The Dark Psychology of Social Networks

Upon watching the Netflix documentary "The Social Dilemma", I went on to read a couple of more articles on the topic. One interesting article that I came across is an article on The Atlantic called "The Dark Psychology of Social Networks", which focused on the psychology behind how a world with social media changed the way individuals and societies behave.

One concept mentioned in the article is moral grandstanding, which describes "what happens when people use moral talk to enhance their prestige in a public forum". Grandstanders dial up moral charges and scrutinize every word spoken by their opponents, which obscures nuance and truth in the process. One other phenomena mentioned is the invention of News Feed, the "Like" button, and "Retweet", which flattened the hierarchy of credibility and enabled the frictionless spread of content. Such functions have led to fake accounts and extreme posts that are used by bad actors to spread misinformation and polarize users.

The article went on to offer three suggestions that social media platforms can employ to limit the negative impacts. (1) Reduce the frequency and intensity of public performance. (2) Reduce the reach of unverified accounts. (3) Reduce the contagiousness of low-quality information. These suggestions were offered in late 2019, but it is a relief to see that a lot of these suggestions have already been put in place, or started to be introduced, by social media platforms. Twitter, for example, has started putting warning messages on tweets containing misinformation on COVID-19 as well as election and voting, including those posted by president Donald Trump. Just last week, Twitter introduced a set of changes that include discouraging users from retweeting posts without adding their own commentary, and showing prompts with links to credible sources for tweets that are labeled as misleading. These actions and the increasing awareness on the impact of social media gives a promising sign to mitigating the many issues that are mentioned in the documentary and the article.

Reference:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/12/social-media-democracy/600763/

https://techcrunch.com/2020/10/09/twitter-retweet-changes-quote-tweet-election-misinformation/?utm_medium=TCnewsletter&tpcc=TCdailynewsletter&guccounter=1