[HN Gopher] Social media distorts perceptions of norms (2024)
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Social media distorts perceptions of norms (2024)
Author : TaurenHunter
Score : 99 points
Date : 2025-01-05 09:10 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (osf.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (osf.io)
| Narciss wrote:
| Interesting. My social media use is very sparse, and some of my
| reasons are echoed in the article.
| fldskfjdslkfj wrote:
| I hope the U16 ban in Australia works and more countries adopt
| that approach.
| yakshaving_jgt wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| ??? Where did all this come from?
| harimau777 wrote:
| In my experience, the extremism comes from those who are
| sucked into conservative media no longer adapting to social
| changes.
|
| Previously, when some new social shift occurred there would
| be an initial conservative backlash. However, over time as
| people were exposed to the change they would see that it
| wasn't actually the end of the world and find ways to adapt
| their views to find a "new normal" that allowed the old and
| new to coexist.
|
| That doesn't seem like it's the case anymore. People are
| fed a constant stream of media designed to keep them afraid
| of anything that's different such that they don't have a
| chance to experience the other side and find a middle
| ground.
| yakshaving_jgt wrote:
| I've heard people from my parents' generation argue in
| favour of allowing all of my friends to die.
|
| Seems pretty extreme to me.
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| A cursory glance at the history of youths tells anyone that it
| won't
| fldskfjdslkfj wrote:
| 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.
| flyinglizard wrote:
| 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.
| ohmy987 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| You're on social media right now fwiw
| averageRoyalty wrote:
| Are they? Personally (and I know many others agree with
| this) I wouldn't class BBS', forums, an online guestbook,
| Steam etc as 'social media'. I can't quite qualify the
| delineation, but it is there.
| CaptainFever wrote:
| The definition of social media from Oxford is "websites
| and applications that enable users to create and share
| content or to participate in social networking". I think
| that describes HN. We participate in social networking on
| this website, and we can share content, and create
| content (in the form of comments, Show HNs, etc).
|
| Personally, and this is a bit of a "hot take", but I
| think some people trying to define a difference is just
| trying to justify continue using HN and forums like
| Reddit while still hating on social media or wanting it
| banned. To be consistent with getting off social media, I
| think one ought to get off HN and Reddit completely as
| well (use a site blocker extension). But yeah this is a
| bit of an inflammatory opinion, I understand.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| 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).
| gonzo41 wrote:
| Nobody wants their daughter to go search out a make up video
| then after 3 or 4 of those to start getting pro-anorexia
| content because the algorithm knows it drives engagement.
|
| we already know the answer to the ills of social media, the
| better solution would be to force companies to have
| chronological feeds and non algorithmically targeted
| suggestions.
| throw_pm23 wrote:
| This is like saying that smoking and alcohol consumption is
| the future, so better get kids to start doing it as early as
| possible.
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| I think the age should be higher or it should be banned all
| together.
|
| Why? Because the good it adds to society is trivial. You know
| how I know? Because I know plenty of people who do not use it
| and they are getting along just fine. I also know people who
| pretty much do not use the internet outside of work and get
| along fine.
|
| We are told we need these things by people who are selling us
| these things.
|
| And what you are saying is we should teach these kids how to
| live in a horrible, distorted attention economy that is
| warping our social norms to an extreme instead of building
| them a healthy society and economy.
| nkrisc wrote:
| Most people I meet seem to treat online stuff either as mere
| amusement or an annoying thing they need to deal with to get
| done what they need done.
|
| Most people do not live online. They use the Internet because
| they need to (and usually hate it while they do) or simply as
| a tool to communicate or amuse.
|
| They don't care about AI, or federated this and that, or
| about open source, or about walled gardens, or any of that
| sort of stuff.
| richrichie wrote:
| Banning never works.
