7 ms·

Social media distorts perceptions of norms (2024)

108 points by TaurenHunter 2y ago

Narciss 2y ago
Interesting. My social media use is very sparse, and some of my reasons are echoed in the article.
fldskfjdslkfj 2y ago
I hope the U16 ban in Australia works and more countries adopt that approach.
- yakshaving_jgt 2y ago
  I do too, but I don’t think it’s enough. I’ve noticed over the years that so many people are experiencing this thing where their parents are adopting extreme ideas based on what they’ve picked up while scrolling through Facebook.
  - MrMcCall 2y ago
    We must first tune our own sense of truth and compassion to point our moral compass in the right direction. My parents have fallen victim to FoxNews' cult of dishonesty and fascism. I am at their service, but they don't want the truth, so they continue wondering in the darkness, not even caring to experience our extraordinarily delightful and accomplished children. As to our children, they have never had either a smartphone or unmonitored access to the internet. It's that simple. Through the twist of fate that is the pandemic combined with living in public housing, they were already home-schooled as they didn't need to be around other adolescents watching "Game of Thrones" or porn, or listening to Black Metal or the more ignorant kinds of Hip Hop (glorifying wealth, violence, objectification of women, and braggadocio). We are each the product of many different cultures, which we then combine into our own individual cultural worldview. Few people appear able to apersonally evaluate their cultural tendencies, so they are susceptible to influence from the dishonest, immoral and/or belligerent. They were raised with compassion and taught why we should be as compassionate as possible to every single person, and that makes them a delight for every single person they encounter. I have found that surrounding them by good people, ideas, attitudes, and behaviors was important to their development. Keeping them away from submorons who are both ignorant and overconfident is an important factor in the development of young adults. I know this deeply because -- while not myself belligerent -- I was a total dipshi_t as a teenager. I do not blame my parents for my idiocy, for they worked their asses off to provide for us. I blame our society for not facilitating our being able to have responsible adults around to educate myself and my peers. My first rule of parenting is to not let children raise children. When left to their own devices (PNI), they tend to gravitate to the worst ideas, and the younger kids will learn from their elders' abyssmal examples.
  - paganel 2y ago
    That’s “extreme” only to their children, who most probably (the children, that is) hold very extreme beliefs themselves, such as smaller pensions and reduced State-supported assistance for the elderly. It is true, those (relatively younger) children think that they still hold the Gramcsian hegemony-like hold on what’s considered to be the “truth”, and hence the non-“extreme”, but that has stopped happening with the advent of social networks and the democratization of information (think of how happy everyone was about that democratization via social media when the Arab Spring started).
    - saagarjha 2y ago
      ??? Where did all this come from?
      - paganel 2y ago
        Don't you have friends in their 30s, even 40s, asking for the pensions to go down? And for the old people to die off soon enough because they're keeping all of us (younger people) down, with their (the old people's) voting habits being a very good example of that? Because I certainly do have those type of friends and acquaintances. Or maybe it's just an Eastern-European thing and further West there's no inter-generational war.
        saagarjha 2y ago
        We don't really have pensions in the US (anymore). There is a meme of baby boomers cashing out of Social Security and leaving it unreplenished for future generations. I don't think "let's kill off the older people" is a common viewpoint but "the old people vote against our interests and I am waiting for them to die" is.
        paganel 2y ago
        Artificially keeping the stock exchange up (and inflated), no matter the consequences, is a form of State-sponsored pension, even though technically it is all private money. Somebody should write a study to show the correlation between the pension funds getting bigger and bigger and the number of companies getting in/out of the the S&P500 or Dow Jones getting lower and lower over time. That second number getting lower and lower means less innovation, means less real wealth going into the future, means less real money for people who are now in their 30s and 40s. I’d say that many of the NIMBY policies also respect that premise, i.e. government-supported decisions that help keep the wealth among the elderly by (artificially) keeping the existing home prices up (and it is known that those houses are some of the most important assets that said elderly people own).
- aprilthird2021 2y ago
  A cursory glance at the history of youths tells anyone that it won't
  - fldskfjdslkfj 2y ago
    Are you sure about that? Seems to me the banning substances such as alcohol, drugs and cigarettes drastically reduced usage over time (for kids, adults is a different topic) And in this case you have a handful of companies that are responsible so it will be much easier to enforce vs trying to prevent every small shop from selling stuff illegally.
    - aprilthird2021 2y ago
      Kids did all these things in increasing amounts until social media and tech came around and made them isolated. If you take that time period out, there is no decrease from the start of the war on drugs till the first iPhone in youth use of drugs. Lastly, you forgot all these big companies started off as small, hard to regulate websites, which will be where kids flock to avoid 'teen accounts' and 'bans' and everything else
- flyinglizard 2y ago
  The future of our society is in a large part online, and I'd rather youth to grow up into those platforms with adequate tools to handle them than to just get in at 16. No matter what phenomena you look at, by the time a generation grows around a certain tech or condition as a given it just blends into everyday normal life. It happened with the TV, Internet, Instant Messaging, YouTube, Facebook and now TikTok. Happens as we speak with ChatGPT. I wouldn't ban it until 16 either, I'd teach kids about it from first grade.
  - BlueTemplar 2y ago
