There's a whole production line devoted to the manufacture of outrage. It's not entirely spontaneous, it occurs along primed fracture lines defined by talking points which are carefully crafted to appeal to existing prejudices, morality, and tribal identification. The emotional response of the individual member of the public may be sincere from their point of view, but it's not independently arrived at.

Hypothesis testing suffers from being very easy to put a thumb on the scales. Especially if you manufacture a lot of slightly variant hypotheses and pick the ones which are significant. This turns into whataboutery.