7 ms·

The extended ‘chilling’ effect of Facebook (2016)

182 points by nosuchthing 10y ago

muninn_ 10y ago
Hmm. I'm not sure about this. From my experience people are a lot more likely to speak their mind or engage in highly emotional behavior online, but in-person are a lot more reserved than you would think based on what they say online.
- dgut 10y ago
  To me it seems people are more likely to speak their mind freely when they are anonymous. It's the only way to get rid of the need to conform.
  - muninn_ 10y ago
    Yeah so I would see that as a kind of "level 3", if you will. In a level 3, you'll say anything. You don't care, you may or may not believe it, but you'll say it. In a level 2, like social media, you'll say things you wouldn't say in real life, but you'll still moderate some of what you say because your peers will see it and maybe they'll disapprove publically. Level 1 would be your in person communication. This is going to be highly moderated compared to l2 or l3. You certainly won't say things in person that you would say online. To me this seems makes sense.
    - exo762 10y ago
      I'm much more comfortable speaking openly in person than online. Online I don't have control over context or the audience. I don't have direct emotional feedback nor I myself can use emotion to properly convey my idea to someone. This puts me in position of extreme vulnerability, since my message can be distorted and put out of context. Social media are useless for any serious discussion unless you have pseudonymity (HN, reddit) or full anonymity (4chan).
      - westmeal 10y ago
        But most chans are also pseudonymous. The only difference is that by default websites such as these require some sort of alias. It's very hard or even impossible to be really anonymous on a computer network.
        Inconel 10y ago
        I would assume that by saying the chans are anonymous, the poster meant they are anonymous between users. Sure, the site administrator, your ISP, or the NSA may know it's you posting, but the other users of the site don't. And you don't have a site wide identity that follows you around. Unless you explicitly choose so.
      - jslabovitz 10y ago
        I agree. I definitely stifle myself online more than I might in a small in-person group, or even a large group, for fear of negative reactions. For me, it's got nothing to do with anonymity or some possible later repercussion; rather, it's being sensitive to short-term feedback. Effectively, the bandwidth of human communications through the internet is low and error-prone, and hence stressful for me to get my thoughts across. (It doesn't help that long-form replies -- which help me explain my ideas better -- have been grossly devalued.) Sadly, it's gotten worse in the last few years -- perhaps due to Facebook, or perhaps due to societal changes that opened the door to mediums like Facebook. I seem less and less capable of growing that thick skin that people always talk about...
        mwfunk 10y ago
        Agreed. IMO the biggest problem with online communication is that people don't realize how much ambiguity there is in language, or how easy it is to misread what people type into little boxes on web pages. Every tweet is like an underdetermined system of equations with infinitely many solutions (solution == what they really meant when they typed up the tweet, and everything else that readers project onto posters). Everyone has to choose how to interpret ambiguous statements all the time, and by nature our brains are more likely to choose interpretations that conform to our own expectations. We can create our own private echo chambers if we aren't careful, where we always interpret what people who are on "our side" say in the most charitable way possible, and we always interpret statements from opponents in terms of the biggest strawmen our brains can come up with. This is a pitfall of any sort of communication, but it seems to be a vastly greater danger with online communication. People tend to blame the lousiness of online communication on other people, and there's some truth to that, but I think it's just inherent in both the medium and human nature. In the long term I hope that digital mediums can evolve to support better communication and provide more fertile ground for more constructive discussions.
    - technopath 10y ago
      There's a lot that I won't ever say online, even anonymously, that I would say in person to someone I trust. So for me talking to trusted people is level 4.
  - wybiral 10y ago
    Try browsing 4chan for a bit. It's crazy to see how much conformity and mob behavior happens even in an anonymous format like that. Almost as though people exhibit adherence to a culture just to perpetuate that culture itself rather than their own identity (of which there is none).
- passwd 10y ago
  I just glanced over the abstract, so I don't know for sure, but wasn't the point of study to show how people who are 'actively aware' of social network 'surveillance'? This would make sense to me.
