How Outrage Became the Internet’s Currency

Okay, so the social media companies and people listening to this be like, yeah, that makes sense that they'd be recalcitrant because it does threaten their economics. But I feel like ordinary citizens would be like, ooh, yeah, there's a mini movement around people that are converting to dumb phones or devices that don't bombard them in the same way. I mean, Jonathan Haidt's book obviously struck this very, very powerful chord among not just families, but also legislators. So as the social media companies have closed up, I feel like are other people reaching out to you, whether it's academics, families, or policymakers? Yeah, I'll say a few things. So I just had a meeting yesterday with the IPIE. And so they're based in Europe, in Zurich, but they study the information environment. And they're the equivalent of, on this topic, of the IPCC, which is like the international panel that studies climate change, that every few years releases a report that everybody uses to figure out what the heck's going on and what we need to do. They recently started something like that for social media and the information environment, realizing it poses its own set of existential threats to humanity, not just in kids' education and our welfare, but conflict and threats to democracy. So they're trying, this is the type of thing that's happening, is policymakers are becoming interested in this and realizing they need to get a good information that has consensus and support of a lot of scientists, so it's not just one scientist's perspective. But then they need it to be turned into some policy, because if this affects all of us, if this affects our democracy, our kids' mental health, then it's something that we all have mistaken from a political perspective, right? And that I often think that the companies aren't going to change on their own. In fact, anything they're getting rid of, content moderation, they're not letting us analyze data. They're going in the off. I used to at one point have hope. If you interviewed me 10 years ago, I would have said the Arab Spring is really good evidence, it fosters democratic voice and activity. And I would have said, it's kind of a cool moment because maybe you have four CEOs who have the power with a couple presses of a button to change the information flow for billions of people. We've never had that before. And I would have said, maybe it's good not to have that in the hands of dictators around the world. But if anything, they're going in the opposite direction on a lot of these platforms, they're cutting down content moderation and information access. So I think it's really going to become an issue of people, citizens, to decide, no, I don't want this. I don't want it in my schools. I don't want it at my work. I don't want these companies to do whatever. And it's kind of like we went through this years ago with all these lawsuits against big tobacco. If people want to smoke, that's fine. But there's rules. You can't do it on an airplane anymore or in a classroom with kids. And if these companies are profiting from causing a bunch of people lung cancer that are all taxpayers have to pay for because we have to pay for the medical fees, then those companies have to actually cover that cost. And so I think we're going to have to come to some solution like that where we realize we have a voice in this. Building on that, I do see a bit of a vibe shift in society, especially with part of it is driven by the conversation around the anxious generation. And I think a lot of this issue about the negative impacts of social media is some of the specific sub issues like the misinformation issue that's more polarizing. But some of the issues like the impact on kids' mental health, that seems really bipartisan. When you look at the states that are implementing smartphone bans in schools, they're both Republican and Democratic states. And I think in America, to pass a movement, something needs to be bipartisan. And this seems to be an issue where people across the political spectrum are really concerned. Let me add one thing to this. We had a study on this a few years ago before this was happening. And we surveyed a sample of Americans and said, what things do you think are going viral on social media? And what things do you want to go viral? And the things that people, average Americans, see as going viral are things that cause outrage, that are negative, that are spreading misinformation, that are hateful. And then you ask them what do you want? And they want the exact opposite on almost every dimension. They want things that are accurate, things that are positive, things are uplifting, things that don't foster outrage, things that aren't polarizing. And then we looked at, well, is there a difference between Democrats and Republicans? Because they don't agree on anything, right? And that was one thing that we found huge consensus across the political spectrum. And there was also huge bipartisan support for making the algorithms more transparent so people can understand how it's manipulating them and for giving them control over their news feeds. And so these are things that 90% of Americans kind of secretly all agree on. So this might be one of those rare things that we can get action on. In building on that study, we call this phenomenon the paradox of virality, the type of content that goes viral online. So outrage, polarizing content, moral and emotional content, that's the exact opposite of what people want to have go viral. So why is it the content that people don't like at all? Why is that the content that's going viral? And there are a couple explanations for this. One is that it's content that grabs our attention. And this is an attention economy. It's the same as eating junk food or looking at a car crash on the side of the road. You can't help but look away. And I would say the car crash thing, I like to use that as a metaphor for how algorithms work. Well, there's an old news statement, if it bleeds, it leads. But because the reason is if you see someone bleeding out on the side of the road or a car crash, you can't help but look away. But now imagine if that led to 10 more car crashes down the road. Just because we look at a car crash doesn't mean we want more of it. We don't want to drive on roads where it's just like a hellscape. So yeah, that's one explanation. You can't look away. Social media is like a car crash. But another explanation is what we're finding in our research is that it tends to be a very small number of people who are sharing the vast majority of toxic content on social media. So one study on Reddit finds that while only about 3% of Reddit users share toxic content, they account for about 33% of the content shared on Reddit. And there are similar statistics for misinformation that are even more striking. Around 80% of misinformation spread on Twitter can be attributed to around 0.1% of individuals. So it's usually a very small number of active users who are sharing the most toxic content online. And there have also been studies where if you survey people and ask them, do you like these polarizing tweets from politicians? Like the vast majority of people, like 90 plus percent of people will say no. But the 7% who are highly active in political conversations on social media will say they love those polarizing tweets. So it's the people who post the most, who really like the toxic content, and they're not at all representative of the rest of Americans.