The metaphor of "funhouse mirrors" of distorted perception is apt. We have installed toxic channels of deeply negative behaviours into our society. Now we find ourselves trying to protect reality.

The paper mentions all the points of concern, with even a brief reference to... the money. Given the enormous influence of advertising revenue (i.e. how these corporations survive), these sections in the paper are essential to consider:

=> Whose opinions are represented online?

=> Why are false norms worse online than offline?

From the first section (Whose opinions are represented online?):

""False norms emerge, in part, because social media is dominated by a small number of extreme people who post only their most extreme opinions, and do so at a very high volume (Bor & Petersen, 2022) , while more moderate or neutral opinions are practically invisible online. Encountering a disproportionate volume of extreme opinions can lead to false perceptions that the norms are far more extreme than they actually are. This occurs across domains and platforms.""

From the second section (Why are false norms worse online than offline?):

""Social media operates in an attention economy, where design features and algorithms are designed to elicit as much engagement as possible (Fisher , 2022; Van Bavel et al., 2024). Platforms then sell ad space to companies based on indices of attention. As such, there is a strong incentive for users to create content that maximizes engagement–rather than content that reflects reality. And, given that those who are the most active on social media are also the most extreme (Barberá & Rivero, 2015; Bor & Petersen, 2022 ), this creates a perverse incentive structure to reward surprising, negative, extreme or divisive content. For instance, news stories that express outgroup animosity are 67% more likely to be shared on social media (Rathje et al., 2021). Thus, people with more extreme or hostile beliefs tend to dominate discourse – drowning out or overshading more mild or nuanced content (Bail, 2022) and leading to false beliefs about the norms of a community . These online dynamics are amplified by the design features and recommendation algorithms on various platforms (Brady et al., 2020; Brady , Jackson, et al., 2023). For instance, a recent analysis of the algorithm on Twitter/X found that it prioritizes evocative content (Milli et al., 2023) . This incentivizes users to create this type of content which can help them build a large following while warping public perceptions of norms. This is compounded due to the fact that there is often little motivation for someone to post a nuanced or moderate opinion on social media. Moreover , nuanced or moderate posts often risk hostility from more extreme ingroup and outgroup members, especially since such hostility has no cost for the aggressor due to the social distance the online environment af fords (Robertson et al., in press) . Indeed, people who are politically moderate were more likely to report being harassed online, even though they were also less likely to post (Bail, 2022) . People who hold less extreme beliefs have less investment in arguing, and when attacked by people who have more strongly held beliefs, perceive it as more hostile. The fact that people who “troll” other people typically have higher dark triad characteristics also does not encourage nuanced debate (Brubaker et al., 2021""

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The very real effects of social media on actual public discourse (extreme opinions, insults, threats) can be observed everywhere in daily life. And even on HN, where moderation has been successful, I have no doubt that dang and other moderators could recount dreadful things.