    There's a difference between TV / Internet / Instant Messaging and YouTube / Facebook / TikTok / ChatGPT. The former are general concepts, while the latter are specific companies that are arguably damaging enough to be worth banning at the level of the whole society (except maybe in their home countries, which of course makes the situation harder to deal with).
  - ohmy987 2y ago
    > The future of our society is in a large part online I wonder how accurate this is. I have no account in any social media except in LinkedIn (which I see more as a job portal than social media), and that's how I raise my kids. I live without facebook, instagram, twitter, or whatever else and I'd risk to say life is better without those.
    - FollowingTheDao 2y ago
      It is not accurate. This person is one of those extremes they talk about in the paper. "For instance, news stories that express outgroup animosity are 67% more likely to be shared on social media (Rathje et al., 2021). " They are holding an extreme view and posting it online.
    - saagarjha 2y ago
      You’re on social media right now fwiw
      - 2y ago
- richrichie 2y ago
  Banning never works.
  - FollowingTheDao 2y ago
    Banning never works...perfectly. But I will take anything over what we have now. Point: We have banned murder, which obviously does not work perfectly.
    - MrMcCall 2y ago
      Yes, indeed. Age restrictions definitely lessen the harms young people can easily get into.
    - richrichie 2y ago
      Murder was never legal or “allowed”. If you believe that people do not kill because it is illegal, you are on a shaky ground.
      - bdangubic 2y ago
        you should ask yourself a different question - if we legalized murder would this cause uptick in murders or not…? :)
        richrichie 2y ago
        It has more nuance. The supposition that there are significant number of murderers walking among us that would not murder because it is illegal has no basis. Crime statistics imply that most murders are results of either passion or pre-meditated/ well planned. These have nothing to do with legality of it. We have to have the law for an entirely different reason.
        bdangubic 2y ago
        Crime statistics are based on what is currently considered a “crime.” you are defeating your own argument… :) there is no nuance - if you made murder legal there would be A TON of murders, it is that simple (I personally might pop a cap in couple of people that have wronged people I love)
yakshaving_jgt 2y ago
It’s interesting also which platforms prefer which norms. On my Instagram, everyone is a sexy millionaire. When I had Twitter, everyone utterly hated straight, white men. Neither of these are an accurate representation of society.
- richrichie 2y ago
  Twitter as X now is very different from the heavily censored and woke cesspool it was.
- lm28469 2y ago
  Individualist ghettos are very well segmented either inside of social medias themselves or split between different platforms. That's why some people think the entire world is totally fine with their fringe ideas while in real life (Most people don't spend 5-10 hours on reddit/twitter/facebook discussing genders, masculinist ideas, politics, &c.) people either don't care or aren't even aware of the topics that engulfed terminally online people's mind Although I guess this is slowly changing with new generations, I've noticed more and more people spewing their social medias's "prêt a penser" out of nowhere, as if you had to chose your side on every single topic of the day. One minute your talking with your 14 year old nephew and the next he'll tell you why he supports Israel, I wish I was exaggerating but I literally went through that scenario during the Christmas holidays
- redeux 2y ago
  I was on Twitter from 2009 until it turned into Xitter. I never saw much of that hatred for straight, white men (e.g. me). Sure, if you went looking you could always find something to be offended about, if that’s what you desired. I never found it showing up at my doorstep though. I did see a lot of hate show up at marginalized people or had those otherwise minority representation in society. I did see a lot of people challenged for their personal beliefs that went on to claim racism and sexism, especially but not exclusively among straight white men. Nobody should suffer the indignity of discrimination for what we were born into, but people are often way too quick to dismiss ideological criticism as discrimination.
  - 2y ago
blueflow 2y ago
I hoped the preprint would go more into the details about which norms. I'm sure most of them are no better than superstition.
- MrMcCall 2y ago
  Embracing compassion as a way of interacting with our world's peoples is not superstition, my friend, yet you will find very little of it in mainstream fiction, the mainstream media, or even the popular media (e.g. Joe Rogan). The people who fund those media have created the norms that we live within today in 2025, my friend. It takes effort for us to dig ourselves out of our naturally selfish tendencies towards others, especially those of other cultures. Many of our cultures inculcate those tendencies as being proper, when they are anything but, and are, in fact, degrading our world with pollution, waste, and callous apathy to the plight of our fellow human beings. I do, as ever, however, recommend the works of William Gibson as he always imbues a sense of humanity in his protagonists. The same is true of Tolkien's books, where goodness is detailed and the evil rarely mentioned. The movies were trash simply on account of their changing Faramir's character so unnecessarily. If you want a truly good Hollywood movie, look to the first Equalizer, which Denzel Washington executive produced, whose protagonist is a hero for the ages.
- ANewFormation 2y ago
  It alluded rather strongly to the perception gap [1] in multiple parts of the paper. That gap is greatly exasperated with social media usage. That interpretation also eliminates the 'norms change' nuance many have mentioned because it's about objectively incorrect assessments of the norms/values of society, as opposed to oft liminal standards. [1] - https://perceptiongap.us https://perceptiongap.us
greekanalyst 2y ago
Findings are not surprising but definitely interesting and verify a lot of the assumptions many of us have these days about the power/influence of social media.
BlueTemplar 2y ago
One issue that this article seems afraid fully embrace, is how social "reality" is... socially constructed, so with a high enough usage of social media, social norms become the "extreme" social media norms.
motorest 2y ago
