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Toxicity on Social Media

thenoisyroom.com

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Re: Toxicity on Social Media

#51

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

I think another angle to this is that some people just can't ignore a number that might be interpreted as a score. They want followers not because they have a message that they want to get out there, but rather because more is better.

These people are unwittingly working for the platforms to drive engagement, often to the exclusion of any goal they might've had before the addictive aspects of social media kicked in.

I think we get less of this kind of behavior here on HN because each username is not bedazzled with metrics. You can see up vote counts for your own comments, but you can only infer those counts for others. The scoreboard is hidden, so it isn't triggering as much bad behavior from people who can't handle such things.

I think we could get even better behavior out of people if we never showed them raw counts of updoots, but instead only showed them metrics relating to their explicitly stated social graph, plus maybe one hop out:

> Alice and two of her friends like this

> Charlie likes this

It gives a sort of directionality to the feedback. Instead of seeking the high score as granted, likely, by a bot army, you learn something about Alice's corner of the social network. Maybe you should get to know Alice's friends better.

Because that loud 3% that are being harnessed by the platforms to drive engagement via content we all hate... Their primary sin is just that they fell for it. They're like alcoholics, if we want to help them into a mode where they're less problematic, we should hang out someplace besides the bar.

Re: Toxicity on Social Media

#52

Post by robot-wrangler »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #34
seltzerboys wrote: post #17

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.

Do we need their permission to implement it? Could be a browser extension.

Or post it as a reply in url, hope for the silent majority to support it enough to send it to the top. If the platform only supports out-links it's tough.. maybe use QR codes as avatars?

Re: Toxicity on Social Media

#53

Post by tskj »

rcxdude wrote: post #24
energy123 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree, recommendation algorithms are a huge part of the problem. Consciously choosing what you interact with is a very important part of media consumption IMO and most social media sites give you very little tools to do that (no, having likes/dislikes affect your personalised feed is not enough, especially when that also becomes 'engagement' and boosts it everyone's feed in general). These algorithms should be dumb…

I think this undersells the problem of discovery a little bit though. For example, youtube has been great at serving me longform content I want to engage with and wouldn't have discovered any other way.

(then they started having shorts, so I cancelled youtube premium)

Re: Toxicity on Social Media

#54

Post by tardedmeme »

mrmarket wrote: post #39
krapp wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you strip social media down to its essential parts it's simply a multimedia communications and networking paradigm. Nothing ontologically good or evil about it. You aren't listing problems intrinsic to social media per se, so much as how people choose to use it and how specific platforms choose to operate. The latter of which is a problem when Twitter, Facebook and the like optimize for engagement through controve…

well yeah. like hacker news is a social platform with checks and balances in place to prevent mass hysteria and ragebaiting. but if we're honest about the biggest social media platforms of the day, each of the things listed are features of them. and because these tools are actually incentivized against fixing each of the problems listed, they will not fix them. so they're functionally essential parts of the social me…

Hacker News does not prevent mass hysteria and ragebaiting. It seems like for any social media side, the appearance of preventing negative behaviors is worth far more than actually preventing negative behaviors, which can actually subtract stakeholder value in many cases.

Re: Toxicity on Social Media

#55

Post by funimpoded »

krapp wrote: post #33
seltzerboys wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you strip social media down to its essential parts it's clear that it can easily cause huge problems for a society. it's basically a never-ending 24/7 stream of information amplified out to anywhere in the world that is: 1. insanely low-effort to post 2. requires NO discernment, proof, credibility, or peer review to post 3. 'viral' in that opinions circulate because other people have interacted with them, not beca…

If you strip social media down to its essential parts it's simply a multimedia communications and networking paradigm. Nothing ontologically good or evil about it. You aren't listing problems intrinsic to social media per se, so much as how people choose to use it and how specific platforms choose to operate. The latter of which is a problem when Twitter, Facebook and the like optimize for engagement through controve…

> If you strip social media down to its essential parts it's simply a multimedia communications and networking paradigm. Nothing ontologically good or evil about it.

“The medium is the message”.

This stuff’s been around long enough we’ve got a pretty good idea of what its “message” is.