  - muninn_ 10y ago
    sorry I don't follow. Show how people who are actively aware of social network surveillance... ? Maybe you meant to finish your thought?
    - passwd 10y ago
      As in, how the people who already experienced the 'chilling effect' online, had this projected on their offline life. I've also seen many people doing and saying all kinds of weird stuff online, but I'd expect the study not to be concerned with those.
- strken 10y ago
  The problem with Facebook is that you are usually talking to a very broad audience. You have to tailor what you say so that neither Casually Racist Uncle Jim nor Guy Who Posts Marxist Memes will be angry at you, and so that Your Boss won't see anything embarrassing. I'd believe that habit of thought could transfer to offline life, e.g. worrying about getting caught at a strip club, as per the paper.
  - muninn_ 10y ago
    Yeah I just don't see it
    - headShrinker 10y ago
      Just knowing my self I don't post a lot of gay stuff on my feed even if it's inane because there so many straight people who just wouldn't associate. Most of my content has a universal appeal by design. This is the same for most, which explains the high rate of dog/cat, baby, food and vacation pics on fb. They are safe universal topics that everyone can "like". After "likes" are the currancy we are trading
  - bogomipz 10y ago
    I agree with all of your points and there is also the downside risk that one of that "broad audience" is going to leave some appalling or just cringe-worthy comment about your post. And unless you check up on FB regularly that association is just hanging out there. When I used FB I found that I had to go an do "maintenance" to untag photos and delete cringe-worthy comments from people I am not even really friends with. I don't miss having FB at all.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
scotch_drinker 10y ago
Another way to think about a chilling effect is just the social norms that civilization and culture enforce on people. While this research (and much of the discussion of social network sites) focuses on the surveillance factor, society can't just have people expressing their so called real self and still function in the way it does today. So the question to me becomes where is the line drawn between free expression and societal norms enforced by our culture. Once upon a time, that line was drawn by your family and your community, people who you saw every day probably. Now, it's being drawn not just by your close contacts but likely also by the anonymous data collection of social network sites. That would seem to be the true scary part of this chilling effect, that it's no longer being enforced by people we know and interact with but instead by people who we may barely know at all as well as by the marketing and news information that we are fed through the algorithms of social networks.
- FullMtlAlcoholc 10y ago
  > society can't just have people expressing their so called real self and still function in the way it does today. That is a subtly insightful comment. As I am doing some self-learning on human history, I. wantes to expound on this point a bit. It is true that one of the primary objectives of societies, communities, etc., is to restrain the individual ostensibly for the greater good. In the modern era, the greater good has become conflated with those who hold power. However, before we broke out of the Malthusian trap, self-actualizing and expressing one's real self could spell doom for a community. In general, risk-averse behavior has been common among all groups that operated along the margins of survival. The sheer challenge of survival in premodern societies always constrained the behavior of the poor. Taboos and social constraints limited experimentation innovation, and self-expression. For example, the role of marriage and infidelity is the reverse of what it is today. Marriage was a contract, not an expression of love. Often, the only way to express true love was through an affair. Also, it explains the taboo on homosexuality. Since infant mortality rates were higher, couples tended to have more children than we do today. If the union didn't produce children, who would farm the next generation? This was a rational reflection of the fact that experimentation increases the variability of results. Greater variability means not only potentially greater gains but more ominously for those at the very margin of survival potentially ruinous losses. A great part of the cultural energy of poor farming societies has always been devoted to suppressing experimentation and self-expression. This repression, in effect, was their substitute for insurance policies. Personal ability and personal choice individual "pursuit of happiness," in the modern sense were suppressed by Taboos and social restrictions that have always been most emphatic among the poor. Such restrictions were usually superseded only in societies with high productivity. This makes me really thankful I was born in the modern era or I'd be doing what my father did, as he would be doing what his father did and so on.
