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.
Great link! The anti-humanist tilt the toxicity of rightwing owned corporate social media has caused in people is alarming. People don't listen when you point out structural reasons for the toxicity that are results of active choices of the platform owners (they are too wrapped up in emotional reactions to toxic users to focus on the broader system causing it) and it scares me because it is beginning to make people turn even more towards a cynical future and isolate in private bubbles that are only more vulnerable to structural forces of toxicity trying to make us feel cornered and alone.
I don't think it is any coincidence this is happening, it just makes me deeply sad. When people pull back from seeing a positive potential in social media they completely surrender the capacity to hear narratives that challenge the structures of power around them because the only way they will then hear about the broader world is through established corporate news channels which are literally no less toxic than social media anyways even though people ignore this fact.
To give one specific example, if people weren't on social media they wouldn't know about the Palestinian Genocide, it was completely and thoroughly sweeped under the rug in the channels that people have retreated to from social media because "social media = bad" and if that doesn't scare you, you are an idiot.
This article is super helpful as a reality check for people lost in cynical reductive narratives about humans on social media, thank you!