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Experts say social media has a "Funhouse Mirror" effect on our perceptions of the offline world.
Opinion: Social media warped my perception of reality
Over the past week, the algorithms that shape my social media feeds have been serving up tons of content about the Major League Baseball playoffs. This because the algorithms know that I am a fan of the Mets, who have been -- you should know -- on a surreal playoff run for the last two weeks.
A lot of that content is the usual: sportswriter opinion pieces or interviews with players talking about how their teams are “a great group of guys just trying to go out there and win one game at a time,” or team accounts rallying their fan bases with slick highlight videos or “drip reports” on the players’ fashion choices.
But there’s been a lot of uglier stuff too: Padres and Dodgers fan pages threatening each other after some on-field tension between the two teams and their opposing fanbases last week. Or a Mets fan page declaring “war” on Phillies fans who had been filmed chanting “f*ck the Mets” on their way out of their home stadium after a win. Or a clip of a Philly fan’s podcast in which he mocked Mets fans for failing to make Phillies fans feel "fear" at the Mets' ballpark.
As a person who writes often about political polarization for a living, my first thought upon seeing all this stuff was: aha, further evidence that polarization is fueling a deep anger and violence in American life, which is now bleeding into sports, making players more aggressive and fans more violent.
But in fact, there isn’t much evidence for this. Baseball games and crowds are actually safer now than in the past.
I had fallen for social media reflections of the real world that were distorted. It’s what some experts call “The Funhouse Mirror” aspect of the internet.
One of those experts is Claire Robertson, a postgraduate research fellow in political psychology at NYU and the University of Toronto, who studies how the online world warps our understanding of the offline world.
Since Robertson recently published a new paper on precisely this subject, I called her up to ask why it’s so easy for social media to trick us into believing that things are worse than they actually are.
Part of the problem, she says, is that “the things that get the most attention on social media tend to be the most extreme ones.” And that’s because of a nasty feedback loop between two things: first, an incentive structure for social media where profits depend on attention and engagement; and second, our natural inclination as human beings to pay the most attention to the most sensational, provocative, or alarming content.
“We’ve evolved to pay attention to things that are threatening,” says Robertson. “So it makes more sense for us to pay attention to a snake in the grass than to a squirrel.”
And as it happens, a huge amount of those snakes are released into social media by a very small number of people. “A lot of people use social media,” says Robertson, “but far fewer actually post – and the most ideologically extreme people are the most likely to post.”
People with moderate opinions, which is actually most people, tend to fare poorly on social media, says Robertson. One study, of Reddit, showed that 33% of all content was generated by just 3% of accounts, which spew hate. Another revealed that 80% of fake news on Facebook came from just 0.1% of all accounts.
“But the interesting thing,” she says, “is, what’s happening to the 99.9% of people that aren’t sharing fake news? What's happening to the good actors? How does the structure of the internet, quite frankly, screw them over?”
In fact, we screw ourselves over, and we can’t help it. Blame our brains. For the sake of efficiency, our gray matter is wired to take some shortcuts when we seek to form views about groups of people in the world. And social media is where a lot of us go to form those opinions.
When we get there, we are bombarded, endlessly, with the most extreme versions of people and groups – “Socialist Democrats” or “Fascist Republicans” or “Pro-Hamas Arabs” or “Genocidal Jews” or “immigrant criminals” or “racist cops.” As a result, we start to see all members of these groups as hopelessly extreme, bad, and threatening in the real world too.
Small wonder that Democrats’ and Republicans’ opinions of each other in the abstract have, over the past two decades, gotten so much worse. We don’t see each other as ideological opponents with different views but, increasingly, as existential threats to each other and our society.
Of course, it only makes matters worse when people in the actual real world are committed to spreading known lies – say, that elections are stolen or that legal immigrants who are going hungry are actually illegal immigrants who are eating cats.
But what’s the fix for all of this? Regulators in many countries are turning to tighter rules on content moderation. But Robertson says that’s not effective. For one thing, it raises “knotty” philosophical questions about what should be moderated and by whom. But beyond that, it’s not practical.
“It's a hydra,” she says. “If you moderate content on Twitter, people who want to see extreme content are going to go to FourChan. If you moderate the content on FourChan, they're going to go somewhere else.”
Rather than trying to kill the supply of toxic crap on social media directly, Robertson wants to reduce the demand for it, by getting the rest of us to think more critically about what we see online. Part of that means stopping to compare what we see online with what we know about the actual human beings in our lives – family, friends, neighbors, colleagues, classmates.
Do all “Republicans” really believe the loony theory that Hurricane Milton is a man-made weather event? Or is that just the opinion of one particularly fringe Republican? Do all people calling for an end to the suffering in Gaza really “support Hamas,” or is that the view of a small fringe with outsized exposure on social media?
“When you see something that’s really extreme and you start to think everybody must think that, really think: ‘Does my mom believe that? Do my friends believe that? Do my classmates believe that?’ It will help you realize that what you are seeing online is not actually a true reflection of reality.”
An Israeli infantry soldier inside a Jewish home in Kibbutz Be’eri that was destroyed by Hamas in their October 7, 2023 infiltration of southern Israeli communities. This community was attacked by Hamas infiltrators who killed some 100 people out of 1000 who lived in this community on October 7, 2023.
Seven key consequences of the Oct. 7 attack
A year ago today, Hamas militants shot and paraglided their way out of the Gaza Strip and went on a rampage through southern Israel, murdering more than 1,200 people and taking more than 240 hostages.
The attack set off a geopolitical earthquake in a region that a top US official had described, just a week earlier, as “quieter today than it has been in two decades.”
The noise ever since has been deafening.
