Americans overestimate online toxicity, believing 43% of Reddit users post severely toxic comments when only 3% actually do, and this misperception inculcates pessimism about society.
Angela Y. Lee, Eric Neumann, and colleagues surveyed 1,090 American adults via the online platform CloudResearch Connect to compare people's perceptions of harmful online behavior with platform-level data from past research. Participants overestimated the prevalence of Reddit users posting toxic content by 13-fold and overestimated the prevalence of Facebook users sharing false news by 5-fold, guessing 47% of users post false news while only 8.5% actually do. Even when participants accurately identified toxic content in a signal detection task, many still overestimated how many users post such content. In an experiment, correcting this misperception made participants feel more positive, reduced their perception of moral decline, and decreased related misperceptions about how many Americans desire less harmful content online. According to the authors, people mistake an extremely vocal minority posting toxic and harmful content online for a majority, failing to realize that such content mostly comes from a small group of prolific users. Correcting this misperception could help mitigate the negative effects of social media on social cohesion.