I wonder if researchers are simply failing to frame the problem. It might not be that the perception of norms are distorted. It's just that communities are entirely different and insulated, and thus as communities go they organically develop their own norms. This failure in perception also communicates a bias that a specific norm should be the reigning one and anything that differs from it is "distorted". This reads like last century's inherent racism in sociology, anthropology, and even linguistics, where anything that contrasted with the old country's baseline was labelled as distortions and errors.
- Dalewyn 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - motorest 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - redeux 2y ago
      What you said does encapsulate conservative vs progressive ideology pretty well. One seeks to cling to their ancestors norms and one seeks to write their own. I don’t think it’s trolling to point that out, but maybe I’m missing some subtext.
      - FrustratedMonky 2y ago
        "I don’t think it’s trolling to point that out, but maybe I’m missing some subtext." It is a troll because it was only pointed at progressives. You made the point that technically correct, this applies to conservative and progressives can both have similar issues with echo chambers. But the parent was clearly only focusing on progressives that are in error, as if the conservative ideology is correct. When really, there are a several studies that show that conservatives are more likely to fall for conspiracy theories, and not able to use critical thinking.
mensetmanusman 2y ago
This was known since TV. My favorite example was when some anthropologists introduced video recording to this remote tribe that caused the tribe to immediately stop performing the male adulthood initiation rituals. The tribe leader’s reasoning was that the kids could simply watch the video now. Was a stark reminder of how different human life was in the past before moving pictures.
- FollowingTheDao 2y ago
  This is not at all what they are talking about. You are talking about changing norms, they are talking about false norms.
  - mensetmanusman 2y ago
    Norms are norms, not true or false, just more or less aligned to prosperity.
    - FollowingTheDao 2y ago
      What they are saying is that social media norms do not reflect social norms, thus they are false norms.
      - mensetmanusman 2y ago
        Sure, same with TV and News Media. It’s outliers of interest all the way down.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
hunglee2 2y ago
it is not only social media, but rather than 'total information environment' including what we get irl. Normative behaviour is literally what the majority believe and do, so if we enter into spaces where we have certain norms pervasive, we are likely to adopt these ourselves in order to avoid ostracism. This is pressure is especially acute if we have no alternative social group, or have entered into a group which then actively conditions members to separate from alternatives. This can happen as easily in a small regional town or on a reddit subreddit.
- bloomingkales 2y ago
  Or as Patrick Bateman put it more starkly: EVELYN: Well, you hate that job anyway. Why don't you just quit? You don't have to work. BATEMAN: Because I...want...to...fit...in. ---- We don't even know it, social media has got us all comparing Bone font.
  - tempodox 2y ago
    For those who didn't get the reference, it's from the movie “American Psycho”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Psycho https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Psycho
- HPsquared 2y ago
  A defining part of our age is that social media gave everyone a huge number of alternative social groups.
ddmma 2y ago
If you’re thirsty then look for water. That is also what social media does and now is augmented by passive listening, fill it with algorithms and synthetic content.
heresie-dabord 2y ago
The metaphor of "funhouse mirrors" of distorted perception is apt. We have installed toxic channels of deeply negative behaviours into our society. Now we find ourselves trying to protect reality. The paper mentions all the points of concern, with even a brief reference to... the money. Given the enormous influence of advertising revenue (i.e. how these corporations survive), these sections in the paper are essential to consider: => Whose opinions are represented online? => Why are false norms worse online than offline? From the first section (Whose opinions are represented online?): ""False norms emerge, in part, because social media is dominated by a small number of extreme people who post only their most extreme opinions, and do so at a very high volume (Bor & Petersen, 2022) , while more moderate or neutral opinions are practically invisible online. Encountering a disproportionate volume of extreme opinions can lead to false perceptions that the norms are far more extreme than they actually are. This occurs across domains and platforms."" From the second section (Why are false norms worse online than offline?): ""Social media operates in an attention economy, where design features and algorithms are designed to elicit as much engagement as possible (Fisher , 2022; Van Bavel et al., 2024). Platforms then sell ad space to companies based on indices of attention. As such, there is a strong incentive for users to create content that maximizes engagement–rather than content that reflects reality. And, given that those who are the most active on social media are also the most extreme (Barberá & Rivero, 2015; Bor & Petersen, 2022 ), this creates a perverse incentive structure to reward surprising, negative, extreme or divisive content. For instance, news stories that express outgroup animosity are 67% more likely to be shared on social media (Rathje et al., 2021). Thus, people with more extreme or hostile beliefs tend to dominate discourse – drowning out or overshading more mild or nuanced content (Bail, 2022) and leading to false beliefs about the norms of a community . These online dynamics are amplified by the design features and recommendation algorithms on various platforms (Brady et al., 2020; Brady , Jackson, et al., 2023). For instance, a recent analysis of the algorithm on Twitter/X found that it prioritizes evocative content (Milli et al., 2023) . This incentivizes users to create this type of content which can help them build a large following while warping public perceptions of norms. This is compounded due to the fact that there is often little motivation for someone to post a nuanced or moderate opinion on social media. Moreover , nuanced or moderate posts often risk hostility from more extreme ingroup and outgroup members, especially since such hostility has no cost for the aggressor due to the social distance the online environment af fords (Robertson et al., in press) . Indeed, people who are politically moderate were more likely to report being harassed online, even though they were also less likely to post (Bail, 2022) . People who hold less extreme beliefs have less investment in arguing, and when attacked by people who have more strongly held beliefs, perceive it as more hostile. The fact that people who “troll” other people typically have higher dark triad characteristics also does not encourage nuanced debate (Brubaker et al., 2021"" === The very real effects of social media on actual public discourse (extreme opinions, insults, threats) can be observed everywhere in daily life. And even on HN, where moderation has been successful, I have no doubt that dang and other moderators could recount dreadful things.
