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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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 :) )
Well you just posted, telling someone else what Zuck's political interests might be, based upon what even you described as meaningless performative behavior.
