4 ms·

Americans overestimate how many social media users post harmful content

32 points by bikenaga 10mo ago

bikenaga 10mo ago
Abstract: "Americans can become more cynical about the state of society when they see harmful behavior online. Three studies of the American public (n = 1,090) revealed that they consistently and substantially overestimated how many social media users contribute to harmful behavior online. On average, they believed that 43% of all Reddit users have posted severely toxic comments and that 47% of all Facebook users have shared false news online. In reality, platform-level data shows that most of these forms of harmful content are produced by small but highly active groups of users (3–7%). This misperception was robust to different thresholds of harmful content classification. An experiment revealed that overestimating the proportion of social media users who post harmful content makes people feel more negative emotion, perceive the United States to be in greater moral decline, and cultivate distorted perceptions of what others want to see on social media. However, these effects can be mitigated through a targeted educational intervention that corrects this misperception. Together, our findings highlight a mechanism that helps explain how people's perceptions and interactions with social media may undermine social cohesion."
- daveguy 10mo ago
  Ahhhh. So maybe it's the platforms and their algorithms promoting harmful content for attention that are to blame? And how many of the platforms want to even admit the content they are pushing is "harmful"? Seems like two elephant sized sources of error.
  - exceptione 10mo ago
    Open youtube in a fresh browser profile behind a vpn. More than 90% of the recommended videos in the sidebar are right-wing trash like covid-conspiracies, nut-jobs sprouting Kremlin nonsense, alt-right shows. Baseline is in the end anti-democracy and anti-truth. And Google is heavily pushing for that. The same for Twitter. They are not stupid, if they know you and they think they should push you in a more subtle way then they aren't going to bombard you with Tucker Carlson. Don't ever think the tech oligarchy is "neutral". Just a platform, yeah right.
    - decremental 10mo ago
      [dead]
    - bdangubic 10mo ago
      > Baseline is in the end anti-democracy and anti-truth. And Google is heavily pushing for that. Google et al do not give a hoot about being “left” or “right” - they only care about profit. Zuck tattooed rainbow flag while Biden was President and is currently macho-man crusader. If Youtube can make money from videos about peace and prosperity that’s what you’d see behind the VPN. since no one watches that shit you get Tucker
      - deleted 10mo ago
        [deleted]
      - freejazz 10mo ago
        > Zuck tattooed rainbow flag while Biden was President and is currently macho-man crusader. If Funny how you say this but insist you're not the one being fooled right now!
        bdangubic 10mo ago
        fooled in what way? I don’t use youtube or any social media since 2019-ish. last time I saw anything on youtube in probably 2018-ish (othercthan my kid showing me volleyball highlights :) )
        freejazz 10mo ago
        Well you just posted, telling someone else what Zuck's political interests might be, based upon what even you described as meaningless performative behavior.
      - exceptione 10mo ago
        > they only care about profit via their preferred business model: no competition, no market. Their best bet is the right. And since the right's agenda is objectively antithetical to the people's interest, they need to create smokescreens with bullshit. That is exactly what is being pushed here. They are happy with "left" politicians as long as they buy into the false narratives, and as long as they are willing to play along with their monopolist playbooks.
  - Me1000 10mo ago
    The premise of this study is a bit misguided, imho. I have absolutely no idea how many people _post_ harmful content. But we have a lot of data that suggests a _lot_ of people consume harmful content. Most users don't post much of anything at all on most social media platforms.
  - darth_avocado 10mo ago
    Isn’t that how news works? Sensational stuff sells, so you only see the extremes. Pretty much the same with social media. Rage = engage
  - skybrian 10mo ago