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Yes, indeed. Age restrictions definitely lessen the harms
| young people can easily get into.
| richrichie wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| you should ask yourself a different question - if we
| legalized murder would this cause uptick in murders or
| not...? :)
| richrichie wrote:
| 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.
| bildung wrote:
| Of course it was, the trick simply was to declare some
| groups to not be human.
| nkrisc wrote:
| Guess we just ought to legalize murder then, since banning it
| hasn't stopped it.
| richrichie wrote:
| If you believe that people do not kill because it is
| illegal, you are on a shaky ground mon ami.
| MrMcCall wrote:
| It's like the military says, "We can't make you do
| something, but we can make you wish you had."
|
| People understanding the negative consequences of
| potential actions is a bedrock of society.
|
| If a person is not amenable to acting out of compassion
| for others, they should at least have a fear of the
| repercussions for being violent towards them.
| yakshaving_jgt wrote:
| I believe that likely criminal punishment is absolutely a
| reason there aren't as many murders as there could be.
| nkrisc wrote:
| I would agree that many (most?) people would not kill
| even if it was legal. But not all.
| yakshaving_jgt wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Twitter as X now is very different from the heavily censored
| and woke cesspool it was.
| lm28469 wrote:
| 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
| "pret 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 wrote:
| 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.
| TexanFeller wrote:
| I went on Twitter years ago and almost exclusively followed
| people interested in programming language research,
| functional programming, and various hard sciences - tried to
| stay well away from the political nonsense. A year or two
| later many of those same people started posting as much about
| things like heteronormativity and trans issues as much as
| they did computer science. The authors I followed started
| talking mostly about how JK Rowling is the devil. Such
| discussions aren't what I was there for so I was very
| disappointed that everyone got sucked into the echo chamber
| and spent all their time talking about that instead.
| Twitter/X is optimized for zingers and gotcha responses about
| emotionally charged topics, not thoughtful and nuanced
| discussions about deeper topics. I think in the past it was
| legitimately a left wing echo chamber and now it's Elon's
| echo chamber.
| seethedeaduu wrote:
| Many people in the programming language, functional
| programming, and academic community in general are trans or
| queer themselves so it only makes sense. Especially since
| the hate towards trans people became more public since
| around 2019.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| There are people who hate women and people who hate men on
| Twitter. Which one you perceive to be an issue is more a
| reflection of your sensitivity.
| yakshaving_jgt wrote:
| I really don't care for this insinuation.
|
| I recently created a new YouTube account, and for the first
| few months, YT couldn't work out if I was a Nazi or a
| Communist. I'm neither.
|
| You should not just assume that users are only shown ideas
| they already believe in. Because, that is obviously not true.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| Right, you've been shown ideas that outrage you, (that men
| are bad) and not ideas that you already believe in. Because
| the former stimulates engagement for Twitter.
|
| Yes, there are terrible extremists on Twitter who hate men.
| It's our responsibility not to let that make us believe
| that's the literal truth of the bulk of society.
| yakshaving_jgt wrote:
| > It's our responsibility not to let that make us believe
| that's the literal truth of the bulk of society.
|
| That was literally my argument.
|
| Let's just end this here.
| blueflow wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| greekanalyst wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| ANewFormation wrote:
| The topic is about how people within these subsets of society
| begin to believe the norms of their subset are shared by
| society at large, or in other words - by people outside their
| subset.
| bloomingkales wrote:
| A bubble. Interestingly enough, we sit and talk in an
| _incubator_ (thats what YT is). How can we really assess the
| situation from our own bubble? If we really want to be
| objective here. We 're just as bat shit as society at large.
|
| Social media pretty much abused every generation. Truly a
| class action lawsuit is in order, if we only had the courage.
| CaptainFever wrote:
| > Social media pretty much abused every generation.
|
| That's a pretty extreme viewpoint, no?
| motorest wrote:
| > The topic is about how people within these subsets of
| society begin to believe the norms of their subset are shared
| by society at large, or in other words - by people outside
| their subset.
|
| Again, I think that's just a failure to frame the problem.
| Norms originate and develop organically within communities.
| If you have online communities that develop their own norms,
| and that community does not have a perfect 1-to-1
| correspondence with other communities, such as your work or
| your local bar scene, then you're bound to stumble upon
| people who don't share them even though they are apart of
| other communities shared by you.
|
| The same applies if you replace "online community" with
| "work", "bar scene", "school board", etc.
|
| The only aspect that sounds remotely relevant is the online
| nature of said communities, but that's something that exist
| and is already known for decades.
