A two-year study at the University of Warwick—Fanning the Flames of Hate: Social Media and Hate Crime—found that “right-wing anti-refugee sentiment on Facebook [in Germany] predicts violent crimes against refugees in otherwise similar municipalities with higher social media usage.” In an interview, the two researchers who conducted the study said they believe the Facebook effect generated 10 percent of all anti-refugee violence nationwide in Germany during the period they put under scrutiny. Amanda Taub and Max Fisher at The New York Times report:
Karsten Müller and Carlo Schwarz, researchers at the University of Warwick, scrutinized every anti-refugee attack in Germany, 3,335 in all, over a two-year span. In each, they analyzed the local community by any variable that seemed relevant. Wealth. Demographics. Support for far-right politics. Newspaper sales. Number of refugees. History of hate crime. Number of protests.
One thing stuck out. Towns where Facebook use was higher than average, like Altena, reliably experienced more attacks on refugees. That held true in virtually any sort of community — big city or small town; affluent or struggling; liberal haven or far-right stronghold — suggesting that the link applies universally.
To find some personal stories related to the research, the two reporters visited Altena, a town of 17,500 in Germany’s most populous state of North Rhine-Westphalia, which has a dwindling population and a shrinking economy. When the mayor opened the doors to more refugees than other communities of Altena’s size were allotted, most residents greeted them warmly. People volunteered in droves to teach German to the refugees—most from Syria and Afghanistan—and give them other assistance.
But when the person who runs the refugee integration center in town launched a Facebook page to organize food drives and other volunteer events, she encountered venomous responses. These were the product of some outsiders and a few locals, not reflective of the generally tolerant attitude of most residents toward refugees in Altena. After the Facebook page was put up, a firefighter trainee with no history of political involvement or violence set ablaze the attic of an apartment building where refugees were being housed. Nobody was hurt. The arsonist was widely condemned, but local Facebook pages were filled with hateful comments shortly before the mayor was later stabbed by an attacker reportedly furious over his pro-refugee stance. He was not seriously injured but it was a close thing.
The researchers make clear they are not blaming Facebook or social media in general for causing anti-refugee violence:
While our measure of social media sentiment is necessarily correlated with media attention about refugees, we find that coverage by major German news outlets does not have an independent effect on hate crimes, once we take social media into account. General right-wing sentiment, as measured by the weekly number of protesters of the “Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West” (PEGIDA), in turn particularly spurs local demonstrations, in contrast to the [ultra-right Alternative für Deutschland]-based salience that only has an effect on violent incidents. Because our preferred measures of social media exposure are orthogonal to internet usage and local right-wing ideology—and negatively correlated with newspaper consumption—these findings are consistent with an independent propagation effect of social media on hate crimes.
When interpreting our results, we do not claim that social media itself causes crimes against refugees out of thin air. In fact, hate crimes are likely to have many fundamental drivers; local differences in xenophobic ideology or a higher salience of immigrants are only two obvious examples. Rather, our argument is that social media can act as a propagating mechanism for the flare-up of hateful sentiments. Taken together, the evidence we present suggests that quasi-random shifts in the local population’s exposure to such sentiments on social media can magnify their effect on refugee attacks.
Increased violence was not linked with general use of the internet, the researchers found, but specifically to Facebook. Experts are said to believe that the link to violence isn’t a product of overt hate speech on Facebook but to the ways the social media platform “distorts users’ picture of reality and social norms.” Facebook’s algorithm determines each user’s newsfeed, the Times reports, and “promotes content that engages our base emotions.”
That algorithm is built around a core mission: promote content that will maximize user engagement. Posts that tap into negative, primal emotions like anger or fear, studies have found, perform best and so proliferate.
The way it works is that even if the anti-refugee voices are a minority, they can dominate the newsfeed, which can affect everyone. Unlike real life where moderating voices and respected authority figures have a major impact, Facebook puts people in silos with likeminded people and increases the impact of extremist views by promoting those “base emotions,” the researchers say.
Hatred thus becomes contagious.