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.
I guess the bigger question is why people come to the opposite conclusion.
It has to do with the rise in rightwing "populism" which is founded on the morality story that people are inherently toxic and bad and must be violently oppressed by righteous force to create society.
This story is being firehosed at people by the rich in a million ways and people are largely uncritically accepting it. If you want to understand it, look at how in the US people have become convinced society is becoming more violent, people are becoming less trustable, and that crime is increasing year over year. If you look at the evidence, it points in the opposite direction except for a brief spike of crime during Covid, but who cares about reality? The story of everybody becoming more depraved and scary is a good one and it gets us engaged, why talk about hard numbers and policy?