Jonathan Haidt and Tobias Rose-Stockwell: The Dark Psychology of Social Networks
The social
psychologist Mark Leary coined the term sociometer to describe
the inner mental gauge that tells us, moment by moment, how we’re doing in the
eyes of others. We
don’t really need self-esteem, Leary argued; rather, the
evolutionary imperative is to get others to see us as
desirable partners for various kinds of relationships. Social media, with its
displays of likes, friends, followers, and retweets, has pulled our sociometers
out of our private thoughts and posted them for all to see.
If you constantly
express anger in your private conversations, your friends will likely find you
tiresome, but when there’s an audience, the payoffs are different—outrage can
boost your status. A 2017
study by William J. Brady and other researchers at NYU measured the
reach of half a million tweets and found that each moral or emotional word used
in a tweet increased its virality by 20 percent, on average. Another 2017
study, by the Pew Research Center, showed that posts
exhibiting “indignant disagreement” received nearly twice as much engagement—including
likes and shares—as other types of content on Facebook.
At its inception,
social media felt very different than it does today. Friendster, Myspace, and
Facebook all appeared between 2002 and 2004, offering tools that helped users
connect with friends. The sites encouraged people to post highly curated
versions of their lives, but they offered no way to spark contagious outrage.
This changed with a series of small steps, designed to improve user experience,
that collectively altered the way news and anger spread through American
society. In order to fix social media—and reduce its harm to democracy—we must
try to understand this evolution.
When Twitter arrived
in 2006, its primary innovation was the timeline: a constant stream of
140-character updates that users could view on their phone. The timeline was a
new way of consuming information—an unending stream of content that, to many,
felt like drinking from a fire hose. Later that year,
Facebook launched its own version, called the News Feed. In 2009, it added the
“Like” button, for the first time creating a public metric for the popularity
of content. Then it added another transformative innovation: an algorithm that
determined which posts a user would see, based on predicted “engagement”—the
likelihood of an individual interacting with a given post, figuring in the
user’s previous likes. This innovation tamed the fire hose, turning it into a
curated stream... read more:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/12/social-media-democracy/600763/