Re: Toxicity on Social Media

#56

Post by tolerance »

speak_plainly wrote: post #47
krapp wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It comes down to the kind of society we want to create, not some existential threat. Social media has an outsized effect on everything from the food people eat to the medical care they receive. The incentives of social media create a great number of distortions within the social media sphere but also in the real world. Is traveling to Tokyo just to sprint across the Shibuya Scramble for a slightly less-crowded Instag…

I couldn't have said any of that better myself...

> Human social pressure and follower mindsets are part of the human experience but systematically gaming those instincts in real-time so money flows to a social media company at all costs in some strange digital sharecropping scheme is what’s new and the hierarchy of others trying to capture a small piece of that pie creates these distortions.

To what I think @krapp's point is: these dynamics are not exclusive to social media. At their core they're led by something far more primal than what social media only exacerbates. Governments are not as naive as the general public. Regulations effected in 2026 to "regulate social media" could have consequences on how information is spread among people in 2040.

Re: Toxicity on Social Media

#57

Post by tolerance »

funimpoded wrote: post #55
krapp wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you strip social media down to its essential parts it's simply a multimedia communications and networking paradigm. Nothing ontologically good or evil about it. You aren't listing problems intrinsic to social media per se, so much as how people choose to use it and how specific platforms choose to operate. The latter of which is a problem when Twitter, Facebook and the like optimize for engagement through controve…

> If you strip social media down to its essential parts it's simply a multimedia communications and networking paradigm. Nothing ontologically good or evil about it. “The medium is the message”. This stuff’s been around long enough we’ve got a pretty good idea of what its “message” is.

> “The medium is the message”.

What's this mean?

Re: Toxicity on Social Media

#58

Post by BoredPositron »

krapp wrote: post #27
BoredPositron wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Case closed.

This is what I get for trying to have a serious conversation here. Congratulations on the endorphin hit. You really zinged me. I need to find where the grownups hang out.

The thing is you are not you are only pretending to do so. Your predispositions are so ingrained that you even adopted the phrasing and speech pattern of deranged /pol threads. There is nothing to be gained except you reaching for the next talking point on your list.

Re: Toxicity on Social Media

#59

Post by robot-wrangler »

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?

> how do we actually get this implemented?

Hackers might be interested to know that there's an "open questions" section at the end of TFA. Some of it probably wants simulation, some wants theorems.

Camel-ai pubs/frameworks might be related and useful, for example: https://github.com/camel-ai/agent-trust

Several model checkers also have primitives for working with common-knowledge. TFA puts it like this:

> Learning a fact changes what you know. Seeing it displayed publicly — where everyone else can see it too — where you know others can also see it, changes what everyone knows, and subsequently how they act.

An important piece of technical vocabulary, it really seems we need this to talk about a lot of problems lately. Here is Terence Tao talking about some related math for disinformation and politics ( https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/114866548969775485 ) and summing it up this way:

> we barely even have the vocabulary to discuss, let alone analyze, games in which control of information is a major battleground.

He kinda means in general though I think.. probably we can find heuristics and crunch a case or two

Re: Toxicity on Social Media

#60

Post by dependsontheq »

tardedmeme wrote: post #29
dependsontheq wrote: post #26

I have been working on a monitoring and prebunking system for digital manipulation and desinformation. We are focusing not on the content or narrative but on the psychological patterns and manipulation techniques that are used. It's the most disturbing thing I have ever worked on, there is much more out there than moste people realize and a lot of it uses deceptive dark patterns. If somebody is interested in talking…

How do you convince people that your system is not itself disinformation?

I get that question a lot and I can understand it, so there are two things here at work, one is freedom of speech. Depending on your local rules (I am from Germany so our rules i.e. concerning the Nazi past are different than the US rules) freedom of speech should be guaranteed, and opinions shouldn't be labeled as desinformation or manipulation based on their content.

What we are monitoring are deceptive patterns on a text or transcript level. Deceptive patterns can be things like information inconsistency in one post, context shifts in one post that are used to reframe something, or video patterns like fake statistics or fake headlines that are not consistent with the main content.

All of these patterns are actual science backed psychological manipulation patterns and they are consistently used in the most viral posts we detect. My perspective after one year working on this is that the average media literacy is even lower than we think and that we build an evolutionary system with the social media platforms that is optimized to increase the performance of digital manipulation actors.

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