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Toxicity on Social Media

thenoisyroom.com

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Re: Toxicity on Social Media

#11

Post by 63stack »

JimmyBuckets wrote: post #9

This seems like a great idea. Even without the linked surveys. Two questions I have: - how you does this handle the fact that a lot of accounts on social media platforms are bots that maybe controlled by a small number of people. - how do we actually get this implemented?

This is my question as well, especially about the "community check". How will it be ensured that the "community check" is not going to be dominated by bots pushing an agenda? How is that different from "just another comment section hidden behind a green button"?

Re: Toxicity on Social Media

#12

Post by robot-wrangler »

This is amazing analysis, presentation, and has a call to action at the end. Some of this guys other stuff: https://tobias.cc/reading

The only point I'd add is that it's not handling time evolution in wicked problems quite right. Agree that the noisy room is distorting the world in exactly the ways described. But what if we've been in there so long, and the world has become so distorted.. that reality itself slides towards the once-extreme positions? Easiest to see this with climate-change controversy since that is the way that sort of thing happens, regardless of whether you think it's happened yet. Cascade, phase change, and collapse don't just call a truce.

So you have to anticipate that, acknowledging the pessimist is actually right, and that systems are a real bitch. Then you point out that if we're already doomed, we have nothing to lose nothing by trying. Systems are complex after all, that's the whole problem.. so if we miscalculated on the doom, then bothering to try actually saves us. Checkmate pessimists.

Re: Toxicity on Social Media

#14

Post by energy123 »

JimmyBuckets wrote: post #9

This seems like a great idea. Even without the linked surveys. Two questions I have: - how you does this handle the fact that a lot of accounts on social media platforms are bots that maybe controlled by a small number of people. - how do we actually get this implemented?

Regulating the algorithm is my favorite answer. Ban the recommendation engine on large social media sites. Make it a chronological feed of who you follow. Make it boring. I don't know all the details, but something like this.

Re: Toxicity on Social Media

#15

Post by po1nt »

I was on social media since sharing Zynga game invites was majority of the posts. I've seen countless of magic bullets attempting to fix the polarization issues. Algorithm adjustments, fact checkers, community notes.

I feel like the real problem is the people. Many of us just want to be told what to think to blend in with society, some of us demonstrate Dunning-Kruger publicly and a few of us really want to drive the polarization for clout and attention.

Everyday I see people promote increasingly stupid ideas on both sides, further pushing my believe that the only solution is to severely limit what government can do, therefore making all this discussion pointless.

Re: Toxicity on Social Media

#16

Post by BoredPositron »

krapp wrote: post #10
hermitcrab wrote: post #7

New social trends and technologies frequently cause some level of moral panic. Moral panics of the past have been caused by all sorts of things, that now seem rather quaint: novels, bicycles, comics, television, videos, heavy metal, dungeons and dragons etc. But social media feels very different. It really does seem to be causing major societal disruption.

The current social panic always feels very different. But people literally believe social media is the sole cause of all of modern society's problems, that it's a mind-control platform and a cancer on society. I've seen people say they would welcome a fascist dictatorship if only it meant destroying social media. I've seen people say they want "algorithms" made illegal. It's obvious from the hyperbole around the disc…

You: Other people are unhinged hyperbolists. Here, let me characterize them hyperbolically to prove it, therefore I am the calm rational one and by the way, civilization may collapse and the CIA might be behind this.

I mean wtf. Is this your parody account?

Re: Toxicity on Social Media

#17

Post by seltzerboys »

This article is awesome but it doesn't acknowledge that the problem has been maliciously manufactured by social media companies. they do not have incentive to curb the distortion of extremism and therefore any attempt to do so in a grassroots way will likely not be effective. then there's the bot problem but that is probably easier to address if we actually committed to doing so.

Re: Toxicity on Social Media

#18

Post by ketzu »

> toxic tweets receive ~86% more retweets

The part that annoys me about the toxicity, or repetetive and annoying topics on reddit, HN, etc. is not that I am unaware that the content is produced by a small fraction. (I underestimated the count! I guessed 2%)

It's that people espouse it: They upvote and retweet it.

> Both sides develop wildly inaccurate beliefs about who the other side actually is.

That was a guess I had for a while. People have a strawman version of their out-groups in mind and quickly map people to that if an unknown person says something that indicates they might be part of the out-group.

> What percentage of the other side supports political violence?

It would be interesting to see the in-group statistic as well: "What percentage of your own side supports policical violence?", in my experience people also justify very shitty behavior as long as its from their in-group. (This plays heavily into the first point of espousing all kinds of shit)

---

It would be interesting to see if the community check actually changes anything. But the actual data seems to be only possibly for very generic topics - those we have the data on already. Something that would not be available for daily-fresh topics.

For my personal sanity I simply left reddit and stopped opening comments on certain HN posts - of course that does not help with the societal problems. Unfortunately.

Re: Toxicity on Social Media

#19

Post by camillomiller »

Fantastic presentation. Unfortunately the conclusion is painfully naive and forgives the platforms too much.

>We Could Do This Now - Platforms already have a lot of these capabilities. They already survey users. They even know how to run sophisticated polls. There are a few technical details to work out (spec here), but this is not a hard problem to solve.

Why do you think something like this is not already implemented? Platforms literally profit from this division, so why would they be incentivised to do anything? What's needed is not a good gesture from the overly powerful platforms, is fast, hard and deep regulation.

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