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Americans overestimate how many social media users post harmful content
(academic.oup.com)
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this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2025
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Great link! The anti-humanist tilt the toxicity of rightwing owned corporate social media has caused in people is alarming. People don't listen when you point out structural reasons for the toxicity that are results of active choices of the platform owners (they are too wrapped up in emotional reactions to toxic users to focus on the broader system causing it) and it scares me because it is beginning to make people turn even more towards a cynical future and isolate in private bubbles that are only more vulnerable to structural forces of toxicity trying to make us feel cornered and alone.
I don't think it is any coincidence this is happening, it just makes me deeply sad. When people pull back from seeing a positive potential in social media they completely surrender the capacity to hear narratives that challenge the structures of power around them because the only way they will then hear about the broader world is through established corporate news channels which are literally no less toxic than social media anyways even though people ignore this fact.
To give one specific example, if people weren't on social media they wouldn't know about the Palestinian Genocide, it was completely and thoroughly sweeped under the rug in the channels that people have retreated to from social media because "social media = bad" and if that doesn't scare you, you are an idiot.
This article is super helpful as a reality check for people lost in cynical reductive narratives about humans on social media, thank you!
I certainly don't doubt the top line trends here in this study. However, I wonder how the fediverse might differ. Anyone can set up a Lemmy or Mastodon instance, regardless of their technical aptitude and desire to secure the instance from toxic content. It's also inherently more anonymous. A more direct comparison might be 4chan not Reddit.
Both of the platforms they studied on have more sophisticated methods to determine bad actors because of their dominance. Particularly Facebook, where a profile is supposed to be mappable to a single, real identity.
That being said, there's a very real concern about how algorithms end up placing these "loud mouths" in other people's feeds. After all, outrage is still something that is preferred by algorithms. So those 3 to 7% of users creating the toxic content, might represent an outsized proportion of views.
It's good to know the reality on these platforms is that most people are reasonable. I guess the bigger question is why people come to the opposite conclusion. And I think that algorithms overly indexing on outrage are part of that.
It has to do with the rise in rightwing "populism" which is founded on the morality story that people are inherently toxic and bad and must be violently oppressed by righteous force to create society.
This story is being firehosed at people by the rich in a million ways and people are largely uncritically accepting it. If you want to understand it, look at how in the US people have become convinced society is becoming more violent, people are becoming less trustable, and that crime is increasing year over year. If you look at the evidence, it points in the opposite direction except for a brief spike of crime during Covid, but who cares about reality? The story of everybody becoming more depraved and scary is a good one and it gets us engaged, why talk about hard numbers and policy?