon via email instead. She didn’t get five heart emoticons in return. Instead, I sent her a “thank you”. Somehow that made me feel more connected to her than I had in a long time.
The howler monkey can’t help the yodel. It needs it to survive. We’ve got a choice. Maybe if we pause for a moment, we’ll find we never liked all that shouting anyway.
