The Infinite Negativity Loop - part 1

Over the span of the past several years, especially in the time between 2020 and now, we’ve seen an uprising in the attention given to negative information on the internet. Between “ragebait” and therapy buzzwords, the cycle of decline appears never ending, but where is it all coming from? The internet is the home of opinions, which has been an objectively true statement since its’ creation and subsequent evolution into the modern-day goliath we all know and love/hate. That being said, the uptick in black and white thinking has to come from somewhere, so let’s unpack that.

NEGATIVITY BIAS V. CONFIRMATION BIAS

For many of us, social media has morphed from a thing of escape to a thing of destitute reality, wherein it’s hard to break away from negative news cycles once you’re in them. Much like the topic at large, many factors go into the reason why negative news is all you seem to find on your favored social media these days. We’ll start with confirmation bias. 

Confirmation bias is defined by Oxford English Dictionary as “the tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of one's existing beliefs or theories.” When applied to modern social media as we know it, it can be surmised that confirmation bias has a strong influence over the media consumption that we all partake in. An informative study was done on the matter of negativity and news trends, entitled Negative online news articles are shared more to social media, in which the authors spoke on negativity bias as a whole, with procured data to support their findings. In a subsection of this article they analyzed their findings on the subject of increased shares for negative news when split into in-group and out-group articles respectively, meaning negative news about people/politicians they support (in-group), and those they don’t support (out-group). Their findings supported the notion that confirmation bias has a noticeable effect on the amount of shares a news article gets across Facebook and X (Watson et al. Fig. 3). The authors further confirm this by stating plainly, “... with negativity being a stronger driver of the sharing of articles concerning political out-group rather than in-group concepts 49. This suggests that articles critical of political opponents receive disproportionate attention, lending credence to the argument that increased engagement with out-group content is driven by animosity 46.” (Watson et al.).

So, does that make confirmation bias the one true disease or all but an ugly symptom of something more? As surmised from Negative online news… we can understand this as a piece of the larger whole known as negativity bias, where confirmation bias is a factor but not the whole picture. Their initial research shows an increased number of shares for negative news of all kinds, not just that which is politically motivated (Watson et al. Fig. 1). Confirmation bias influences negativity, negativity bias influences the number of shares an article receives on social media, and around the cycle goes, enforcing your opinion with more negativity.

What’s truly fascinating about this study as a whole, lies in the converse results in negative news directly from news sites and that which gets shared on social media. This study focused on Facebook and Twitter, though the results of the study speak largely to my own point. As said by the authors, “Negative news articles are in the minority for all news sites (29% to 42%) 84,85. We also note that news articles are consistently less negative than the tweets that concern them, with all tweet samples being predominantly negative 85,86” (Watson et al.). So, with the knowledge that negative news garners less attention on the direct sites while their shares on social media tell a completely different story, it can be easily surmised that the infection of negativity is a social media problem, not a journalistic one per se. This of course springs another question, because why is negativity so enforced on social media?

Stick around for part two: Algorithmic Antagonization coming soon!

Thank you for reading!

- Eraser