What We Get Wrong About Online Toxicity

Photo by Igor Omilaev on Unsplash

Spend enough time on social media and it is easy to walk away with a discouraging view of your fellow humans. The hostile comments, viral outrage, and seemingly endless misinformation can make it feel like the online world reflects something deeply broken about people. Well, I have some encouraging news. New research shows that online toxicity is driven by a much smaller group of people than most of us realize.

In a series of three studies involving over 1,000 Americans, a team of researchers from Stanford University compared what people believe about harmful behavior on social media to what platform-level data actually reveals. The gap is pretty remarkable.

When participants estimated what percentage of active Reddit users had posted severely toxic content, they guessed more than 40 percent on average across the studies. The actual figure is 3 percent. For Facebook, participants estimated that nearly half of all users had shared false news online. The real number is 8.5 percent. When it came to so-called super-sharers who had spread 10 or more false news articles, participants guessed roughly 36 percent of users fell into this category. The actual figure is less than half of one percent.

The misperception is not rooted in confusion about what counts as harmful content. In one of the studies, participants were shown actual Reddit comments and asked to identify which ones would be classified as toxic. They were highly accurate. They understood what toxic content looks like. They simply believed it was coming from a much larger portion of the population than it actually is.

Participants also failed to realize how few accounts were responsible for so much content. That 3 percent of Reddit accounts responsible for toxic posts generated about a third of all content on the platform, toxic or otherwise. In other words, people encounter a lot of harmful content not because many people are creating it, but because a small group is posting relentlessly. We see the volume and assume it reflects broad participation. It does not.

I think it is crucial to emphasize what this misperception actually does to us. The researchers found that believing more people post harmful content online generates more negative emotion and a greater sense that the country is in moral decline. This sense of moral decline informs how people engage with public life, with institutions, and with each other. When we think the worst of our fellow citizens based on what we see online, we become more defensive and more prone to viewing those who disagree with us as bad actors rather than as people who simply see things differently.

The researchers also found that participants consistently underestimated how much their fellow Americans shared their desire for less harmful online content. So not only do we think more people are producing toxic content than actually are, we also fail to recognize how many people share our preference for a healthier online environment. We feel like a quiet, reasonable minority surrounded by a hostile majority. The data suggest a very different picture.

The good news is that this misperception can be corrected. When participants learned the actual prevalence of harmful content and understood that it comes from a small but vocal minority, they felt more positive emotion, showed less pessimism about their fellow citizens, and were better able to see that others share their desire for something better online.

Knowledge empowers agency. When we understand that the toxic content we see online is not representative of how most people actually behave, we can put what we see in its proper context, resist the pull toward cynicism, extend more good faith to the people we encounter, and remind ourselves that most people share our basic desire for a healthier online environment. And when we share this knowledge with others, we help replace a distorted picture with a more accurate and ultimately more hopeful one.

Most Americans who use social media are not spreading misinformation or engaging in toxic behavior. If we want to make progress on societal challenges such as polarization, social distrust, and pessimism about our shared future, seeing each other more accurately is a good place to start.

Have a great weekend!

Clay