I can’t abide an unnecessary question hed.
When I scroll through social media, I often leave demoralized, with the sense that the entire world is on fire and people are inflamed with hatred towards one another. Yet, when I step outside into the streets of New York City to grab a coffee or meet a friend for lunch, it feels downright tranquil. The contrast between the online world and my daily reality has only gotten more jarring.
Since my own work is focused on topics such as intergroup conflict, misinformation, technology and climate change, I’m aware of the many challenges facing humanity. Yet, it seems striking that people online seem to be just as furious about the finale of The White Lotus or the latest scandal involving a YouTuber. Everything is either the best thing ever or the absolute worst, no matter how trivial. Is that really what most of us are feeling? No, as it turns out. Our latest research suggests that what we’re seeing online is a warped image created by a very small group of highly active users.
This is why I think that people should always always treat strangers on the internet exactly the same way as strangers in real life. The sense of anonymity has allowed so many people to distance themselves from their own humanity.
I sure as hell know that if anyone every spoke to me in real life like how half of Twitter does I would never want speak to them again. 😭
If half of any platform were to be rude and/or inappropriate, I’d exit, stage left.
I don’t follow you to your conclusion, though. The way most people treat strangers in the U.S. is basically “when are they going to fuck me over?” We’re less pleasant in meatspace because we expect deceit.
What I do like to see is a continued discussion on how to take back the internet in its current form. The cesspool of online bots and malicious corporate social spaces can be managed or avoided entirely with healthy practices, and yet you never see articles with step-by-step guidelines on how to do this. Instead, articles like this point out a few problems then give up.
Stop using social media entirely or find safe alternatives. Do not engage in online arguments. Control your viewing of political content and tailor your access towards specific trusted sources. Avoid any apps that use scrolling content feeds. Stop using your phone in bed. Lessen your phone use and restrict it to primarily phone calls and texts only.
Platforms could easily redesign their algorithms to stop promoting the most outrageous voices and prioritise more representative or nuanced content.
Corporations are not going to take actions that would benefit your health if it harms their engagement metrics. Bavel missed the mark on how the public should be actively fighting against late-stage capitalism.
Its really not just a few people, its the system of neoliberalism that incentivised these behaviours.
With strong, common sense regulation, the internet would have been a much better place instead of the hell hole we have now.
That’s easy enough to say, but it’s unlikely it would have turned out how you’re envisioning. “Common sense” is not so common, as it turns out.
the sense that the entire world is on fire
Leaving aside the massive literal heatwave and multi-state wildfires and global-warming-accelerated flooding happening just this month and all… we’re literally seeing a campaign of race-based kidnappings and trafficking by the government, the deployment of active duty military personnel in the streets, and a DOJ arguing that the President is not bound by law or court orders.
If you don’t think the world is on at very least metaphorical fire, I don’t know what to tell you, Guardian author. “I can get my coffee in peace without thinking about that stuff” is not some brag.
“I can get my coffee in peace without thinking about that stuff” is not some brag.
bragging about their privilege
Let me tell you how excited I am that we’re getting yet more slow-moving heavy rains.
In a recent series of experiments, we paid people a few dollars to unfollow the most divisive political accounts on X. After a month, they reported feeling 23% less animosity towards other political groups. In fact, their experience was so positive that nearly half the people declined to refollow those hostile accounts after the study was over. And those who maintain their healthier newsfeed reported less animosity a full 11 months after the study.
Found this bit interesting
After a month, they reported feeling 23% less animosity towards other political groups.
This sounds like a call to be willfully ignorant of the serious political shit going down around them. That’s how you get the average idiot who doesn’t understand why voting for a guy like Trump is a bad idea.
You should be fucking angry and have more animosity towards other political groups, or you aren’t paying attention. Nazis should be called out.
No, not in context. They are talking about disimformation like, “using YOUR tax dollars, funded bioweapon research, including Covid-19” from Musk. They say:
A mere 0.1% of users share 80% of fake news. Twelve accounts – known as the “disinformation dozen” – created most of the vaccine misinformation on Facebook during the pandemic. These few hyperactive users produced enough content to create the false perceptions that many people were vaccine hesitant.
So if you cut out the the most divisive political accounts, you will not miss ANY actual news, but are likely to miss a huge pile of disinformation.
So if you cut out the the most divisive political accounts, you will not miss ANY actual news, but are likely to miss a huge pile of disinformation.
No, you just cut out the misinformation. If they are spreading vaccine misinformation on Facebook, fuck them. Cut them out. Never read a thing they put out again.
It’s not about divisiveness. It’s about critical thinking skills.
I am not confident I or most other Americans can always tell what is misinformation. A recent bout of AI generated ‘Am I the A-hole?’ post on reddit recently got a bunch of people angry (Meta would say, ‘highly engaged’) because enough of them though the stories might be true.
When the Fukishima power plant got hit by a tidal wave, I foolishly believed an ‘expert’ on TV that day who said the plant was designed so that lead shielding hoods would automatically cover the rods in the event of power loss. Well THAT didn’t happen. I no longer remember who the ‘expert’ was, so he could fool me again. Maybe he has.
That’s always been the case. Grifters grift, and they have been grifting for thousands of years.
You’re never going to find it 100%, but you can at least go back and blacklist who you have seen to be lying. Reputation is more important than ever. Far too many random strangers have been believing every word from other random strangers. This is why I don’t understand TikTok or other short-form video formats. Why would you take advice from some creator you’ve only seen once?
Mis/disinformation is not the same as “divisive political content”. Political content can be both true, and divisive (e.g. Trump being a pedophile). Conversely, something that is accepted by the majority may still be misinformation, while not be divisive.