FedyaDostoevsky 2y ago
One of the more stunning examples of Figure 1 from the paper in the wild in recent times is the discrepancy between the "consensus" on social media that the assassination of a certain healthcare CEO was justified, versus public opinion polling showing this to be a minority opinion among Americans.[0][1] [0] https://stratpolitics.org/2024/12/unitedhealthcare-poll/ https://stratpolitics.org/2024/12/unitedhealthcare-poll/ [1] https://emersoncollegepolling.com/december-2024-national-poll-young-voters-diverge-from-majority-on-crypto-tiktok-and-ceo-assassination/ https://emersoncollegepolling.com/december-2024-national-pol... (The demographic breakdown in the second poll pretty starkly demonstrates as well how the sort of uneven sample of the population you typically see on places like reddit can give you a very distorted impression of public opinion.)
roenxi 2y ago
Although mildly interesting, this doesn't really explore some of the more interesting dynamics of online conversation. There was a theory over in one borderline famous reddit post that most online conversations were various factions of people who were borderline mentally ill talking to each other. Boiling the situation down to a bell curve over one axis is really underselling the amount of distortion that can take place - the moderate opinion might literally not be hinted at in an online conversation. But the effect the paper hints at is real. I remember being noting with curiosity that Factorio's positive reviews vs Steam's game stats for their recent expansion and noting that the reviews must have been done by people who probably hadn't seen the expansion's content.
- fragmede 2y ago
  Space Age was an unofficial mod for Factorio long before Factorio 2 was released, so those reviews weren't entirely made up.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - xboxnolifes 2y ago
    No it wasn't. That is Space Exploration, and it's wildly different.
- HPsquared 2y ago
  Important to note that some types of people post more than others, so a random sample of posts will not have the same properties as a random sample of people.
  - gruez 2y ago
    That's exactly the thesis mentioned by the parent. >There was a theory over in one borderline famous reddit post that most online conversations were various factions of people who were borderline mentally ill talking to each other. The referenced post: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most_of_what_you_read_on_the_internet_is_written/ https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...
TexanFeller 2y ago
This hit me hard this year. I'd looked at a lot of Reddit opinions about politics and assumed they were only a normal level of insanely biased, like MSNBC or Fox News. Turns out the average Redditor, even in fairly conservative subs, is vastly more left wing than the population average as seen in the recent elections. Even the Texas subreddit had "vote for Kamala" and "vote blue no matter who" posts that were highly upvoted before the election. Reddit's moderators are the thought police and absolutely nothing there besides perhaps Taylor Swift discourse is reflective of average Jane's opinion.
CaptainFever 2y ago
This paper reflects a lot of my experiences, but I think the "Why are false norms worse online than offline?" didn't make a good case. Platforms like Mastodon, which do not have algorithms, are just as or are even more distorted than algorithmic platforms like X. How can this paper blame it on algorithms, then, if a platform without one ends up the same way? (Possible counterpoint: Mastodon is more extreme because it could represent a platform that people banned from other platforms move to, though the differences between mainstream Mastodon opinions and mainstream offline opinions are so large that I don't think this is the real reason either.) The paper says "Platforms then sell ad space to companies based on indices of attention. As such, there is a strong incentive for users to create content that maximizes engagement–rather than content that reflects reality." This does not follow. Users don't usually make money from ads. I do think users do want to create content that maximizes engagement, but this is simply for ego and impact, not due to monetary incentives. The paper later says that "This is compounded due to the fact that there is often little motivation for someone to post a nuanced or moderate opinion on social media." I think this is the real reason, but either way, I think the paper is not convincing at establishing any kind of causality for "online social media" being worse than "offline social media". Figure 3 is also confusing. What does "moral" and "immoral" mean?
1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
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illwrks 2y ago
My personal opinion is that social media is an absolute poison. The internet is an amazing way of connecting disparate people who perhaps don’t have many connections in their immediate community, but as social media has grown those excessive ‘insane’ users are distorting it for everyone - if I was to think of an analogy, going for Sunday lunch in a pub, but you’ve got one table who are absolute alcoholics ruining the experience for everyone else, they invite some patrons from other tables to have a drink and join their group but it’s still a mess of a party, and terrible for everyone else. It’s not going to be easy to put controls in place without being oppressive and draconian, and therefore the poison will spread as more and more people join the communities, even more so as older less ‘switched on’ people join.

