[Delk]

I mostly agree, and you're spot on about the outrage cycle. Well put.

However, I don't think the outrage cycle is really contained within Twitter, or within social media in general. It also spills over to traditional media, at least to some extent. Since it gets a lot of attention, including sometimes from influential people, it can actually affect the kinds of content that people dare make, especially if financial risks are involved.

What you're "allowed" to do is a bit of an imprecise expression unless you go right down to law, but it would be a little disingenuous to pretend that social pressure doesn't affect what people expect others to find permissible. Getting outrage thrown at you can certainly make people feel something is socially forbidden. (That of course serves a pro-social role as well. But I don't think we're used to the idea that it's normal to have outrage or other strong emotional condemnation towards something we do from random people we don't know unless we've done something totally unacceptable. We're wired to think of social acceptance as important and outrage as something that requires our attention. The way social media works throws us off because of that. But I digress.)