Israel responded by unleashing a ferocious air and ground campaign in Gaza that sought to destroy Hamas and liberate the hostages. About half of them have been freed, the majority of those in a prisoner swap deal. Ninety-seven hostages are still in Gaza.
Israeli forces have weakened Hamas as a fighting force in a campaign that has killed more than 40,000 people in Gaza, according to local, Hamas-run health authorities. The dead include thousands of children. Close to two million Gazans, or nearly 90% of the pre-war population, have been displaced from their homes, and Israel has faced accusations of war crimes, including genocide, in international courts.
Meanwhile, months of cross-border clashes with Iran-backed Hezbollah in southern Lebanon have recently escalated – Israel last week assassinated the group’s leader and launched an invasion of Lebanon.
Tensions between Israel and Iran are reaching a crescendo as well. Iran recently fired hundreds of ballistic missiles at Israel, which has vowed to respond, potentially by striking Iranian oil facilities, in a move that could rock oil markets and the global economy.
We take a brief look at how the past year has shaped prospects for seven key players in this story:
1. The Palestinians. Their plight is most certainly back on the global agenda after years of being overlooked as Israel moved toward normalizing its relations with more Arab powers – especially Saudi Arabia – in deals that paid only lip service to eventual Palestinian statehood. Global sympathy for the Palestinian cause has risen, particularly among young people in the West. But Gaza has suffered immense destruction, and the occupation of the West Bank has only deepened over the past year. Support for a Palestinian state among Israelis, already waning in recent years, has plummeted, while the forces most hostile to that outcome in Israel are on a roll these days.
2. Benjamin Netanyahu. Before Oct. 7, 2023, the Israeli prime minister was on the ropes, facing corruption trials and mass protests over his judicial reforms. Then, the biggest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust occurred on his watch, cratering his support further. For months, he seemed to be on borrowed time, an unloved leader kept in power only by Israelis’ reluctance to change horses in mid-war. He faced criticism at home over failure to secure the release of more hostages, but also from far-right ministers who wanted to see even harsher reprisals in Gaza. Shifting the focus to defeating longtime foe Hezbollah, a policy 90% of Israelis support, has paid dividends: He is rising in the polls again. Just how far an emboldened Netanyahu is willing to go now is a big question in a region on fire.
3. Hamas. The terror group has lost thousands of its fighters and two of its most senior officials over the past year. Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar may still be alive, likely confined to a tunnel beneath the rubble of Gaza. Still, he miscalculated if he thought that global pressure would force Israel to negotiate a cease-fire, or that Hezbollah’s attacks on Israel from the North would cause Netanyahu to ease up on Gaza in the South. Still, it’s hard to imagine that the idea of Hamas, as an ideology of armed resistance against Israel, has been defeated, especially after the destruction that the IDF has visited upon the Palestinians over the past year. Over the next year, it will be crucial to see if the remainder of Hamas can shape any aspect of a post-war Gaza and whether it reconstitutes itself in any way.
4. Iran. Did Iran miscalculate too? Surely in the days after Oct. 7, Tehran didn’t expect that a year later Israel would be going on an offensive like this, smashing Iran’s No. 1 proxy in the region (Hezbollah) and mulling a major strike on Iran itself. That puts Iran in a tricky spot. As the leader of the “axis of resistance” against Israel, it has to keep resisting via its proxies. But with those proxies getting rolled up by Israel now, “Iran is exposed,” says Cliff Kupchan, head of research at Eurasia Group. “Iran misjudged power dynamics and sentiment in Israel. The IDF killed Nasrallah and severely degraded Hezbollah. Iran’s forward deterrence is gone.” That, he says, means Iran is likely to lean more heavily into its nuclear program now. That program, of course, is something Netanyahu is famously eager to try to destroy.
5. United States. The Biden administration has been largely unwavering in its rhetorical, military, and financial support for Israel, although it has also occasionally angered Israel and Israel supporters by pushing – ineffectively – for a cease-fire, or by raising concerns about the civilian death toll in Gaza. Partisan splits over Israel’s action in Gaza won’t be central to the upcoming presidential election – it will be decided by concerns about the economy, abortion access, and immigration. But the issue could affect the vote at the very margins, with some progressives and Arab-American voters in key swing states pledging not to vote at all in protest of the Biden administration’s support for Israel. The outcome of the election itself will matter on the ground: Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are both strong supporters of Israel, but Trump would give Netanyahu a much freer hand in dealings with the Palestinians, with Hezbollah, and with Iran.
6. Russia. It certainly hasn’t hurt Vladimir Putin to see so much of the world’s attention drawn away from his invasion of Ukraine. And to the extent that the US gets wound into an intractable conflict in the Middle East, so much the better from his perch, especially if regional jitters push up oil prices. But the Kremlin has to be careful. If Israel severely weakens Hezbollah, it could shake things loose in Syria, where the group’s fighters are a major ground force for Russia’s protégé, Bashar Assad. And if a wider Israel-Iran war erupts, Moscow could get drawn more deeply into a messy situation than it likes – after all, Putin’s already fighting a war of his own closer to home.
7. The Arab world. Popular opinion is strongly critical of Israel and the US. That has been a particular challenge for regimes in Egypt and Jordan, which have peace treaties with Israel and are close partners of the US. In Jordan, for example, even in a recent tightly controlled election, Islamist opposition parties that support Hamas surged in the polls. Saudi Arabia, arguably the preeminent Arab power now, is warily watching as Israel-Iran tensions escalate. Saudi Arabia and Iran are longtime rivals, but ties have been improving recently, and Riyadh has no interest in a wider war as it tries to move ahead with an ambitious domestic economic and social modernization drive. But Israel may yet have other ideas.