Technology

In a recent series of experiments, we paid people a few dollars to unfollow the most divisive political accounts on X. After a month, they reported feeling 23% less animosity towards other political groups. In fact, their experience was so positive that nearly half the people declined to refollow those hostile accounts after the study was over. And those who maintain their healthier newsfeed reported less animosity a full 11 months after the study.

Twitter got a lot better when I unfollowed the peeps whose tweets I hated. But it also got boring, so I stopped using it (this was loooong before Trump, Elon, etc).

There's probably a lesson there.

FTFY: Are a few people ruining the world for the rest of us?

Answer: Yes. They need to face justice.

Musk, Bezos, Zuck, Page ruined the internet for us. That's who to blame

The money cult ruined the internet like they ruin everything else

A mere 0.1% of users share 80% of fake news. Twelve accounts – known as the “disinformation dozen” – created most of the vaccine misinformation on Facebook during the pandemic. These few hyperactive users produced enough content to create the false perceptions that many people were vaccine hesitant.

So, this is super anecdotal, but through the father of a friend I learned about a guy who was just downright a walking stereotype in that regard. Said father is a rather conservative guy (ex-cop, actually), got lucky and rather rich, and he lived in a suburban village here in Germany. Said neighbour, as described by him: Also an ex-cop, old acquaintance, wife and kids left him because he was violent, living financially comfortably in a large house in that suburban German village on his own, but miserable. And he, unironically, sent said father of my friend far-right propaganda articles, images, messages just... all day long. Every 10 minutes or so. Presumably as mass messages to about anyone who still had a semblance of contact with him. Anecdotal, hearsay with 2 degrees of separation, but - it was the first time I realised those people existed as actual people just casually living their lives around us all.

Absolutely agree. There's a minority of highly polarized people who encourage a false binary view of the world - where anyone who doesn't 100% agree with you is your enemy, and questioning even a subtle aspect of an opinion is an all-out attack. These people post so much they dominate forums and create the false appearance of trends. Most people aren't nearly that polarized.

A "few" people? The problem is not a handful of loudmouths, but the masses hanging on their lips. An influencer is not influencing without a mass of followers.

Yep. Musk. Trump. Rogan. Spez. Libs for Tik Tok. Zuckerberg. And so on. It’s like giving Conservatives access to the web lead to it being a septic tank.

You can extrapolate that to humanity for the last few centuries or even millennias

Independent of what anyone is actually saying, the mere fact that someone is commenting on social media at all makes it highly likely they’re one of the people the article is talking about. As the saying goes, a tiny number of users produce nearly all the content. Most people don’t post comments online. The average person doesn’t. So if someone does, that alone already marks them as unusual in some way.

This becomes especially obvious on Lemmy, where you can see people’s moderation history - and it takes only a few seconds to notice how many users are spouting mean, violent, and extremist views. You might not see those views as extreme because this is an echo chamber and you probably agree with them, but they’re extreme nonetheless when compared to what the average person would say.

Nobody ever thinks of themselves as the problem - we all have some story about how our behavior is justified and how those people over there are the real issue. Nah, you're probably part of the issue as well. I am too.

One of them being main stream media trying to stay relevant

Nah, "the rest of us" is ruining the internet by following the people in the top of the trash pit.

You know... nobody is stopping you from self hosting, building a website or digging a gopherhole?