A set of three studies in the U.S. revealed that Americans believe that 43% of Reddit users post severely toxic comments, while 47% of Facebook users share false news online. However, in reality, such content is produced by only 3-8.5% of users. The paper was published in PNAS Nexus.
Social media contains many posts sharing misleading or completely untrue content. There are also users who post toxic comments to other people’s posts. These are comments that are insulting, hateful, or aggressive. These two types of behavior—sharing false news and posting toxic comments—are an important issue because they hurt real people, damage reputations, and create fear or anger.
False news can spread very quickly because people often share dramatic information before checking whether it is true. Toxic comments can make online spaces hostile and discourage reasonable discussion. This behavior can also deepen conflicts between groups, because people begin to see others as enemies rather than as human beings.
What is interesting is that studies indicate that both of these types of behaviors are produced by a very small minority of users who are highly active and post prolifically. A recent study found that 1% of conflict-seeking Reddit communities produced 74% of all conflict content across the platform. Similarly, another study found that 60% of hateful speech on Twitter came from a small community of users. These findings reflect what seems to be a broader pattern across social media platforms—the majority of problematic content is produced by a small, but vocal, minority of users.
Study author Angela Y. Lee and her colleagues investigated Americans’ beliefs about how many social media users contribute to harmful content and examined the consequences of such beliefs. They hypothesized that people would overestimate the prevalence of harmful users on social media. In turn, this misperception might foster excessive cynicism about their fellow citizens. These authors suggest that when people believe that many of their fellow Americans are posting harmful content, they may develop more negative views of society and perceive greater moral decline than actually exists.
To explore this further, study authors conducted three surveys of U.S.-American adults via CloudResearch Connect, matched to national quotas on age, gender, race, and ethnicity. The total number of participants across the three surveys was 1,090.
The first study asked participants to read about two research studies that identified how many Reddit accounts had posted toxic content and how many Facebook users had posted false news on the platform. Participants then provided their estimates regarding how many social media users produced such content.
In study 2, participants read about a Google system used to detect toxic language. They also viewed 20 comments from actual Reddit users, half of which were severely toxic, and half were not. They were then asked to identify the comments the Google system would classify as toxic.
Study 3 was an experiment where participants in one condition read a text explaining how scientists found that most people never share toxic content online. This was the misperception correction condition. The other experimental condition was a control condition, where they read about how Reddit was founded. The text the control group read did not mention online toxicity. After this, participants in both conditions completed measures of social media use, cynicism, generalized trust, perceptions of moral decline, and beliefs about the kinds of content that should go viral on social media.
Results showed that, on average, participants believed that 43% of all Reddit users posted severely toxic comments and that 47% of Facebook users shared false news online. In reality, platform-level data shows that most of these forms of harmful content come from 3-8.5% of users—a small, but highly active, group.
The experiment revealed that participants in the misperception correction condition tended to see their fellow U.S. citizens as being in less moral decline compared to participants in the control condition. They also felt more positive and were more likely to understand that others do not desire harmful online content. However, there were no differences between the two groups in cynicism and generalized trust in human nature.
“Our results reveal people do not realize that most harmful content on social media is produced by a small, prolific group of users. Instead, they believe that the amount of harmful content on social media is the result of many users participating in harmful behaviors,” study authors concluded.
The study contributes to the scientific knowledge about Americans’ perceptions of social media and their users. However, it should be noted that the study only involved U.S. participants and focused on only two types of harmful behaviors on two platforms. Because of this, the findings may not fully generalize to other countries, other cultures, and other social media platforms.
The paper, “Americans overestimate how many social media users post harmful content,” was authored by Angela Y. Lee, Eric Neumann, Jamil Zaki, and Jeffrey Hancock.
