Social media distorts perceptions of norms (2024)
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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.
>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...
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.
[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.)
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.
Social media pretty much abused every generation. Truly a class action lawsuit is in order, if we only had the courage.
That's a pretty extreme viewpoint, no?
But it's not like cocaine became worse over time - it still had all the harmful and addictive characteristics that cocaine is known for.
And so it was eventually banned because it was indeed 'abusing each generation.' The point I make is that something can gave beneficial and desirable characteristics, yet if the negatives are sufficiently large, then those positives are mostly irrelevant.
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.
So the curiosity is when people hold fringe views that they begin to think are normal.
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.
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.
I think the point is social media is larger, more encapsulating, more pervasive, more targeted than a newspaper or television ever could be.
Don't you think that having someone's algorithm manipulate what should and should not be accepted by a community is something extremely dangerous?
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
The internet is an amazing way of connecting disparate people who perhaps don’t have many connections in their immediate community, but as social media has grown those excessive ‘insane’ users are distorting it for everyone - if I was to think of an analogy, going for Sunday lunch in a pub, but you’ve got one table who are absolute alcoholics ruining the experience for everyone else, they invite some patrons from other tables to have a drink and join their group but it’s still a mess of a party, and terrible for everyone else.
It’s not going to be easy to put controls in place without being oppressive and draconian, and therefore the poison will spread as more and more people join the communities, even more so as older less ‘switched on’ people join.
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.
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).
Somebody should write a study to show the correlation between the pension funds getting bigger and bigger and the number of companies getting in/out of the the S&P500 or Dow Jones getting lower and lower over time. That second number getting lower and lower means less innovation, means less real wealth going into the future, means less real money for people who are now in their 30s and 40s.
I’d say that many of the NIMBY policies also respect that premise, i.e. government-supported decisions that help keep the wealth among the elderly by (artificially) keeping the existing home prices up (and it is known that those houses are some of the most important assets that said elderly people own).
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.
Seems pretty extreme to me.
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.
If you take that time period out, there is no decrease from the start of the war on drugs till the first iPhone in youth use of drugs.
Lastly, you forgot all these big companies started off as small, hard to regulate websites, which will be where kids flock to avoid 'teen accounts' and 'bans' and everything else
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.
"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.
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.
That being said, voting mechanisms which change the order of user-contributed content is hallmark of social media shared by Hacker News. I like to think, though, that this place has a strong enough community to prevent the voting dynamics from devolving to what you see on the most politicized subreddits. (I'll mention that the quality on here is in no small part the result of dang's diligent moderation, btw!)
An interesting message board to compare Hacker News with in this regard is actually 4chan. The former is maybe less social media like inasmuch as we have no inline images here, so there is no room for the sort of meme culture you see on the latter. On the other hand, 4chan is entirely bereft of voting (and even accounts to assign karma to, although reusable tripcodes come the closest), and as such is in some ways even more egalitarian (in contrast to non-anonymous social media).
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).
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.
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.
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.
Point: We have banned murder, which obviously does not work perfectly.
If you believe that people do not kill because it is illegal, you are on a shaky ground.
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.
there is no nuance - if you made murder legal there would be A TON of murders, it is that simple (I personally might pop a cap in couple of people that have wronged people I love)
This is an assumption.
> it is that simple (I personally might pop a cap in couple of people that have wronged people I love)
I dont think so. I will bet good money that you don not have what it takes to kill. Most people do not.
of course it is an assumption (lets keep it that way :) )
The supposition that there are significant number of murderers walking among us that would not murder because it is illegal has no basis.
btw this is an assumption too :)
I will bet good money that you don not have what it takes to kill. Most people do not.
you are forgetting that humans by their very nature are animals... and also predators. you are thinking about a little more civilized humans, your Mom and Pop in Boise, Idaho. in large parts of this Earth human life is expendable - civilized places have laws in place to ensure this be the case. I am certainly not saying that if you legalize murder we'd all start shooting each other but there is a much better change that happens than that "most people won't have what it takes..."
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.
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.
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.
Neither of these are an accurate representation of society.
Although I guess this is slowly changing with new generations, I've noticed more and more people spewing their social medias's "prêt 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
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.
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.
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.
That was literally my argument.
Let’s just end this here.
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.
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
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.
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 (Barberá & 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.