Sabine
patreon
How Bad Is Social Media?
🕑 Added 2022-12-17 13:00:03 +0000 UTC[This is a transcript with references.]
What should you do if you’re spending too much time on social media? Asking for friend. Well, you try to convince yourself that social media is actually good for, something. It’s got to be good for something, right? But they say that social media increases polarization, and gets you stuck in echo chambers full of fake news and so on. How bad is social media? That’s what we’ll talk about today.
Social media has changed society profoundly. About 60 percent of the world’s population now uses social media. It has made it vastly easier to find people all over the globe, to connect with them, and to get insulted by them.
What does that do to society? It’s complicated. American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and sociologist Chris Bail have compiled a public Google Doc in which they collect references on questions such as “Does social media make people angrier?” and “Does social media create political echo chambers?”. The most relevant thing you learn from this document is that whatever your opinion, you can find a paper that supports it.
Honestly, I began working on this video thinking it’ll end up being one big shrug because that’s how sociology generally looks like to a physicist. But turns out it isn’t quite as bad. You just have to be really careful with phrasing the question.
For example, you may remember the headlines claiming that fake news spreads faster than the truth. Then again there were headline saying that those headlines about fake news were themselves fake news. What is going on?
Well, the original headlines were based on a 2018 paper published in Science by researchers at MIT. The authors compared how true and false news stories spread on twitter.
They had a sample of about 126 thousand news items from 2006 to 2017, tweeted by about three million people over four point five million times. So, not a small study.
These new items were classified as true or false according to certain fact-checking organizations. The conclusion of the study was, in the authors’ own words, that “Falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories. The effects were most pronounced for false political news.” And it wasn’t a small difference. They found that it took true stories approximately six times as long as false stories to reach one thousand five hundred people.
But in 2021 other researchers pointed out that the 2018 paper looked at news that had been fact-checked by certain institutions, but that those institutions pay more attention to news that have already spread quite successfully. An article in Science then claimed that this means the original study had been debunked. This is why you’ve seen the headlines saying news about fake news are fake news.
That wasn’t the end of the story. Because the authors of the original study then said they’d never claimed their study applies to all fake news, it had just been misreported. And the authors of the new study said they had never claimed the earlier study was wrong because they knew it’d been misreported. Then the author of the science news article who had claimed that the misreported fake news study was fake news apologized that his article had misreported the story. Hope that clarifies it!
But wait what does all that mean now? Do fake news spread better or do they not? The answer is: they do, but. It turns out that the major difference between true news and fake news is that fake news spread to a larger audience. And since they appeal to a larger audience, they also spread faster. But if you compare true and false stories that have reached an audience of the same size, then the sharing patterns look the same. This was the point of the 2021 paper. It’s not like fake news networks have a different connectivity, the size of audience that they attract is the major difference.
And yes, that was strictly speaking only demonstrated for fake news stories that were fact checked by certain institutions. One of the authors made this diagram to show the difference between what they *said they did and what the headlines said they did. But the authors’ also say they’re reasonably confident their finding will carry over to false news more generally, but that remains to be seen. I am guessing there are people working on doing exactly this as we speak.
But the 2018 Science paper has made an interesting that didn’t spread widely. They found that bots accelerated the spread of true and false news equally. This means that if false news spreads better than the truth, then it’s because *humans are more likely to spread false news. We can’t blame it on the bots. The authors conjecture that the reason may be that people like novelty, and it’s easier to be original with something that’s made up.
Anecdotal evidence. I had my first encounter with fake news on facebook in 2016 when Trump ran for president. It was a quote attributed to Trump from some anti-republican facebook page, shared by an American friend. Several people pointed out that there was no evidence Trump actually said that. The guy who’d shared it reacted by saying it’s funny even if it isn’t true.
And that’s why false news spreads: We share it for reasons other than accuracy. Because it’s funny or upsetting or because it allow us to express our own opinion. Whether it’s true doesn’t really matter for that. The problem is that the next person who comes across shared fake news believes that the person who shared it believed it to be true and is therefroe more likely to also believe it’s true.
What can be done about it? It’s easier than you think! Because most people agree that fake news is bad and they’re actually quite good at spotting it, you just have to occasionally remind them to think before sharing. At least this was the conclusion of a paper published in Nature last year.
