Americans can become more cynical about the state of society when they see harmful behavior online. Three studies of the American public (n = 1,090) revealed that they consistently and substantially overestimated how many social media users contribute to harmful behavior online. On average, they believed that 43% of all Reddit users have posted severely toxic comments and that 47% of all Facebook users have shared false news online. In reality, platform-level data shows that most of these forms of harmful content are produced by small but highly active groups of users (3–7%). This misperception was robust to different thresholds of harmful content classification. An experiment revealed that overestimating the proportion of social media users who post harmful content makes people feel more negative emotion, perceive the United States to be in greater moral decline, and cultivate distorted perceptions of what others want to see on social media. However, these effects can be mitigated through a targeted educational intervention that corrects this misperception. Together, our findings highlight a mechanism that helps explain how people’s perceptions and interactions with social media may undermine social cohesion.
It has to do with the rise in rightwing “populism” which is founded on the morality story that people are inherently toxic and bad and must be violently oppressed by righteous force to create society.
This story is being firehosed at people by the rich in a million ways and people are largely uncritically accepting it. If you want to understand it, look at how in the US people have become convinced society is becoming more violent, people are becoming less trustable, and that crime is increasing year over year. If you look at the evidence, it points in the opposite direction except for a brief spike of crime during Covid, but who cares about reality? The story of everybody becoming more depraved and scary is a good one and it gets us engaged, why talk about hard numbers and policy?
Crime going down and society becoming more violent are different things. “Crime” is only a measure of illegal violence.
I think right-wing ethno-nationalism has made society more violent. Violence by agents of the state like ICE also isn’t being included in those stats: we’ve had more assaults and abductions this year than in decades thanks to ICE, if we are counting honestly.
That is top down state administered violence, it is very scary and real but what I am talking about is how increasingly sure people have gotten that random stochastic violence will happen to them for almost no reason by evil people acting individually, it is a growing sense that every alleyway has a random assailant waiting in it for no reason other than to attack because there are no superheroes left or something.