The majority of Americans use some form of social media, according to the Pew Research Center. A team of researchers at Virginia Tech spent the past eight years trying to better understand how human behavior influences the version of reality we see online.
Alice Jang noticed a lot of her friends on social media seemed to be eating amazing dinners and having enviable adventures in far off countries. “Think about on your Instagram feed, everybody’s having an amazing vacation, but you’re having like normal life,” Jang, who teaches information technology at Virginia Tech, says.
She began studying which types of images and stories people are most likely to share. She asked over 1,000 people to participate in a study that mimics social media platforms. They tended to show a glossier, more action-packed version of their lives. And those posts often got the most attention through likes and shares.
“Whatever you are seeing in the online feed is not the representation of the real world,” Jang says. “And because everyone is sharing the rare ones, they prefer to share the rare ones, you’ll see more of those in the feed.”
She points to some viral video trends, like one that showed teenagers chewing on Tide laundry pods, which led many to the hospital after being poisoned.
As social media companies develop technologies with more artificial intelligence, Jang says they may use our biases to push us towards a skewed version of reality.
Viswanath Venkatesh, who also worked on the study, says it’s important think critically about what you see online.
“And I think it’s gonna be important looking ahead as well, as we already see so much fake news, we’ve been seeing so much fake news for some years,” Venkatesh said. “But now it’s increased a lot more with AI, with fake videos. And so that means that [we] could really easily make bad decisions or feel poorly based on something fake.”
Venkatesh advises keeping all this in mind when making health or shopping decisions. He said it’s also important to try to educate young people about social media literacy and why they should be wary of trusting videos in their feeds as real.