    Saying it's "algorithms" trivializes the problem. Even on reasonable platforms, trolls often get more upvotes, reshares, and replies. The users are actively trying to promote the bad stuff as well as the good stuff.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
tsunamifury 10mo ago
any basic nodal theory will help you understand its not about how many who post, its about their reach and correlations with viewership of overall graph. A few bad apples, spoil the whole bunch is illustrated to an extreme in any nodal graph or community. So it's more about how much toxic content is pushed, not how much is produced. At an extreme a node can be connected to 100% of other nodes and be the only toxic node, yet also make the entire system toxic.
bongodongobob 10mo ago
Isn't this just saying they are bad at estimating? It's not like any of these people did any rigorous studies to come to their conclusion.
Apreche 10mo ago
This is one of those studies that presents evidence confirming what many people already know. The majority of the bad content comes from a small number of very toxic and very active users (and bots). This creates the illusion that a large number of people overall are toxic, and only those who are in deep already recognize the truth. It is also why moderation is so effective. You only have to ban a small number of bad actors to create a rather nice online space. And of course, this is why for-profit platforms are loathe to properly moderate. A social network that bans the trolls would be like a casino banning the whales or a bar banning the alcoholics.
- didgetmaster 10mo ago
  It is very much like crime in general. The vast majority of crimes committed each year are by a tiny minority of people. Criminals often have a rap sheet as long as your arm; while a huge percentage of the population has never had a run-in with the law except for a few traffic or parking tickets. While crime is definitely a major problem, especially in big cities; it only takes a few news stories to convince some people that almost everyone is out to get them.
- SchemaLoad 10mo ago
  One of the best things platforms started doing is showing the account country of origin. Telegram started doing this this year using the users phone number country code when they cold DM you. When I see a random DM from my country, I respond. When I see it's from Nigeria, Russia, USA, etc I ignore it. It's almost 100% effective at highlighting scammers and bots. IMO all social media should show a little flag next to usernames showing where the comment is coming from.
  - BoiledCabbage 10mo ago
    Yes, but as soon as scammers find their current methods ineffective they will swap to VPN and find a way to get "in country" phone numbers. There is a fundamental problem with large scale anonymous (non-verified) online interaction. Particularly in a system where engagement is valued. Even verified isn't much better if it's large scale and you push for engagement. There are always outliers in the world. In their community they are well know as outliers and most communities don't have anyone that extreme. Online every outlier is now your neighbor. And to others that "normalizes" outlier behaviors. It pushes everyone to the poles. Either encouraged by more extreme versions of people like them, or repelled by more extreme versions of people they oppose. And that's before you get to the intentional propaganda.
ggm 10mo ago
If more people were obligated to undergo KYC to get posting rights, Less people would be able to objectively claim to be other than they are. If more channels were subject to moderation, and moderators incurred penalty for their failure, channels would be significantly more circumspect in what they permitted to be said. Free speech reductionists: Not interested.
- JuniperMesos 10mo ago
  Man, I'm against existing American KYC laws in the context of transferring money. I certainly don't want to see them expanded to posting online.
- RiverCrochet 10mo ago
  KYC should work both ways. If a social media network needs to know my real name and address, I should know the real name and address of everyone running the social media network.
  - ggm 10mo ago
    Seems fair.
  - ashtakeaway 10mo ago
    It's a good idea for it to work both ways in case doxxing happens. I'm against KYC by any business from a security perspective: my PII shouldn't be available to criminals.
- juggerlt 10mo ago