scotty79 10y ago
It stands to reason that people participating in social networks and being aware of how a silly thing might get blown out of proportions will limit their offline behavior to reduce the possibility that someone will publish that and paint a target on their backs. I think It's not so much use of the social networks that makes people more careful. Just awareness how much of a WMD gossip machine they are.
interpol_p 10y ago
The paper describes an effect called "context collapse" which the authors claim is observed in people who use social networks. The effect is described as people self-censoring their posts on social media because their audience is potentially represented by a multitude of groups (parents, friends, colleagues). So people self-edit their content in order to satisfy a lowest common denominator. The authors proceed to measure if this self-censoring behaviour extends into real life for people who are thinking about social networks versus people who are not. The method surveyed the participants about either a trip to an adult night club, or a theme park. Half the participants were "primed" with Facebook — meaning they were shown photos of the trips they could take as a mocked-up Facebook event, and they were told they would need to add the trip representative to their Facebook so their photos could be tagged for promotional reasons. The measure they used to determine self-censoring behaviour is called Negatively Directed Impression Management (NDIM). Online this means removing yourself from tagged photos, deleting social media content that may be offensive, or other forms of removal. To measure it offline they asked participants how much they would need to be paid to take part in the trip, and whether they would be interested in a follow up trip (the payment stuff was worked into their cover story). The Facebook-primed group showed significantly higher offline NDIM for the adult night club trip. The theme park trip showed no significant difference. The participants were composed of 80 male Facebook users at a UK university, about 20 years old.
YPCrumble 10y ago
I just deleted Facebook. All my photos are gone forever, according to them. It felt like Snapchat except the timer was set to ten years.
- headShrinker 10y ago
  ?? You can't delete your Facebook account, only deactivate it. And all friends, posts and pics are saved for when you return. If I am wrong I would love to know how.
  - jackcosgrove 10y ago
    You can, and you can also download all of your content before doing so. https://www.facebook.com/help/224562897555674?helpref=related https://www.facebook.com/help/224562897555674?helpref=relate...
  - jasonl99 10y ago
    Actually, you can; I just did it two days ago. Take a look at this: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/0/permanently-delete-facebook-account/ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/0/permanently-delete-f... edit: lol for being slow on the draw.
problems 10y ago
I used Facebook for about a year or two - but when I did I made 2 separate accounts, one for friends I was close to and one for family, colleagues, etc. Fake name on the friends one. Is this not a more common way to get around this issue?
- bogomipz 10y ago
  I believe they have made the practice of an "alternate" account much more difficult and also shut down accounts they believe are not tied to "real names."
headShrinker 10y ago
Just knowing myself I don't post a lot of gay stuff on my feed even if it's inane because there so many straight people who just wouldn't associate. Most of my content has a universal appeal by design. This is the same for most, which explains the high rate of dog/cat, baby, food and vacation pics on fb. They are safe universal topics that everyone can "like". After "likes" are the currancy we are trading
- keyboardhitter 10y ago
  > Most of my content has a universal appeal by design. Maybe you've just gotten used to this idea? It is possible your data is vastly different from other individuals, even if it appears universal on the surface. It is very easy to feel exempt from scrutiny if one thinks their data is only included into "safe" or "popular" categories or topics. (Not entirely related, but this type of uncertainty helped me rationalize the deletion of my Facebook account.)
Spooky23 10y ago
It's easy to picture the current state as what will rule the future. I doubt it. IMO, Facebook as it is today is a fad that is already cracking -- FB constantly has to adapt to retain engagement with younger people and new users.
blubb-fish 10y ago
Is there anything out there which might have at least the slightest chance to grow into something becoming dangerous to Facebook? (https://prism-break.org/en/categories/gnu-linux/#social-networks https://prism-break.org/en/categories/gnu-linux/#social-netw...)
- ColanR 10y ago
  Doesn't look like it...