Truthfulness determines whether something is misinformation. How much something matches a group’s beliefs determines whether it is divisive: if everyone agreed that the world was flat, that would not be divisive to state, but it would be misinformation.
Conflating them entrenches the perception that the most widely-held, non-“divisive” viewpoint must not be misinformation.
Go check out Truth Social if you want to see what a space where only “non-divisive” (to them) but near-total misinformation looks like.
I agree that as categories, the are different things, just as ‘tools’ are not the same as ‘weapons’, but ignoring the perncious overlap borders on criminal. If you follow actual news sites and reporters but omit the likes of Musk, you will still see Musk quoted, but it is more likely to be properly discredited where needed. At no point does the article suggest you avoid all partisan content, it simply says the most divisive is likely to hurt us all. You know the platforms profit from engagement, so they’ll promote the worst offenders’ content upward, but we don’t have to take that bait.
The accounts with the MOST divisive political content are unlikely to be your best source of information. You might hate Rachel Maddow or Charlie Kirk, but you’'ll be better off getting news from a generic MSNBC or FOX feed than either personality. Better still, pick BBC, Reuters, and AlJazeera to see a variety of views.
A reverse example of context: Project 2025 never explicitly says anything about IVF, but it repeatedly talks about human life “from conception to natural death”, which would mean IVF would be problematic. If you try quoting just the last sentence in this chunk, ‘day one’ might be interpreted as birth, but in context, ‘day one’ is obviously conception:
From the moment of conception, every human being possesses inherent dignity and worth, and our humanity does not depend on our age, stage of development, race, or abilities. The Secretary must ensure that all HHS programs and activities are rooted in a deep respect for innocent human life from day one until natural death: Abortion and euthanasia are not health care.
P.S. Do we agree that Bernie Sanders is NOT divisive? That the majority of actual people agree with most of what Bernie says, and it is only a few rich interests that object?
P.S. Do we agree that Bernie Sanders is NOT divisive? That the majority of actual people agree with most of what Bernie says, and it is only a few rich interests that object?
I think we probably agree that Bernie Sanders is correct, and that most people want for themselves what he says we should all have, but I don’t think he would necessarily be considered “non-divisive” by these standards if his social media account were more prolific.
I think perhaps where you and I may also disagree, is that I don’t think political animosity is intrinsically bad, only misplaced political animosity. We should have animosity towards people intentionally causing harm.
I also don’t think it’s a coincidence that we’re seeing yet another source telling people that now is the time to defuse and become less polarized to politics, right when Trump is in the process of deporting thousands of people and setting up concentration camps.
Yes, the real war is the class war, but even if the foot soldiers of the oligarchy shouldn’t be working class people, they are. It’s not billionaires out there in ICE uniforms, or getting deputized or joining bounty hunter groups to arrest brown people, or reporting brown people to ICE. That’s also where the “for themselves” bit that I emphasized comes in, because the truth is that there are a LOT of working class people who are opposed to helping others (especially along racial or religious lines), and helping others is the core of solidarity. Not all problems can be solved solely with class consciousness.
I, too, know the trend of criminal U.S. administrations to tell the other side to tone it down and just go with the President. The current administration makes me more outraged than post-9/11 when we knew the hijackers were Saudis, we knew bin Laden was around Afghanistan/Pakistan, and we had a team of Nuclear inspectors WITHIN Iraq saying they’d found no evidence of such weapons, yet a few days before their official report was finished, Bush declares war on Iraq? With no exit strategy? When Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11?
Rather than suggesting we all calm down, or that true patriots back the President, I’m simply seeing the article’s point in asking people to stop following the top, say, 2% most divisive voices. It is a sad truth that the worst liars will get their followers to disbelieve Dr. Fauci such that he becomes divisive through no fault of his own, but he won’t hit the critical ‘worst’ list because he’s not spouting vitriol of his own.
As far as Bernie goes, there were a good number of Bernie backers at Trump rallies, so I honestly doubt that anyone but moneyed think tanks have much bad to say about him.
Yeah it’s kind of like the psychological advice to let go of things you can’t control. That’s fine when it’s your annoying boss (within limits) but not fine when it’s mass kidnappings.
Wait can I get paid too? I don’t follow any politicians on social media. Sign me up!
Spoon found in kitchen. More from Tom at 7
SM is designed to react to clicks and content that riles people up and consequently creates more clicks. Consciously disengaging from the shit gibbons will make every ones life better but it goes against the base ‘more clicks = more ad revenue’
I delete all my social media periodically for similar reasons.
Even communities of people who are really level headed and supportive, like academics and engineers. Eventually there is groupthink, tribalism, and generally people who I am over (and I’m sure it’s mutual)
This is such an incredibly important message for us to understand. Thank you for bringing it to our attention. I can only hope that more and more people learn this.
- At least on Lemmy, this is definitely what I’ve observed. If you look at any thread that’s full of sturm und drang, it’s usually a tiny handful of accounts that are creating all of it (and then roping other people into their hostility, like a little chain reaction, like Chernobyl.) If you look at the impact, it just looks like everyone’s an asshole, but if you look at the root of the trouble, you realize most people are fine and a tiny minority are noisy and hostile and they can just get everyone else spun up.
- I agree, if you’re in NYC right at this moment in history and you can’t see a bigger picture of things worth getting heated up about than White Lotus, you should talk with people in your community more.
It’s like product reviews. The people leaving a review are either angry about the product or are so pleased they feel a need to tell the world about it. Most people, on the other hand, just use the product, have a perfectly average opinion of it, and don’t feel a need to tell the world. What makes things seem awful or great is you don’t usually know what percentage of the overall customer base they represent. Fifty bad reviews can be a red flag or noise depending on how many customers there are.
You’re welcome.
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