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Social media often feels like a minefield—dodging spiteful and incendiary posts when you’re simply trying to, say, scroll through cute cat photos or seek out Reddit advice on vacuum cleaners.
Fortunately, the internet isn’t necessarily brimming with trolls. People actually tend to vastly overestimate their prevalence, according to online survey results recently published in PNAS Nexus.
Stanford University researchers asked more than 1,000 adults in the United States about their perceptions of the social media trolls behind “severely toxic” comments, which were defined as “hateful, aggressive, and disrespectful” posts that could encourage people to exit an online discussion. The study volunteers were recruited strategically so that the participant pool mirrored proportions of certain demographics, including gender and race, reported in the 2020 U.S. census.
Read more: “Why Your Brain Hates Other People”
Participants estimated how many Reddit users post severely toxic comments—on average, people guessed that number to be about 43 percent. In reality, this figure is closer to around 3 percent, a study presented at the 2023 Association for Computing Machinery Web Conference found. Survey respondents also speculated on the share of Facebook users that circulate fake news, proposing 47 percent on average. But the reality is around 8.5 percent, according to a 2019 Science Advances paper.
Meanwhile, survey respondents were nearly right on the money when guessing the portion of all Reddit postings that are churned out by trolls. They proposed on average that around 38 percent of all Reddit comments—toxic or not—come from these mischievous users, when the reality is closer to around a third, or more than 559 million comments over the 2023 study’s year-and-a-half duration.
The research team also shared accurate data on toxic social media users with some participants, and they reported feeling more positive and more likely to believe that “the character of their fellow U.S. citizens was in less moral decline” than the participants who weren’t given the true information. This group was also more likely to recognize that most people don’t want harmful content to go viral on social media.
“This particular, widely held misperception about social media toxicity can have serious consequences, leaving participants feeling negatively, with higher pessimism about the moral state of their fellow citizens, and with more pluralistic ignorance about how much others desire harmful online content,” the authors wrote.
But this potentially perilous mismatch can be fixed, they noted, by “teaching people that social media can overrepresent the views of vocal accounts that post disproportionately often.”
So don’t let your conspiratorial uncle, or any other troll, cloud your conception of your favorite platforms—and humanity more broadly. 
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Lead image: eamesBot / Shutterstock
