Overview
- Researchers surveyed 1,090 U.S. adults via CloudResearch Connect and compared perceptions with platform-level estimates drawn from prior large-scale studies.
- Participants guessed that 43% of Reddit users post highly toxic comments, while research-based estimates put the share at about 3%.
- Respondents believed 47% of Facebook users share false or misleading news, compared with estimates of roughly 8.5%.
- In a signal-detection task, many participants correctly recognized toxic posts yet still overestimated how common such behavior is among users.
- The authors attribute the gap to a small, highly active minority and algorithmic amplification, and they report that correcting misperceptions reduced pessimism and perceptions of moral decline.