  Hi. Are we posting from Eglin or Tel Aviv today?
  - ggm 10mo ago
    Australia. The land of the VPN nowadays.
    - 10mo ago
AuthAuth 10mo ago
Isnt it still an accurate perception of moral decline? Even if its only 3% sharing misinfo and toxic posts its still 47% that is sharing them, commenting on them and interacting positively with them. This gives the in my opinion correct perception that there is moral decline.
- RiverCrochet 10mo ago
  You have to eliminate this counterpoint for the evidence to fully support your perception: people share stuff on social media because it's easier and actively encouraged. Here's the counterpoint to that though: people share stuff on social media not just because it's easy, but because of the egocentric idea that "if I like this, I matter to the world." The egocentricism (and your so-called moral decline) started way earlier than that, though-it goes back to the 1990s when talk shows became the dominant morning and afternoon program in the TV days. Modern social media is simply Jerry Springer on sterioids.
- cosmic_cheese 10mo ago
  It doesn't indicate moral decay at all. It just confirms what we already know about the human psyche being vulnerable to certain types of content and interactions. The species has always had a natural inclination towards gossip, drama, intrigue, outrage, etc. It only looks like "decline" because we didn't used to give random people looking to exploit those weaknesses a stage, spotlight, and megaphone.
ok123456 10mo ago
This is intentional: make people think there's nothing online except harmful content, and propose a regulatory solution, which creates a barrier to entry. It's "meta" trying to stop any insurgent network.
- goalieca 10mo ago
  It’s also meta overstating the power of influence. Why would they do that? Because it’s good marketing for them to sell a story around how their services running ads can be used for highly effective mass influence.
  - ok123456 10mo ago
    Yes, like the "Cambridge Analytica scandal." The "scandal" was people using their ad marketplace tools and a 100-line Python script to "hack" a presidential election. Also, the "Russian Election Interference" aka someone doing a $50k ad buy and "hacking" the presidential election.
- energy123 10mo ago
  These academics are being bribed by Meta? What are you implying here?
  - ok123456 10mo ago
    There are plenty of sychophantic academics who will do anything to advance their career. Take a look at Alex "Lex" Fridman.
JuniperMesos 10mo ago
> When US-Americans go on social media, how many of their fellow citizens do they expect to post harmful content? Just because an American citizen sees something psoted on social media in English, it doesn't mean that it was a fellow American citizen who posted it. There are many other major and minor Anglophone countries, and English is probably the most widely spoken second language in the history of humanity. Not to mention that even if someone does live in America and speak English and post online, they are not necessarily a US citizen.
barfoure 10mo ago
Turns out the kids are alright after all!
makeitdouble 10mo ago
This study seems to be playing with what toxicity means. Is the 43% cited at the top of the piece matching the same criteria they use for digging deeper in the study ? Their specific definition of toxicity is in the supplementary material, and honestly I don't think it matches the spectrum of what people perceive as toxic in general: > The study looked at how many of these Reddit accounts posted toxic comments. These were mostly comments containing insults, identity-based attacks, profanity, threats, or sexual harassment. That's basically very direct, ad hominem comments. and example cited: > DONT CUT AWAY FROM THE GAME YOU FUCKING FUCK FUCKS! Also why judge Reddit on toxicity but not fake news or any other social trait peolple care about ? I'm not sure what's the valuable takeaway from this study, only 3% of reddit users will straight insult you ?
- glitchc 10mo ago
  Profanity is toxic by definition? Since when?
energy123 10mo ago
Bad content being shoved in our face is a symptom of the real problem, which is bad mechanics. Solutions that reform the mechanics (e.g. require a chronological feed instead of boosting by likes) are going to be more effective, less divisive, neutral by design, and politically/legally easier to implement.