108 points by TaurenHunter 2y ago

Narciss 2y ago

Interesting. My social media use is very sparse, and some of my reasons are echoed in the article.

fldskfjdslkfj 2y ago

I hope the U16 ban in Australia works and more countries adopt that approach.

yakshaving_jgt 2y ago
I do too, but I don’t think it’s enough. I’ve noticed over the years that so many people are experiencing this thing where their parents are adopting extreme ideas based on what they’ve picked up while scrolling through Facebook.
- MrMcCall 2y ago
  We must first tune our own sense of truth and compassion to point our moral compass in the right direction. My parents have fallen victim to FoxNews' cult of dishonesty and fascism. I am at their service, but they don't want the truth, so they continue wondering in the darkness, not even caring to experience our extraordinarily delightful and accomplished children. As to our children, they have never had either a smartphone or unmonitored access to the internet. It's that simple. Through the twist of fate that is the pandemic combined with living in public housing, they were already home-schooled as they didn't need to be around other adolescents watching "Game of Thrones" or porn, or listening to Black Metal or the more ignorant kinds of Hip Hop (glorifying wealth, violence, objectification of women, and braggadocio). We are each the product of many different cultures, which we then combine into our own individual cultural worldview. Few people appear able to apersonally evaluate their cultural tendencies, so they are susceptible to influence from the dishonest, immoral and/or belligerent. They were raised with compassion and taught why we should be as compassionate as possible to every single person, and that makes them a delight for every single person they encounter. I have found that surrounding them by good people, ideas, attitudes, and behaviors was important to their development. Keeping them away from submorons who are both ignorant and overconfident is an important factor in the development of young adults. I know this deeply because -- while not myself belligerent -- I was a total dipshi_t as a teenager. I do not blame my parents for my idiocy, for they worked their asses off to provide for us. I blame our society for not facilitating our being able to have responsible adults around to educate myself and my peers. My first rule of parenting is to not let children raise children. When left to their own devices (PNI), they tend to gravitate to the worst ideas, and the younger kids will learn from their elders' abyssmal examples.
- paganel 2y ago
  That’s “extreme” only to their children, who most probably (the children, that is) hold very extreme beliefs themselves, such as smaller pensions and reduced State-supported assistance for the elderly. It is true, those (relatively younger) children think that they still hold the Gramcsian hegemony-like hold on what’s considered to be the “truth”, and hence the non-“extreme”, but that has stopped happening with the advent of social networks and the democratization of information (think of how happy everyone was about that democratization via social media when the Arab Spring started).
  - saagarjha 2y ago
    ??? Where did all this come from?
    - paganel 2y ago
      Don't you have friends in their 30s, even 40s, asking for the pensions to go down? And for the old people to die off soon enough because they're keeping all of us (younger people) down, with their (the old people's) voting habits being a very good example of that? Because I certainly do have those type of friends and acquaintances. Or maybe it's just an Eastern-European thing and further West there's no inter-generational war.
      - saagarjha 2y ago
        We don't really have pensions in the US (anymore). There is a meme of baby boomers cashing out of Social Security and leaving it unreplenished for future generations. I don't think "let's kill off the older people" is a common viewpoint but "the old people vote against our interests and I am waiting for them to die" is.
        paganel 2y ago
        Artificially keeping the stock exchange up (and inflated), no matter the consequences, is a form of State-sponsored pension, even though technically it is all private money. Somebody should write a study to show the correlation between the pension funds getting bigger and bigger and the number of companies getting in/out of the the S&P500 or Dow Jones getting lower and lower over time. That second number getting lower and lower means less innovation, means less real wealth going into the future, means less real money for people who are now in their 30s and 40s. I’d say that many of the NIMBY policies also respect that premise, i.e. government-supported decisions that help keep the wealth among the elderly by (artificially) keeping the existing home prices up (and it is known that those houses are some of the most important assets that said elderly people own).
aprilthird2021 2y ago
A cursory glance at the history of youths tells anyone that it won't
- fldskfjdslkfj 2y ago
  Are you sure about that? Seems to me the banning substances such as alcohol, drugs and cigarettes drastically reduced usage over time (for kids, adults is a different topic) And in this case you have a handful of companies that are responsible so it will be much easier to enforce vs trying to prevent every small shop from selling stuff illegally.
  - aprilthird2021 2y ago
    Kids did all these things in increasing amounts until social media and tech came around and made them isolated. If you take that time period out, there is no decrease from the start of the war on drugs till the first iPhone in youth use of drugs. Lastly, you forgot all these big companies started off as small, hard to regulate websites, which will be where kids flock to avoid 'teen accounts' and 'bans' and everything else
flyinglizard 2y ago
The future of our society is in a large part online, and I'd rather youth to grow up into those platforms with adequate tools to handle them than to just get in at 16. No matter what phenomena you look at, by the time a generation grows around a certain tech or condition as a given it just blends into everyday normal life. It happened with the TV, Internet, Instant Messaging, YouTube, Facebook and now TikTok. Happens as we speak with ChatGPT. I wouldn't ban it until 16 either, I'd teach kids about it from first grade.
- BlueTemplar 2y ago
  There's a difference between TV / Internet / Instant Messaging and YouTube / Facebook / TikTok / ChatGPT. The former are general concepts, while the latter are specific companies that are arguably damaging enough to be worth banning at the level of the whole society (except maybe in their home countries, which of course makes the situation harder to deal with).
- ohmy987 2y ago
  > The future of our society is in a large part online I wonder how accurate this is. I have no account in any social media except in LinkedIn (which I see more as a job portal than social media), and that's how I raise my kids. I live without facebook, instagram, twitter, or whatever else and I'd risk to say life is better without those.
  - FollowingTheDao 2y ago
    It is not accurate. This person is one of those extremes they talk about in the paper. "For instance, news stories that express outgroup animosity are 67% more likely to be shared on social media (Rathje et al., 2021). " They are holding an extreme view and posting it online.
  - saagarjha 2y ago
    You’re on social media right now fwiw
    - 2y ago
richrichie 2y ago
Banning never works.
- FollowingTheDao 2y ago
  Banning never works...perfectly. But I will take anything over what we have now. Point: We have banned murder, which obviously does not work perfectly.
  - MrMcCall 2y ago
    Yes, indeed. Age restrictions definitely lessen the harms young people can easily get into.
  - richrichie 2y ago
    Murder was never legal or “allowed”. If you believe that people do not kill because it is illegal, you are on a shaky ground.
    - bdangubic 2y ago
      you should ask yourself a different question - if we legalized murder would this cause uptick in murders or not…? :)
      - richrichie 2y ago
        It has more nuance. The supposition that there are significant number of murderers walking among us that would not murder because it is illegal has no basis. Crime statistics imply that most murders are results of either passion or pre-meditated/ well planned. These have nothing to do with legality of it. We have to have the law for an entirely different reason.
        bdangubic 2y ago
        Crime statistics are based on what is currently considered a “crime.” you are defeating your own argument… :) there is no nuance - if you made murder legal there would be A TON of murders, it is that simple (I personally might pop a cap in couple of people that have wronged people I love)