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| There is a difference between false norms and the spectrum of
| norms in a society.
|
| What they are saying is that you do not see the full spectrum
| of norms on social media, so what you are seeing are "false
| norms" and they are the most extreme norms.
|
| Being against slavery was just one norm out of many, but on
| social media all you might have seen was pro-slavery norms.
|
| Social media robs you of your democracy and your voice because
| the algorithms are weigthed for the most attention getting
| extreme voices. And they do this telling you it is the best
| invention ever as they make gobs of money so they can bribe
| politicians to make your life completely worse in every other
| way possible because shareholders.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| >Social media robs you of your democracy and your voice
|
| That has been the case with _any_ form of information
| consumption, including journalism (newspapers).
|
| As Mark Twain (probably) once said: "If you don't read the
| newspaper you're uninformed, if you read the newspaper you're
| misinformed."
|
| The answer has always been to develop and maintain mental
| capacity for critical thinking and form your own opinions
| instead of having someone program you.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Correct, newspapers, television, they all had similar
| problems.
|
| I think the point is social media is larger, more
| encapsulating, more pervasive, more targeted than a
| newspaper or television ever could be.
| rayiner wrote:
| Social media is a huge improvement on people like
| journalists controlling the narrative instead. 2020 was
| basically the last time that sort of information control
| worked. E.g. when journalists suppressed information
| about George Floyd's criminal background and drug use
| because, in their view, it wasn't relevant to the issue.
| That wouldn't have happened just a few years later.
| Kbelicius wrote:
| > when journalists suppressed information about George
| Floyd's criminal background and drug use because, in
| their view, it wasn't relevant to the issue.
|
| Because it isn't relevant? Seems that you think that it
| is relevant, how?
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| "2020 was basically the last time that sort of
| information control worked"
|
| ???
|
| You don't think social media platforms can control the
| flow of information? That is their entire business plan.
| Nothing free about it.
| rayiner wrote:
| They have much less control over it than TV and
| newspapers. TV and newspapers have direct editorial
| control: if they don't publish or say something on air,
| their readers and listeners don't get that information.
|
| Social media platforms don't have direct editorial
| control, only indirect control. They can tweak their
| algorithms to influence the narrative. But the platforms
| are designed to encourage information to go viral, so
| they can only do so much of that.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| The algorithms are automating the editorial control.
|
| But even more so, since they can editorialize down to
| specific people, targeted influence. It is 1000X more
| potent than some joe blow newspaper editor.
| motorest wrote:
| > (...) when journalists suppressed information about
| George Floyd's criminal background and drug use because,
| in their view, it wasn't relevant to the issue.
|
| It wasn't. Police don't have the right to murder people
| indiscriminately just because their record is not
| pristine. I don't know why would compell anyone to claim
| otherwise. Do you?
| binary132 wrote:
| Today's "extreme voices" are tomorrow's "being against
| slavery", depending on who you're talking to.
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| If the algorithm let "being against slavery" be the social
| norm. You see the problem?
| motorest wrote:
| > You see the problem?
|
| Don't you think that having someone's algorithm
| manipulate what should and should not be accepted by a
| community is something extremely dangerous?
| motorest wrote:
| > What they are saying is that you do not see the full
| spectrum of norms on social media, so what you are seeing are
| "false norms" and they are the most extreme norms.
|
| There is no such thing as "false norms". The relativist
| framing of social norms is already something that's
| completely wrong and proven to be the result of projection
| and attempts to frame minority groups as being wrong just for
| being different. There are only different communities, each
| with their own social norms. That's very basic human
| behavior.
|
| > Being against slavery was just one norm out of many, but on
| social media all you might have seen was pro-slavery norms.