32 points by bikenaga 10mo ago

Abstract: "Americans can become more cynical about the state of society when they see harmful behavior online. Three studies of the American public (n = 1,090) revealed that they consistently and substantially overestimated how many social media users contribute to harmful behavior online. On average, they believed that 43% of all Reddit users have posted severely toxic comments and that 47% of all Facebook users have shared false news online. In reality, platform-level data shows that most of these forms of harmful content are produced by small but highly active groups of users (3–7%). This misperception was robust to different thresholds of harmful content classification. An experiment revealed that overestimating the proportion of social media users who post harmful content makes people feel more negative emotion, perceive the United States to be in greater moral decline, and cultivate distorted perceptions of what others want to see on social media. However, these effects can be mitigated through a targeted educational intervention that corrects this misperception. Together, our findings highlight a mechanism that helps explain how people's perceptions and interactions with social media may undermine social cohesion."

daveguy 10mo ago
Ahhhh. So maybe it's the platforms and their algorithms promoting harmful content for attention that are to blame? And how many of the platforms want to even admit the content they are pushing is "harmful"? Seems like two elephant sized sources of error.
- exceptione 10mo ago
  Open youtube in a fresh browser profile behind a vpn. More than 90% of the recommended videos in the sidebar are right-wing trash like covid-conspiracies, nut-jobs sprouting Kremlin nonsense, alt-right shows. Baseline is in the end anti-democracy and anti-truth. And Google is heavily pushing for that. The same for Twitter. They are not stupid, if they know you and they think they should push you in a more subtle way then they aren't going to bombard you with Tucker Carlson. Don't ever think the tech oligarchy is "neutral". Just a platform, yeah right.
  - decremental 10mo ago
    [dead]
  - bdangubic 10mo ago
    > Baseline is in the end anti-democracy and anti-truth. And Google is heavily pushing for that. Google et al do not give a hoot about being “left” or “right” - they only care about profit. Zuck tattooed rainbow flag while Biden was President and is currently macho-man crusader. If Youtube can make money from videos about peace and prosperity that’s what you’d see behind the VPN. since no one watches that shit you get Tucker
    - deleted 10mo ago
      [deleted]
    - freejazz 10mo ago
      > Zuck tattooed rainbow flag while Biden was President and is currently macho-man crusader. If Funny how you say this but insist you're not the one being fooled right now!
      - bdangubic 10mo ago
        fooled in what way? I don’t use youtube or any social media since 2019-ish. last time I saw anything on youtube in probably 2018-ish (othercthan my kid showing me volleyball highlights :) )
        freejazz 10mo ago
        Well you just posted, telling someone else what Zuck's political interests might be, based upon what even you described as meaningless performative behavior.
    - exceptione 10mo ago
      > they only care about profit via their preferred business model: no competition, no market. Their best bet is the right. And since the right's agenda is objectively antithetical to the people's interest, they need to create smokescreens with bullshit. That is exactly what is being pushed here. They are happy with "left" politicians as long as they buy into the false narratives, and as long as they are willing to play along with their monopolist playbooks.
- Me1000 10mo ago
  The premise of this study is a bit misguided, imho. I have absolutely no idea how many people _post_ harmful content. But we have a lot of data that suggests a _lot_ of people consume harmful content. Most users don't post much of anything at all on most social media platforms.
- darth_avocado 10mo ago
  Isn’t that how news works? Sensational stuff sells, so you only see the extremes. Pretty much the same with social media. Rage = engage
- skybrian 10mo ago
  Saying it's "algorithms" trivializes the problem. Even on reasonable platforms, trolls often get more upvotes, reshares, and replies. The users are actively trying to promote the bad stuff as well as the good stuff.
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

tsunamifury 10mo ago

any basic nodal theory will help you understand its not about how many who post, its about their reach and correlations with viewership of overall graph. A few bad apples, spoil the whole bunch is illustrated to an extreme in any nodal graph or community. So it's more about how much toxic content is pushed, not how much is produced. At an extreme a node can be connected to 100% of other nodes and be the only toxic node, yet also make the entire system toxic.

bongodongobob 10mo ago

Isn't this just saying they are bad at estimating? It's not like any of these people did any rigorous studies to come to their conclusion.

Apreche 10mo ago

This is one of those studies that presents evidence confirming what many people already know. The majority of the bad content comes from a small number of very toxic and very active users (and bots). This creates the illusion that a large number of people overall are toxic, and only those who are in deep already recognize the truth. It is also why moderation is so effective. You only have to ban a small number of bad actors to create a rather nice online space. And of course, this is why for-profit platforms are loathe to properly moderate. A social network that bans the trolls would be like a casino banning the whales or a bar banning the alcoholics.

didgetmaster 10mo ago
It is very much like crime in general. The vast majority of crimes committed each year are by a tiny minority of people. Criminals often have a rap sheet as long as your arm; while a huge percentage of the population has never had a run-in with the law except for a few traffic or parking tickets. While crime is definitely a major problem, especially in big cities; it only takes a few news stories to convince some people that almost everyone is out to get them.
SchemaLoad 10mo ago
One of the best things platforms started doing is showing the account country of origin. Telegram started doing this this year using the users phone number country code when they cold DM you. When I see a random DM from my country, I respond. When I see it's from Nigeria, Russia, USA, etc I ignore it. It's almost 100% effective at highlighting scammers and bots. IMO all social media should show a little flag next to usernames showing where the comment is coming from.
- BoiledCabbage 10mo ago
  Yes, but as soon as scammers find their current methods ineffective they will swap to VPN and find a way to get "in country" phone numbers. There is a fundamental problem with large scale anonymous (non-verified) online interaction. Particularly in a system where engagement is valued. Even verified isn't much better if it's large scale and you push for engagement. There are always outliers in the world. In their community they are well know as outliers and most communities don't have anyone that extreme. Online every outlier is now your neighbor. And to others that "normalizes" outlier behaviors. It pushes everyone to the poles. Either encouraged by more extreme versions of people like them, or repelled by more extreme versions of people they oppose. And that's before you get to the intentional propaganda.

ggm 10mo ago

If more people were obligated to undergo KYC to get posting rights, Less people would be able to objectively claim to be other than they are. If more channels were subject to moderation, and moderators incurred penalty for their failure, channels would be significantly more circumspect in what they permitted to be said. Free speech reductionists: Not interested.