yakshaving_jgt 2y ago

It’s interesting also which platforms prefer which norms. On my Instagram, everyone is a sexy millionaire. When I had Twitter, everyone utterly hated straight, white men. Neither of these are an accurate representation of society.

richrichie 2y ago
Twitter as X now is very different from the heavily censored and woke cesspool it was.
lm28469 2y ago
Individualist ghettos are very well segmented either inside of social medias themselves or split between different platforms. That's why some people think the entire world is totally fine with their fringe ideas while in real life (Most people don't spend 5-10 hours on reddit/twitter/facebook discussing genders, masculinist ideas, politics, &c.) people either don't care or aren't even aware of the topics that engulfed terminally online people's mind Although I guess this is slowly changing with new generations, I've noticed more and more people spewing their social medias's "prêt a penser" out of nowhere, as if you had to chose your side on every single topic of the day. One minute your talking with your 14 year old nephew and the next he'll tell you why he supports Israel, I wish I was exaggerating but I literally went through that scenario during the Christmas holidays
redeux 2y ago
I was on Twitter from 2009 until it turned into Xitter. I never saw much of that hatred for straight, white men (e.g. me). Sure, if you went looking you could always find something to be offended about, if that’s what you desired. I never found it showing up at my doorstep though. I did see a lot of hate show up at marginalized people or had those otherwise minority representation in society. I did see a lot of people challenged for their personal beliefs that went on to claim racism and sexism, especially but not exclusively among straight white men. Nobody should suffer the indignity of discrimination for what we were born into, but people are often way too quick to dismiss ideological criticism as discrimination.
- 2y ago

blueflow 2y ago

I hoped the preprint would go more into the details about which norms. I'm sure most of them are no better than superstition.

MrMcCall 2y ago
Embracing compassion as a way of interacting with our world's peoples is not superstition, my friend, yet you will find very little of it in mainstream fiction, the mainstream media, or even the popular media (e.g. Joe Rogan). The people who fund those media have created the norms that we live within today in 2025, my friend. It takes effort for us to dig ourselves out of our naturally selfish tendencies towards others, especially those of other cultures. Many of our cultures inculcate those tendencies as being proper, when they are anything but, and are, in fact, degrading our world with pollution, waste, and callous apathy to the plight of our fellow human beings. I do, as ever, however, recommend the works of William Gibson as he always imbues a sense of humanity in his protagonists. The same is true of Tolkien's books, where goodness is detailed and the evil rarely mentioned. The movies were trash simply on account of their changing Faramir's character so unnecessarily. If you want a truly good Hollywood movie, look to the first Equalizer, which Denzel Washington executive produced, whose protagonist is a hero for the ages.
ANewFormation 2y ago
It alluded rather strongly to the perception gap [1] in multiple parts of the paper. That gap is greatly exasperated with social media usage. That interpretation also eliminates the 'norms change' nuance many have mentioned because it's about objectively incorrect assessments of the norms/values of society, as opposed to oft liminal standards. [1] - https://perceptiongap.us https://perceptiongap.us

greekanalyst 2y ago

Findings are not surprising but definitely interesting and verify a lot of the assumptions many of us have these days about the power/influence of social media.