The authors recruited about a thousand Americans and presented them with 36 actual news stories taken from social media. Half of the headlines were false, and half were correct, half favourable to Democrats and the other half favourable to Republicans. The participants were then asked to evaluate the accuracy of the news items.
They quite reliably rated correct headlines as correct and false ones as false. And while they did rate headlines in favour of their own political orientation as correct more often than those in favour of the other camp, the partisan influence was much smaller than that of the actual accuracy of the headline. So, the problem is not that we’re just bad at spotting bad news.
But the authors also found that whether the headlines were right or wrong had little effect on whether people intended to share a news item. They then encouraged people to consider the accuracy of the news item and afterwards asked again how likely they’d share it. This simple tactic led to a big reduction of the intention to share *false news but didn’t affect the intention to share real news. According to the paper, accuracy “often has little effect on sharing, because the social media context focuses [users’] attention on other factors such as the desire to attract and please followers/friends or to signal one’s group membership”.
According to another paper that just appeared two months ago, the misinformation problem is particularly pronounced in the United States. The authors of the paper found that while people from the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand are exposed to misinformation on social media at about the same rate, Americans are three times more likely to share it.
Earlier this year, a review paper in the journal Nature Medicine looked at the spread of misinformation about public health in particular by reviewing 123 papers. The two major conclusions that the author draws from his literature survey is that (a) people are sometimes duped by misinformation just because they are distracted or not paying attention and (b) some people believe in and share misinformation because it reinforces their beliefs. So that’s consistent with what the other papers had found.
As to what to do about it, one thing he suggests is also just reminding people to think about accuracy before sharing. Another interesting suggestion he has is to give people information about the tactics of misinformation spreaders with browser games. There are two of those games, one is called “Go Viral!” and the other one “Get Bad News”. Studies have found that people who played these games were much better at spotting health-related misinformation. You can try them out yourself, links are in the info below. I think this is a really good idea and I’d like to have a game like this about physics please.
So, yes, social media spreads a lot of misinformation. The good side of social media is that it also seems to generally benefit information literacy. In 2018, a team of American researchers recruited almost 3000 Americans. They offered half of them 20 dollars to deactivate their facebook accounts for 4 weeks, just prior to the 2018 midterm elections. Four weeks later, those who disconnected from facebook were less able to correctly answer factual questions about recent news events. But they also reported increased well-being and less political polarization. Let’s therefore look at what we know about polarization and echo chambers.
If you watch a few of my videos on quantum mechanics, soon all your recommended videos will be about quantum mechanics. Suddenly the whole world is quantum mechanics! Such an “echo chamber” seems to be an inevitable side-effect of algorithms that want to help you find what you’re interested in, and as a result, you get more of the same.
This leads to the dreaded conspiracy rabbit holes that you fall into on YouTube, as it happened to me when I was working on my video on flat earthers, though YouTube seems to have tweaked their algorithm since to prevent that from happening quite as easily.
These “more of the same” algorithms help you make contact with people who think like yourself. So, the idea that we live in echo chambers sounds plausible, but plausible ideas are the ones you should be most sceptical about. What do the data say?
According to a 2021 paper by a group from the University of Oxford, echo chamber issue are real but the problem’s been hugely overstated. They looked at surveys from 7 different countries in which people reported what news they typically consumed. Turns out only about 5 percent of social media user are properly stuck in a political echo chamber in which they almost exclusively consume news from one political side. Though the numbers differ somewhat by country. The overall largest fraction of people in echo chambers is that of the American left.
The previously mentioned Chris Bail is lead author of a 2018 paper about an experiment in which they tried to get people out of their echo chambers. They surveyed about one thousand five hundred Americans, about half Democrats and the other half Republicans who visited Twitter at least three times each week. After one week of tracking, a randomly selected group of those people was offered 11 dollars to follow a Twitter bot for 1 month, but they were not informed about the purpose of this study. The bot initially just tweeted landscape pictures but then began tweeting that promoted the participants’ opposing political ideology.
At the end of the month, the participants were surveyed again. Turned out that republicans who followed a liberal Twitter bot became even more conservative. The more they were exposed the larger the effect. For democrats the change was not statistically significant.
By the way, Chris Bail is the director of an institute called the Polarization Lab that lets you check how deeply stuck in an echo chamber you are on twitter. Turns out rather unsurprisingly I’m deeply stuck in a liberal camp, that’s what you get when you mostly follow people with PhDs.