182 points by nosuchthing 10y ago

Hmm. I'm not sure about this. From my experience people are a lot more likely to speak their mind or engage in highly emotional behavior online, but in-person are a lot more reserved than you would think based on what they say online.

dgut 10y ago
To me it seems people are more likely to speak their mind freely when they are anonymous. It's the only way to get rid of the need to conform.
- muninn_ 10y ago
  Yeah so I would see that as a kind of "level 3", if you will. In a level 3, you'll say anything. You don't care, you may or may not believe it, but you'll say it. In a level 2, like social media, you'll say things you wouldn't say in real life, but you'll still moderate some of what you say because your peers will see it and maybe they'll disapprove publically. Level 1 would be your in person communication. This is going to be highly moderated compared to l2 or l3. You certainly won't say things in person that you would say online. To me this seems makes sense.
  - exo762 10y ago
    I'm much more comfortable speaking openly in person than online. Online I don't have control over context or the audience. I don't have direct emotional feedback nor I myself can use emotion to properly convey my idea to someone. This puts me in position of extreme vulnerability, since my message can be distorted and put out of context. Social media are useless for any serious discussion unless you have pseudonymity (HN, reddit) or full anonymity (4chan).
    - westmeal 10y ago
      But most chans are also pseudonymous. The only difference is that by default websites such as these require some sort of alias. It's very hard or even impossible to be really anonymous on a computer network.
      - Inconel 10y ago
        I would assume that by saying the chans are anonymous, the poster meant they are anonymous between users. Sure, the site administrator, your ISP, or the NSA may know it's you posting, but the other users of the site don't. And you don't have a site wide identity that follows you around. Unless you explicitly choose so.
    - jslabovitz 10y ago
      I agree. I definitely stifle myself online more than I might in a small in-person group, or even a large group, for fear of negative reactions. For me, it's got nothing to do with anonymity or some possible later repercussion; rather, it's being sensitive to short-term feedback. Effectively, the bandwidth of human communications through the internet is low and error-prone, and hence stressful for me to get my thoughts across. (It doesn't help that long-form replies -- which help me explain my ideas better -- have been grossly devalued.) Sadly, it's gotten worse in the last few years -- perhaps due to Facebook, or perhaps due to societal changes that opened the door to mediums like Facebook. I seem less and less capable of growing that thick skin that people always talk about...
      - mwfunk 10y ago
        Agreed. IMO the biggest problem with online communication is that people don't realize how much ambiguity there is in language, or how easy it is to misread what people type into little boxes on web pages. Every tweet is like an underdetermined system of equations with infinitely many solutions (solution == what they really meant when they typed up the tweet, and everything else that readers project onto posters). Everyone has to choose how to interpret ambiguous statements all the time, and by nature our brains are more likely to choose interpretations that conform to our own expectations. We can create our own private echo chambers if we aren't careful, where we always interpret what people who are on "our side" say in the most charitable way possible, and we always interpret statements from opponents in terms of the biggest strawmen our brains can come up with. This is a pitfall of any sort of communication, but it seems to be a vastly greater danger with online communication. People tend to blame the lousiness of online communication on other people, and there's some truth to that, but I think it's just inherent in both the medium and human nature. In the long term I hope that digital mediums can evolve to support better communication and provide more fertile ground for more constructive discussions.
  - technopath 10y ago
    There's a lot that I won't ever say online, even anonymously, that I would say in person to someone I trust. So for me talking to trusted people is level 4.
- wybiral 10y ago
  Try browsing 4chan for a bit. It's crazy to see how much conformity and mob behavior happens even in an anonymous format like that. Almost as though people exhibit adherence to a culture just to perpetuate that culture itself rather than their own identity (of which there is none).
passwd 10y ago
I just glanced over the abstract, so I don't know for sure, but wasn't the point of study to show how people who are 'actively aware' of social network 'surveillance'? This would make sense to me.
- muninn_ 10y ago
  sorry I don't follow. Show how people who are actively aware of social network surveillance... ? Maybe you meant to finish your thought?
  - passwd 10y ago
    As in, how the people who already experienced the 'chilling effect' online, had this projected on their offline life. I've also seen many people doing and saying all kinds of weird stuff online, but I'd expect the study not to be concerned with those.
strken 10y ago
The problem with Facebook is that you are usually talking to a very broad audience. You have to tailor what you say so that neither Casually Racist Uncle Jim nor Guy Who Posts Marxist Memes will be angry at you, and so that Your Boss won't see anything embarrassing. I'd believe that habit of thought could transfer to offline life, e.g. worrying about getting caught at a strip club, as per the paper.
- muninn_ 10y ago
  Yeah I just don't see it
  - headShrinker 10y ago
    Just knowing my self I don't post a lot of gay stuff on my feed even if it's inane because there so many straight people who just wouldn't associate. Most of my content has a universal appeal by design. This is the same for most, which explains the high rate of dog/cat, baby, food and vacation pics on fb. They are safe universal topics that everyone can "like". After "likes" are the currancy we are trading
- bogomipz 10y ago
  I agree with all of your points and there is also the downside risk that one of that "broad audience" is going to leave some appalling or just cringe-worthy comment about your post. And unless you check up on FB regularly that association is just hanging out there. When I used FB I found that I had to go an do "maintenance" to untag photos and delete cringe-worthy comments from people I am not even really friends with. I don't miss having FB at all.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

scotch_drinker 10y ago

Another way to think about a chilling effect is just the social norms that civilization and culture enforce on people. While this research (and much of the discussion of social network sites) focuses on the surveillance factor, society can't just have people expressing their so called real self and still function in the way it does today. So the question to me becomes where is the line drawn between free expression and societal norms enforced by our culture. Once upon a time, that line was drawn by your family and your community, people who you saw every day probably. Now, it's being drawn not just by your close contacts but likely also by the anonymous data collection of social network sites. That would seem to be the true scary part of this chilling effect, that it's no longer being enforced by people we know and interact with but instead by people who we may barely know at all as well as by the marketing and news information that we are fed through the algorithms of social networks.

