It’s not just online content itself that can create conflict; it’s also the context surrounding it. Online, we come across many ideas and communities we may not encounter much in real life. This can lead to disagreements if people post something with one audience in mind, only to have it read by another. Social media researcher danah boyd (she styles her name as lower case) calls it ‘context collapse’. In real life, a chat with a close friend may have a very different tone to a conversation with a co-worker or stranger: the fact that our friends know us well means there’s less potential for misinterpretation. Boyd points to events like weddings as another potential source of face-to-face context collapse. A speech that’s aimed at friends could leave family uncomfortable; most of us have sat through a best man’s anecdote that has made this mistake and misfired. But while weddings are (usually) carefully planned, online interactions may inadvertently include friends, family, co-workers, and strangers all in the same conversation. Comments can easily be taken out of context, with arguments emerging from the confusion.[27]
According to boyd, underlying contexts can also change over time, particularly as people are growing up. ‘While teens’ content might be public, most of it is not meant to be read by all people across all time and all space,’ she wrote back in 2008. As a generation raised on social media grows older, this issue will come up more often. Viewed out of context, many historical posts – which can linger online for decades – will seem inappropriate or ill-judged.
In some cases, people have decided to exploit the context collapse that occurs online. Although ‘trolling’ has become a broad term for online abuse, in early internet culture a troll was mischievous rather than hateful.[28] The aim was to provoke a sincere reaction to an implausible situation. Many of Jonah Peretti’s pre-BuzzFeed experiments used this approach, running a series of online pranks to attract attention.
Trolling has since become an effective tactic in social media debates. Unlike real life, the interactions we have online are in effect on a stage. If a troll can engineer a seemingly overblown response from their opponent, it can play well with random onlookers, who may not know the full context. The opponent, who may well have a justified point, ends up looking absurd. ‘O Lord make my enemies ridiculous,’ as Voltaire once said.[29]
Many trolls – of both the prankster and abuser kinds – wouldn’t behave this way in real life. Psychologists refer to it as the ‘online disinhibition effect’: shielded from face-to-face responses and real-life identities, people’s personalities may adopt a very different form.[30] But it isn’t simply a matter of a few people being trolls-in-waiting. Analysis of antisocial behaviour online has found that a whole range of people can become trolls, given the right circumstances. In particular, we are more likely to act like trolls when we are in a bad mood, or when others in the conversation are already trolling.[31]
As well as creating new types of interactions, the internet is also creating new ways to study how things spread. In the field of infectious diseases, it’s generally not feasible to deliberately infect people to see how something spreads, as Ronald Ross tried to do with malaria in the 1890s. If modern researchers do run infection studies, they are usually small, expensive, and subject to careful ethical scrutiny. For the most part, we have to rely on observed data, using mathematical models to ask ‘what if?’ questions about outbreaks. The difference online is that it can be relatively cheap and easy to spark contagion deliberately, especially if you happen to run a social media company.
If they had been paying close attention, thousands of Facebook users might have noticed that on 11 January 2012, their friends were slightly happier than usual. At the same time, thousands of others may have spotted that their friends were sadder than expected. But even if they did notice a change in what their friends were posting online, it wasn’t genuine change in their friends’ behaviour. It was an experiment.
Researchers at Facebook and Cornell University had wanted to explore how emotions spread online, so they’d altered people’s News Feeds for a week and tracked what happened. The team published the results in early 2014. By tweaking what people were exposed to, they found that emotion was contagious: people who saw fewer positive posts had on average posted less positive content themselves, and vice versa. In hindsight, this result might seem unsurprising, but at the time it ran counter to a popular notion. Before the experiment, many people believed that seeing cheerful content on Facebook could make us feel inadequate, and hence less happy.[32]
The research itself soon sparked a lot of negative emotions, with several scientists and journalists questioning how ethical it was to run such a study. ‘Facebook manipulated users’ moods in secret experiment,’ read one headline in the Independent. One prominent argument was that the team should have obtained consent, asking whether users were happy to participate in the study.[33]
Looking at how design influences people’s behaviour is not necessarily unethical. Indeed, medical organisations regularly run randomised experiments to work out how to encourage healthy behaviour. For example, they might send one type of reminder about cancer screening to some people and a different one to others, and then see which gets the best response.[34] Without these kinds of experiments, it would be difficult to work out how much a particular approach actually shifted people’s behaviour.
If an experiment could have a detrimental effect on users, though, researchers need