The question whether social media increases polarization in society has been extensively studied, especially in the United States. The risk, sociologists say, is that social media makes it easier to find people whose opinions we like, and we get encouraged by like-minded people to distance ourselves from the perceived enemy.
Indeed, in 2018, a leaked internal presentation at Facebook warned senior executives that facebook “algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness,” and that “If left unchecked,” the algorithm would feed users “more and more divisive content in an effort to gain user attention & increase time on the platform.”
Now, it’s quite well-established among sociologists already that increased levels of polarization in society are associated with erosion of constructive political debate, social trust, and inter-party cooperation. The question we’re interested in here is whether social media *increases this polarization.
In 2021, researchers from the UK and the US set out to answer the question whether “Out-group animosity drives engagement on social media”. They analysed almost three million Twitter posts by news media accounts and US congressional members. They found that posts about the political out-group were shared or retweeted about twice as often as posts about the in-group. And almost all of the post about the other political camp were negative, leading to more negative engagement.
Again though, you have to be really careful to keep in mind what question a study was asking in the first place. Because this finding doesn’t necessarily mean that the negative engagement caused polarization to *increase, it might just means that social media is a good platform to live out your feelings. Just which way the causation goes is at the moment rather unclear.
For one thing, a study from 2017 , found that self-reported polarization is higher among elderly Americans who are less likely to be online to begin with.
Another thing to keep in mind is that the USA isn’t the *only country in the world. A team of American researchers pointed out last yearthat while social media usage has increased world-wide, polarization has not. It *has increased in the US, but in many other countries polarization has in fact decreased.
Indeed, a 2021 study among more than 3000 Dutch citizens found that self-reported polarization *correlates with social media use, but the causation goes from polarization to social media usage, and it depends on the platform you’re using. At least in the Dutch sample, people who became politically more polarized spent more time on facebook, but less time on twitter.
It’s hard to interpret what this means because god knows what’s up with Dutch twitter. But I think what we can take away from this is that the idea that more social media use increases polarization is almost certainly too simple to be correct. What happens depends both on cultural context and on platform design.
So what do we learn from all this?
Most obviously we learn that this is a very active research area. I certainly hope that the results will eventually lead to better algorithms for social media. While we wait for that to happen, I think the best we can do is focus on the part that’s in our hands, which is to decide what we pay attention to, and what we share.
What I have taken away from all those papers is that we have to be especially careful with headlines that upset us. Yes, they might get a lot of comments. But they might also spread misinformation and hate. So be careful out there.
Comments
Armando Mistral
👍
@Sabine Thank you for working answering the questions you asked in 'Theory of Everything' & helping to make things right. It's honestly more valuable than any amount of physics experiments & space missions will ever be.
Thanks for being here, Colleen.
:-)
I was a member of plastic.com, now gone, and they had a better "tree" view that showed a thread's branching so it could be followed easier. I think that they used lines.
I'm photoshoping an image of Elon's Mars colony now! IMO, the bad outweighing the good is driven primarily by two points: a) no fact checking prior to being able to post and (b) being able to post anonymously, with (b) providing cover for taking advantage of (a). Simply requiring people to post under their real identity would help. It would also control bots.
Good presentation. My personal experience is that many people just don't check for a story's accuracy and then repeat it. Sure, they have a leaning and seem to believe it when a story aligns with that, but they don't check accuracy for any story, ever.
D Brown
💖🌎💖
I love that Greta has no fucks to give for haters. Aurora sounds like a great human too. I started using YouTube to watch music videos but found myself watching all sorts of interesting things & eventually after mass lockdown STEM binges I ended up watching some of Sabine's videos. It's been an interesting ride. I enjoy Sabine's music for its own sake too, she's a favourite artist of mine. Go listen if you haven't already. 🙂 It's kind of depressing how talented she is. Inspired me to get moving on making my own music. I keep in touch & follow the exploits of dear friends through to random acquaintances with FB & Insta, I'm grateful for that. The pro-science groups on FB help me keep from despair. I'm low-key angry a lot so I figured that I may as well try & do something useful with that.