BlueTemplar 2y ago

One issue that this article seems afraid fully embrace, is how social "reality" is... socially constructed, so with a high enough usage of social media, social norms become the "extreme" social media norms.

motorest 2y ago

I wonder if researchers are simply failing to frame the problem. It might not be that the perception of norms are distorted. It's just that communities are entirely different and insulated, and thus as communities go they organically develop their own norms. This failure in perception also communicates a bias that a specific norm should be the reigning one and anything that differs from it is "distorted". This reads like last century's inherent racism in sociology, anthropology, and even linguistics, where anything that contrasted with the old country's baseline was labelled as distortions and errors.

Dalewyn 2y ago
[flagged]
- motorest 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - redeux 2y ago
    What you said does encapsulate conservative vs progressive ideology pretty well. One seeks to cling to their ancestors norms and one seeks to write their own. I don’t think it’s trolling to point that out, but maybe I’m missing some subtext.
    - FrustratedMonky 2y ago
      "I don’t think it’s trolling to point that out, but maybe I’m missing some subtext." It is a troll because it was only pointed at progressives. You made the point that technically correct, this applies to conservative and progressives can both have similar issues with echo chambers. But the parent was clearly only focusing on progressives that are in error, as if the conservative ideology is correct. When really, there are a several studies that show that conservatives are more likely to fall for conspiracy theories, and not able to use critical thinking.

mensetmanusman 2y ago

This was known since TV. My favorite example was when some anthropologists introduced video recording to this remote tribe that caused the tribe to immediately stop performing the male adulthood initiation rituals. The tribe leader’s reasoning was that the kids could simply watch the video now. Was a stark reminder of how different human life was in the past before moving pictures.

FollowingTheDao 2y ago
This is not at all what they are talking about. You are talking about changing norms, they are talking about false norms.
- mensetmanusman 2y ago
  Norms are norms, not true or false, just more or less aligned to prosperity.
  - FollowingTheDao 2y ago
    What they are saying is that social media norms do not reflect social norms, thus they are false norms.
    - mensetmanusman 2y ago
      Sure, same with TV and News Media. It’s outliers of interest all the way down.

deleted 2y ago

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hunglee2 2y ago

it is not only social media, but rather than 'total information environment' including what we get irl. Normative behaviour is literally what the majority believe and do, so if we enter into spaces where we have certain norms pervasive, we are likely to adopt these ourselves in order to avoid ostracism. This is pressure is especially acute if we have no alternative social group, or have entered into a group which then actively conditions members to separate from alternatives. This can happen as easily in a small regional town or on a reddit subreddit.

bloomingkales 2y ago
Or as Patrick Bateman put it more starkly: EVELYN: Well, you hate that job anyway. Why don't you just quit? You don't have to work. BATEMAN: Because I...want...to...fit...in. ---- We don't even know it, social media has got us all comparing Bone font.
- tempodox 2y ago
  For those who didn't get the reference, it's from the movie “American Psycho”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Psycho https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Psycho
HPsquared 2y ago
A defining part of our age is that social media gave everyone a huge number of alternative social groups.

ddmma 2y ago

If you’re thirsty then look for water. That is also what social media does and now is augmented by passive listening, fill it with algorithms and synthetic content.

heresie-dabord 2y ago

The metaphor of "funhouse mirrors" of distorted perception is apt. We have installed toxic channels of deeply negative behaviours into our society. Now we find ourselves trying to protect reality. The paper mentions all the points of concern, with even a brief reference to... the money. Given the enormous influence of advertising revenue (i.e. how these corporations survive), these sections in the paper are essential to consider: => Whose opinions are represented online? => Why are false norms worse online than offline? From the first section (Whose opinions are represented online?): ""False norms emerge, in part, because social media is dominated by a small number of extreme people who post only their most extreme opinions, and do so at a very high volume (Bor & Petersen, 2022) , while more moderate or neutral opinions are practically invisible online. Encountering a disproportionate volume of extreme opinions can lead to false perceptions that the norms are far more extreme than they actually are. This occurs across domains and platforms."" From the second section (Why are false norms worse online than offline?): ""Social media operates in an attention economy, where design features and algorithms are designed to elicit as much engagement as possible (Fisher , 2022; Van Bavel et al., 2024). Platforms then sell ad space to companies based on indices of attention. As such, there is a strong incentive for users to create content that maximizes engagement–rather than content that reflects reality. And, given that those who are the most active on social media are also the most extreme (Barberá & Rivero, 2015; Bor & Petersen, 2022 ), this creates a perverse incentive structure to reward surprising, negative, extreme or divisive content. For instance, news stories that express outgroup animosity are 67% more likely to be shared on social media (Rathje et al., 2021). Thus, people with more extreme or hostile beliefs tend to dominate discourse – drowning out or overshading more mild or nuanced content (Bail, 2022) and leading to false beliefs about the norms of a community . These online dynamics are amplified by the design features and recommendation algorithms on various platforms (Brady et al., 2020; Brady , Jackson, et al., 2023). For instance, a recent analysis of the algorithm on Twitter/X found that it prioritizes evocative content (Milli et al., 2023) . This incentivizes users to create this type of content which can help them build a large following while warping public perceptions of norms. This is compounded due to the fact that there is often little motivation for someone to post a nuanced or moderate opinion on social media. Moreover , nuanced or moderate posts often risk hostility from more extreme ingroup and outgroup members, especially since such hostility has no cost for the aggressor due to the social distance the online environment af fords (Robertson et al., in press) . Indeed, people who are politically moderate were more likely to report being harassed online, even though they were also less likely to post (Bail, 2022) . People who hold less extreme beliefs have less investment in arguing, and when attacked by people who have more strongly held beliefs, perceive it as more hostile. The fact that people who “troll” other people typically have higher dark triad characteristics also does not encourage nuanced debate (Brubaker et al., 2021"" === The very real effects of social media on actual public discourse (extreme opinions, insults, threats) can be observed everywhere in daily life. And even on HN, where moderation has been successful, I have no doubt that dang and other moderators could recount dreadful things.