FullMtlAlcoholc 10y ago
> society can't just have people expressing their so called real self and still function in the way it does today. That is a subtly insightful comment. As I am doing some self-learning on human history, I. wantes to expound on this point a bit. It is true that one of the primary objectives of societies, communities, etc., is to restrain the individual ostensibly for the greater good. In the modern era, the greater good has become conflated with those who hold power. However, before we broke out of the Malthusian trap, self-actualizing and expressing one's real self could spell doom for a community. In general, risk-averse behavior has been common among all groups that operated along the margins of survival. The sheer challenge of survival in premodern societies always constrained the behavior of the poor. Taboos and social constraints limited experimentation innovation, and self-expression. For example, the role of marriage and infidelity is the reverse of what it is today. Marriage was a contract, not an expression of love. Often, the only way to express true love was through an affair. Also, it explains the taboo on homosexuality. Since infant mortality rates were higher, couples tended to have more children than we do today. If the union didn't produce children, who would farm the next generation? This was a rational reflection of the fact that experimentation increases the variability of results. Greater variability means not only potentially greater gains but more ominously for those at the very margin of survival potentially ruinous losses. A great part of the cultural energy of poor farming societies has always been devoted to suppressing experimentation and self-expression. This repression, in effect, was their substitute for insurance policies. Personal ability and personal choice individual "pursuit of happiness," in the modern sense were suppressed by Taboos and social restrictions that have always been most emphatic among the poor. Such restrictions were usually superseded only in societies with high productivity. This makes me really thankful I was born in the modern era or I'd be doing what my father did, as he would be doing what his father did and so on.

scotty79 10y ago

It stands to reason that people participating in social networks and being aware of how a silly thing might get blown out of proportions will limit their offline behavior to reduce the possibility that someone will publish that and paint a target on their backs. I think It's not so much use of the social networks that makes people more careful. Just awareness how much of a WMD gossip machine they are.

interpol_p 10y ago

The paper describes an effect called "context collapse" which the authors claim is observed in people who use social networks. The effect is described as people self-censoring their posts on social media because their audience is potentially represented by a multitude of groups (parents, friends, colleagues). So people self-edit their content in order to satisfy a lowest common denominator. The authors proceed to measure if this self-censoring behaviour extends into real life for people who are thinking about social networks versus people who are not. The method surveyed the participants about either a trip to an adult night club, or a theme park. Half the participants were "primed" with Facebook — meaning they were shown photos of the trips they could take as a mocked-up Facebook event, and they were told they would need to add the trip representative to their Facebook so their photos could be tagged for promotional reasons. The measure they used to determine self-censoring behaviour is called Negatively Directed Impression Management (NDIM). Online this means removing yourself from tagged photos, deleting social media content that may be offensive, or other forms of removal. To measure it offline they asked participants how much they would need to be paid to take part in the trip, and whether they would be interested in a follow up trip (the payment stuff was worked into their cover story). The Facebook-primed group showed significantly higher offline NDIM for the adult night club trip. The theme park trip showed no significant difference. The participants were composed of 80 male Facebook users at a UK university, about 20 years old.

YPCrumble 10y ago

I just deleted Facebook. All my photos are gone forever, according to them. It felt like Snapchat except the timer was set to ten years.

headShrinker 10y ago
?? You can't delete your Facebook account, only deactivate it. And all friends, posts and pics are saved for when you return. If I am wrong I would love to know how.
- jackcosgrove 10y ago
  You can, and you can also download all of your content before doing so. https://www.facebook.com/help/224562897555674?helpref=related https://www.facebook.com/help/224562897555674?helpref=relate...
- jasonl99 10y ago
  Actually, you can; I just did it two days ago. Take a look at this: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/0/permanently-delete-facebook-account/ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/0/permanently-delete-f... edit: lol for being slow on the draw.

problems 10y ago

I used Facebook for about a year or two - but when I did I made 2 separate accounts, one for friends I was close to and one for family, colleagues, etc. Fake name on the friends one. Is this not a more common way to get around this issue?

bogomipz 10y ago
I believe they have made the practice of an "alternate" account much more difficult and also shut down accounts they believe are not tied to "real names."

headShrinker 10y ago

Just knowing myself I don't post a lot of gay stuff on my feed even if it's inane because there so many straight people who just wouldn't associate. Most of my content has a universal appeal by design. This is the same for most, which explains the high rate of dog/cat, baby, food and vacation pics on fb. They are safe universal topics that everyone can "like". After "likes" are the currancy we are trading

keyboardhitter 10y ago
> Most of my content has a universal appeal by design. Maybe you've just gotten used to this idea? It is possible your data is vastly different from other individuals, even if it appears universal on the surface. It is very easy to feel exempt from scrutiny if one thinks their data is only included into "safe" or "popular" categories or topics. (Not entirely related, but this type of uncertainty helped me rationalize the deletion of my Facebook account.)

Spooky23 10y ago

It's easy to picture the current state as what will rule the future. I doubt it. IMO, Facebook as it is today is a fad that is already cracking -- FB constantly has to adapt to retain engagement with younger people and new users.

blubb-fish 10y ago

Is there anything out there which might have at least the slightest chance to grow into something becoming dangerous to Facebook? (https://prism-break.org/en/categories/gnu-linux/#social-networks https://prism-break.org/en/categories/gnu-linux/#social-netw...)

ColanR 10y ago
Doesn't look like it...