D Brown
We are from different parts of the world and different walks of life, but I believe he we engage in dignified discussion on this platform. We do so out of respect for Dr. Hossenfelder and out of respect for each other. From my perspective there is one expert and many smart people here, and I have the opportunity to learn from all of you. This, I believe, is what the social media experience should look like. When I have a relevant opinion or information on something I have read (e.g., 12-hour glucose cycle and intermittent fasting), it if it ties into the current discussion I will post it (or joke about it). I recently had a rant about the unique struggles certain people will encounter all their lives. Since this does not occupy my mind on a daily basis, rants like that from me should be rare. I have been made a better person by being part of this, and hope the new year is less about war and politics, and more about advancement and breakthroughs that help the world, its people, and helps the advancement of science. Full discloser: My social media consists of Patreon, and YouTube for news (MSNBC) and music videos of bands I never had the money to see as a kid. Favorite people: Dr. Hossenfelder: For [hosting] a place [where] knowledge can be shared and debated, and for figuring out that "no gobbledygook" is a euphemism for "no bullsxxt". Greta Thunberg: yea, that girl. Aurora: Music artist from Norway: See "Exist for Love" on YouTube. I was at her May 25, 2022 concert in Minneapolis MN. Aurora talks to the audience between songs. At one point Aurora stopped between songs and spoke of how people need to find a way to get help if they or people they know are struggling. This concert was a day after the Uvaldi Texas, massacre, and was on the anniversary of the May 25, 2020 George Floyd murder in Minneapolis MN. So for 10+ minutes Aurora spoke from the heart about getting help if you or someone you know are hurting. So Aurora is doing her best to spread [a message] of hope, one concert and one song at a time.
I'm also very glad that I've got to meet & talk with y'all here. 🙂
My Contribution to Society via social media besides sharing rants, articles and memes is to be sharing advice and experiences with others in the relevant groups I'm in, to learn from special interest groups & spend time arguing with & trying somewhat to educate science deniers & bigots of various sorts. My main deal on Twitter is to banter & ask questions with people about physics & science stuff & argue endlessly with transphobes. I hope the arguing & advocating I do does help somehow.
Patreon is limited as a blog but this is still better than how awkward Blogger was to use.
Indented threading has its limits though especially on vertical displays.
Max Eliaser
Patreon has an indented reply system, but I think it only works when you reply from the page for the post, not when you reply from your feed.
D Brown
Colleen Thompson #2: Due to my previous long post, you have earned the right to ban/ignore me for (at least) the rest of the year. Regarding a new sim card, I just refused to rejoin. My being on their platform makes money for them, and for me it is for the most part a productivity drain. With Musk anointing himself "King Twit", the ban appears to be permanent.
D Brown
Patreon: Please prefix each post with name of the owner of the post that is being replied to. This should be about 2 lines of code to change this. For an example of this, see twitter.com, YouTube.com, ...
D Brown
Tracey DeLaney: Addiction and self control are related. Self control is something that is learned and likely comes after a certain age. This is one of the reason kids should not drink alcohol, smoke cigarettes, or do other drugs. Kids are unlikely to have developed this self control and are therefore more susceptible to addiction. Years ago I read that Bill Gates refused to let his kids (who are now grown) use (I believe) the Internet until they were X years old (X >= 16, I think). No Facebook, no Twitter, no Office365. So the (at the time) head of a company whose business model relies heavily on the Internet, refused to let his kids use that same Internet. Very interesting.
D Brown
Colleen Thompson: Based on the "Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity Landing" video on YouTube, I originally joined around/on August 6, 2012. That would have been the day/night of my first tweet. I really did not get the idea of sending messages to strangers (then what are you doing now?), so I quickly dropped it (i.e., twitter). I rejoined (i.e., logged in again) in June 2020, to 'debate' the (then) upcoming 2020 US presidential election. I did so because it seemed the election was again in the process of being stolen (again). Little did I know. I was banned for repeatedly calling out a grifter (V. Jones) who received millions from the Trump administration and appeared smiling in many Trump family photo ops. This same V. Jones stated in a 10/13/2020 tweet that, "Trump 'doesn't get enough credit' for the 'good stuff he has done for the Black community'". Then this same V. Jones could be seen on CNN on election night (i.e., 3 weeks later) crying crocodile tears of joy and claiming how much the Trump defeat meant for people like him and his family. I have a masters in computer science, and have been the most knowledgeable software developer (on my team) everywhere I have worked for the past 15+ years. This is due to experience and because I have been the only one with an MSCS degree. Even so, to this day I continue to put up with a lack of courtesy and respect from a small minority of the people I have to work with. Since my twitter ban, there have been more than one (possibly MSNBC) YouTube video with V. Jones as a guest, in which the news anchor indicates V. Jones is not trusted within the black community. Regardless of my struggles, most people in the US (and the world) are good/reasonable. President Obama's 2-term presidency and President Biden getting the most votes of any US president proves this. If I seem to be waging a battle, it is not for me as I am one of the fortunate ones. It is for those like me who are without a college degree and possible without steady employment. The fact is I have empathy for anyone who is struggling and find myself being generous to someone in need regardless of where their ancestors are from. So I will close on a positive note and wish everyone Happy Holidays in the faith of their choice (e.g., Merry Christmas) with the hope of peace on earth and goodwill towards all in the coming new year.