|
| No. You might see communities that, being communities, share
| their norms and core principles. You have cooking communities
| what develop very strong opinions on how to cook a specific
| dish. You have sports communities developing strong opinions
| on what it means to play a sports the right way. You have
| political communities developing strong opinions on specific
| political topics. I mean, aren't political parties explicitly
| communities that develop their particular opinions on
| political topics in ways that contrast with other political
| parties?
|
| Communities develop their own social norms organically, and
| the more insulated they are the more striking are the
| differences. Is this surprising?
| DiscourseFan wrote:
| I saw some headline the other day about an Elon Musk tweet
| where he claims that humans are evolving to be born via
| c-section only as our heads are getting to big to be passed
| naturally through a womb. Queue numerous reddit comments saying
| Musk is so stupid, insane, racist, etc. all with many upvotes.
| I search and find Reddit posts from about 10 years ago making
| the same claim about c-section births, and there are many
| comments saying yes that makes a lot of sense, all with many
| upvotes relative to the size of the community back then.
|
| I just find the whole thing kind of ridiculous. I know people,
| probably at one point intelligent people, who are addicted to
| twitter, reddit, facebook etc. and always have the unnuanced
| opinion of whatever their online in-group believes. Thus its
| remarkable to me that Trump won seemingly by both calling one
| group's dogma into question, while simultaneously endorsing
| another's.
| svachalek wrote:
| Your last sentence is confusing, as you seem to understand
| the nature of online dogma wars and are then surprised by
| their natural conclusion.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| It's normal and logical for the same information to be met
| with different levels of skepticism based on the reputation
| of the source.
| motorest wrote:
| > I search and find Reddit posts from about 10 years ago
| making the same claim about c-section births, and there are
| many comments saying yes that makes a lot of sense (...)
|
| If you search hard enough, you will find many comments
| describing Yeti's anatomy in detail. What exactly do you
| think your point is? That what represents a moron now and a
| decade ago still holds true?
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| > a bias that a specific norm should be the reigning one and
| anything that differs from it is "distorted"
|
| Modern _social-media business_ has only a short history of
| operating within stable societies. It is not in of itself a
| society of any sort. It is a business. Its product has known
| problems with violent extremism. There certainly are "norms"
| within extremist groups. You probably don't want them anywhere
| near your family and friends.
|
| Violence is bad, and so are stalking, defamation, death
| threats, and disinformation/propaganda. In Real Society, there
| are consequences for these things.
| motorest wrote:
| > Modern social-media business has only a short history of
| operating within stable societies. It is not in of itself a
| society of any sort.
|
| That's simply false. Check the textbook definition of
| "society" and check how online communities operate to see how
| all your arguments are based on an assumption that's
| fundamentally wrong.
| hunglee2 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| For those who didn't get the reference, it's from the movie
| "American Psycho".
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Psycho
| HPsquared wrote:
| A defining part of our age is that social media gave everyone a
| huge number of alternative social groups.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| This is not at all what they are talking about. You are talking
| about changing norms, they are talking about false norms.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Norms are norms, not true or false, just more or less aligned
| to prosperity.
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| What they are saying is that social media norms do not
| reflect social norms, thus they are false norms.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Sure, same with TV and News Media. It's outliers of
| interest all the way down.
| ddmma wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 (Barbera & 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 wrote:
| 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/
|
| [1] 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Space Age was an unofficial mod for Factorio long before
| Factorio 2 was released, so those reviews weren't entirely made
| up.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| No it wasn't. That is Space Exploration, and it's wildly
| different.
| HPsquared wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| ..
| xtiansimon wrote:
| "...some types of people post more than others..."
|
| And some types of modern situations make certain types of
| people. I'm thinking about people who use financial services
| and didn't get their revenue, or "unlimited", "forever"
| services which are not, innocently used cloud services with
| astronomical bills, DCMA takedown for your own content--take
| your pick, add your own.
|
| Infuriated people with no recourse will talk and rant,
| because it's free and feels like taking some of your dignity
| back.
| notnaut wrote:
| Quite a few subreddits have flairs applied automatically to
| comments that show "top 10/5/1% commenter" and by and large
| commenters who are in the thick of the conversation have those
| flairs.
| TexanFeller wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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?
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