Less than 1% of communities start 74% of conflicts

From Dramageddon: The Virtual Civil War by Gurwinder.  The subheading is How social media toxifies discourse.

Social media is having a much stranger effect on people than merely pushing them toward war; it's convincing them they’re headed for war when in fact they aren't. And among the victims of this corrosive delusion are countless influential opinion-makers, as well as everyone influenced by them.

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Indeed, a 2021 Pew survey of 10,000 US social media users found that only 9% of people shared or posted political content online. “Bashing the fash” or “owning the libs” simply wasn’t something the average person cared about.

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explain both the woke and the red-pilled, manifesting as either a victim-complex (“Look at me, I’m being censored/discriminated against!”) or a savior-complex (“Look at me, I’m standing up to the groomers/bigots!”)

Now, here's the thing: research suggests that people with narcissistic traits are more likely to use social media, and more likely to have social media clout. A meta-analysis of 62 studies (N = 13,430) found that narcissism was positively correlated with time spent on social media, frequency of tweets, and number of followers. Narcissists likely find social media a useful (and addictive) way of acquiring the social validation they so deeply crave.

It appears that it’s this small group of needy narcissists who drive the majority of toxicity online. According to a meta-analysis of eight studies (N = 8,434), online political discussions attract superficial, status-driven people who act as horridly online as they do offline. This finding was corroborated by a large study of 36,000 communities on Reddit, which found that less than 1% of communities start 74% of conflicts.

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My suspicions have since been confirmed by research. A 2021 study analyzed 2.7 million tweets and Facebook posts, and found that social media posts that attack the opposing political tribe receive twice as many shares as posts that champion one’s own tribe. Furthermore, each additional word referencing a rival idea or person (e.g. ‘Biden’ or ‘Liberal’ if coming from a Republican source) increased the likelihood of a post being shared by an average of 67%.

The high engagement that online belligerence receives has a double effect: it means that toxic posts are more widely circulated, but it also means that people who act toxically are rewarded. Rewards are incentives, and an analysis of 12.7 million tweets found that people who received high engagement for online nastinesss tended to repeat the behavior. Now combine this with the fact that everyone, narcissist or otherwise, is most motivated to post when they are aggrieved, panicked, or enraged, and you have a recipe for disaster.

Read the whole thing for links and for a larger discussion.