Inside the Funhouse Mirror Factory, a research review in Current Opinion in Psychology. So maybe we shouldn't believe our eyes. We have to have our perceptions warped by this to some extent. "When people stare into the mirror they do not see a true version of reality, but instead one that has been distorted by a small but vocal minority of extreme outliers whose opinions create illusory norms."
Online discussions are dominated by a surprisingly small, extremely vocal, and non-representative minority. Research on social media has found that, while only 3 % of active accounts are toxic, they produce 33 % of all content Furthermore, 74 % of all online conflicts are started in just 1 % of communities, and 0.1 % of users shared 80 % of fake news. Not only does this extreme minority stir discontent, spread misinformation, and spark outrage online, they also bias the meta-perceptions of most users who passively “lurk” online. This can lead to false polarization and pluralistic ignorance, which are linked to a number of problems including drug and alcohol use, intergroup hostility, and support for authoritarian regimes. Furthermore, exposure to extreme content can normalize unhealthy and dangerous behavior. For example, teens exposed to extreme content related to alcohol consumption thought dangerous alcohol consumption was normative.
Via Nathan Witkin at Arachne magazine in The Leviathan, the Hand, and the Maelstrom , a reply to Dan Williams, who we just saw in Contra Critical Theory. (The reply was to a different article by Dan.) It's long and I gave up, but he includes a TL;DR at the top.
Sounds like the Althouse comment section
ReplyDeleteI get the point here, but I’m not sure it’s as comforting to me as I once would have hoped. The angry one percent has disproportionate influence over content creation, and their narratives seep in to mainstream “calm” content at high rates. Even the stories themselves are being picked by the 1% now, because they reliably click and share. In what world was a high school kid smiling at a native banging a drum ever WaPo worthy?
ReplyDeleteI think I was hoping to be more cautionary than comforting. Be aware that we may have been influenced to believe that the world is against us, when it is only a small but efficiently exploitive minority.
ReplyDeleteFair. I think I'm still overly shaded by recent local events, where I absolutely know it was only a small minority who got really in to things, but where I have spent countless hours trying to convince dozens of less involved people that most of what they've heard is basically just AI hallucinations. Each of them is convinced there is no way they could have heard something so often without it being true. The 1% can do a lot of damage.
ReplyDeleteWhich reminds me we should make sure to flip your statement. We ourselves might also be listening to the 1% without realizing it.