The online “funhouse mirror” distorting everyone’s reality
A small, vocal minority is distorting our view of what’s normal online. That’s the conclusion of a new paper from researchers at New York University, “Inside the funhouse mirror factory: How social media distorts perceptions of norms.”
Online discourse is… not doing well. Platforms are fighting claims of censorship in the courts, misinformation on social media is raging, and AI slop is filling up users’ feeds.
All of this is enough to make people question just what reality looks like. It turns out that’s kind of what is happening, according to the paper, which points to several things contributing to this reality-distortion effect.
Research cited in the paper notes that tiny numbers of “toxic” accounts can have massive, outsize negative effects for all users. “While only 3% of active accounts are toxic, they produce 33% of all content,” the authors said. Much of the false information online can be attributed to this minority group, too, noting that just 0.1% of users were responsible for 80% of fake news.
This content sparks outrage among a large number of users, and can create “false polarization” among moderate users who are less likely to wade into the viper’s nest of online discussions and share their more typical viewpoints.