FedyaDostoevsky 2y ago

One of the more stunning examples of Figure 1 from the paper in the wild in recent times is the discrepancy between the "consensus" on social media that the assassination of a certain healthcare CEO was justified, versus public opinion polling showing this to be a minority opinion among Americans.[0][1] [0] https://stratpolitics.org/2024/12/unitedhealthcare-poll/ https://stratpolitics.org/2024/12/unitedhealthcare-poll/ [1] https://emersoncollegepolling.com/december-2024-national-poll-young-voters-diverge-from-majority-on-crypto-tiktok-and-ceo-assassination/ https://emersoncollegepolling.com/december-2024-national-pol... (The demographic breakdown in the second poll pretty starkly demonstrates as well how the sort of uneven sample of the population you typically see on places like reddit can give you a very distorted impression of public opinion.)

roenxi 2y ago

Although mildly interesting, this doesn't really explore some of the more interesting dynamics of online conversation. There was a theory over in one borderline famous reddit post that most online conversations were various factions of people who were borderline mentally ill talking to each other. Boiling the situation down to a bell curve over one axis is really underselling the amount of distortion that can take place - the moderate opinion might literally not be hinted at in an online conversation. But the effect the paper hints at is real. I remember being noting with curiosity that Factorio's positive reviews vs Steam's game stats for their recent expansion and noting that the reviews must have been done by people who probably hadn't seen the expansion's content.

fragmede 2y ago
Space Age was an unofficial mod for Factorio long before Factorio 2 was released, so those reviews weren't entirely made up.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- xboxnolifes 2y ago
  No it wasn't. That is Space Exploration, and it's wildly different.
HPsquared 2y ago
Important to note that some types of people post more than others, so a random sample of posts will not have the same properties as a random sample of people.
- gruez 2y ago
  That's exactly the thesis mentioned by the parent. >There was a theory over in one borderline famous reddit post that most online conversations were various factions of people who were borderline mentally ill talking to each other. The referenced post: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most_of_what_you_read_on_the_internet_is_written/ https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...

TexanFeller 2y ago

This hit me hard this year. I'd looked at a lot of Reddit opinions about politics and assumed they were only a normal level of insanely biased, like MSNBC or Fox News. Turns out the average Redditor, even in fairly conservative subs, is vastly more left wing than the population average as seen in the recent elections. Even the Texas subreddit had "vote for Kamala" and "vote blue no matter who" posts that were highly upvoted before the election. Reddit's moderators are the thought police and absolutely nothing there besides perhaps Taylor Swift discourse is reflective of average Jane's opinion.

CaptainFever 2y ago

This paper reflects a lot of my experiences, but I think the "Why are false norms worse online than offline?" didn't make a good case. Platforms like Mastodon, which do not have algorithms, are just as or are even more distorted than algorithmic platforms like X. How can this paper blame it on algorithms, then, if a platform without one ends up the same way? (Possible counterpoint: Mastodon is more extreme because it could represent a platform that people banned from other platforms move to, though the differences between mainstream Mastodon opinions and mainstream offline opinions are so large that I don't think this is the real reason either.) The paper says "Platforms then sell ad space to companies based on indices of attention. As such, there is a strong incentive for users to create content that maximizes engagement–rather than content that reflects reality." This does not follow. Users don't usually make money from ads. I do think users do want to create content that maximizes engagement, but this is simply for ego and impact, not due to monetary incentives. The paper later says that "This is compounded due to the fact that there is often little motivation for someone to post a nuanced or moderate opinion on social media." I think this is the real reason, but either way, I think the paper is not convincing at establishing any kind of causality for "online social media" being worse than "offline social media". Figure 3 is also confusing. What does "moral" and "immoral" mean?

1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago

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illwrks 2y ago

My personal opinion is that social media is an absolute poison. The internet is an amazing way of connecting disparate people who perhaps don’t have many connections in their immediate community, but as social media has grown those excessive ‘insane’ users are distorting it for everyone - if I was to think of an analogy, going for Sunday lunch in a pub, but you’ve got one table who are absolute alcoholics ruining the experience for everyone else, they invite some patrons from other tables to have a drink and join their group but it’s still a mess of a party, and terrible for everyone else. It’s not going to be easy to put controls in place without being oppressive and draconian, and therefore the poison will spread as more and more people join the communities, even more so as older less ‘switched on’ people join.