JuniperMesos 10mo ago
Man, I'm against existing American KYC laws in the context of transferring money. I certainly don't want to see them expanded to posting online.
RiverCrochet 10mo ago
KYC should work both ways. If a social media network needs to know my real name and address, I should know the real name and address of everyone running the social media network.
- ggm 10mo ago
  Seems fair.
- ashtakeaway 10mo ago
  It's a good idea for it to work both ways in case doxxing happens. I'm against KYC by any business from a security perspective: my PII shouldn't be available to criminals.
juggerlt 10mo ago
Hi. Are we posting from Eglin or Tel Aviv today?
- ggm 10mo ago
  Australia. The land of the VPN nowadays.
  - 10mo ago

AuthAuth 10mo ago

Isnt it still an accurate perception of moral decline? Even if its only 3% sharing misinfo and toxic posts its still 47% that is sharing them, commenting on them and interacting positively with them. This gives the in my opinion correct perception that there is moral decline.

RiverCrochet 10mo ago
You have to eliminate this counterpoint for the evidence to fully support your perception: people share stuff on social media because it's easier and actively encouraged. Here's the counterpoint to that though: people share stuff on social media not just because it's easy, but because of the egocentric idea that "if I like this, I matter to the world." The egocentricism (and your so-called moral decline) started way earlier than that, though-it goes back to the 1990s when talk shows became the dominant morning and afternoon program in the TV days. Modern social media is simply Jerry Springer on sterioids.
cosmic_cheese 10mo ago
It doesn't indicate moral decay at all. It just confirms what we already know about the human psyche being vulnerable to certain types of content and interactions. The species has always had a natural inclination towards gossip, drama, intrigue, outrage, etc. It only looks like "decline" because we didn't used to give random people looking to exploit those weaknesses a stage, spotlight, and megaphone.

ok123456 10mo ago

This is intentional: make people think there's nothing online except harmful content, and propose a regulatory solution, which creates a barrier to entry. It's "meta" trying to stop any insurgent network.

goalieca 10mo ago
It’s also meta overstating the power of influence. Why would they do that? Because it’s good marketing for them to sell a story around how their services running ads can be used for highly effective mass influence.
- ok123456 10mo ago
  Yes, like the "Cambridge Analytica scandal." The "scandal" was people using their ad marketplace tools and a 100-line Python script to "hack" a presidential election. Also, the "Russian Election Interference" aka someone doing a $50k ad buy and "hacking" the presidential election.
energy123 10mo ago
These academics are being bribed by Meta? What are you implying here?
- ok123456 10mo ago
  There are plenty of sychophantic academics who will do anything to advance their career. Take a look at Alex "Lex" Fridman.

JuniperMesos 10mo ago

> When US-Americans go on social media, how many of their fellow citizens do they expect to post harmful content? Just because an American citizen sees something psoted on social media in English, it doesn't mean that it was a fellow American citizen who posted it. There are many other major and minor Anglophone countries, and English is probably the most widely spoken second language in the history of humanity. Not to mention that even if someone does live in America and speak English and post online, they are not necessarily a US citizen.

barfoure 10mo ago

Turns out the kids are alright after all!

makeitdouble 10mo ago

This study seems to be playing with what toxicity means. Is the 43% cited at the top of the piece matching the same criteria they use for digging deeper in the study ? Their specific definition of toxicity is in the supplementary material, and honestly I don't think it matches the spectrum of what people perceive as toxic in general: > The study looked at how many of these Reddit accounts posted toxic comments. These were mostly comments containing insults, identity-based attacks, profanity, threats, or sexual harassment. That's basically very direct, ad hominem comments. and example cited: > DONT CUT AWAY FROM THE GAME YOU FUCKING FUCK FUCKS! Also why judge Reddit on toxicity but not fake news or any other social trait peolple care about ? I'm not sure what's the valuable takeaway from this study, only 3% of reddit users will straight insult you ?

glitchc 10mo ago
Profanity is toxic by definition? Since when?

energy123 10mo ago

Bad content being shoved in our face is a symptom of the real problem, which is bad mechanics. Solutions that reform the mechanics (e.g. require a chronological feed instead of boosting by likes) are going to be more effective, less divisive, neutral by design, and politically/legally easier to implement.