Rad Antonov
Dr DeLaney, are you saying that kids these days would rather crank tunes and chat with buddies than listen to their professor lecture? 😱Truth be told, it drives me crazy when I am talking to my kids and spot an airpod surreptitiously covered with hair. How ahead of his time was Bradbury with the seashells and TV walls in F 451?!
I've been thinking about this all day -- one of the top comments on YouTube is that social media is like a cat fighting with it's reflection in a mirror. Does the social media mirror reflect back our true selves or does it reflect back the worst parts of ourselves -- the anonymous, competitive, road rage part of ourselves when we get cutoff in traffic? If it's our true selves, then we really kind of suck as a species. But if it's our worst selves, then we ought to be able to rein that in with online social engineering using algorithms that reduce hostility rather than feed it.
Hi D, how much do you think is self control vs addiction? The reason I am asking is that the younger generation seems to be truly addicted. I have a 13-year-old cousin who turned into a phone zombie this summer -- like tripping a switch in her brain. My freshmen college students this fall semester were horrible. They openly defied my instructions to put their phones away and take the earbuds out, and within a minute of being told to get off their phones, they're back scrolling through text messages and TikTok again. The algorithm is quite possibly one of the most powerful drugs in existence.
Hi, I got booted from Twitter too, I bought a cheap SIM card to provide another number for my current account. Twitter is bizarrely reporting on its own cataclysms almost live.
D Brown
From my perspective in the US, the bad that has been introduced by social medial outweighs the good. For example, Twitter was originally promoted as a platform that allowed businesses to better connect with their clients (i.e., in real time). For example, a person tweets 'At #BoringStore, what are the best deals here?' Then someone at BoringStore sends them a coupon for the (plastic free) canned Tuna they just put on sale. Having said that, my first tweet was sent during the televised Mars Rover landing. The live broadcast showed someone at NASA using Photoshop to prepare the images they were receiving. So, not being able to resist, I tweeted, "A rocket scientist is using Photoshop. Houston, we have a problem." So as they say, "the road to hell is paved with good intentions". Some people I know are using Facebook to stay connected with friends, which I see as the good side of the platform. I was never really into Facebook and I am off (actually banned from) twitter. I think a lot of the good and bad comes down to the amount of self control a person has. P.S: "The US is not the only country." Verified fake news.
I agree, and I'll elaborate to say that facts can be used to support a narrative, surrounded by manipulative language, twisted and mixed with lies. If not outright disinformation, facts can still be encased in emotive language. That's the rest of 'what and why' that needs to be considered.
Looking at the Google Doc by Haidt & Bail is pretty enlightening, especially in exposing the importance of nuance in understanding the results of the various studies. Although algorithm adjustment can help alleviate the worst aspects of social media, that is not in the best interest of the social media companies, which are really just ad machines that harvest personal data.
'who said what, and why' is a good practical way to make a quick decision as to whether it's worth investigating further in that direction - for instance I trust what Sabine says by default - but I still think it's secondary. Someone I consider the scum of the Earth could still be correct about one thing. Then there is the question of whether 'me saying he's right on that point' would mislead people into thinking I support him, and we go back to the issue of 'looking at a short statement and drawing incorrect conclusions from it'.
(and sorry for spamming you, I was trying to write a separate comment too.)
I've been aware of how social media has shifted my opinions and mindset for better and for worse, this video is a great reminder to keep evaluating what I look at and listen to, what I share and how I interact with others. I've made an effort to not end up in an information vacuum but it's an ongoing effort to not turn into a mere sharing and insult machine.
Also consider who said what, and why.
As long as we'll attribute properties like 'true' or 'false' to statements with less than 160 characters, we'll be subject to widespread misinformation. We have to learn to either increase our attention span, so longer statements can be widespread, or deal with the inherent uncertainty that comes with such short statements.
