As the self-proclaimed “front page of the internet,” the (anti)social media website reddit has largely flown under the radar when it comes to the high-profile disinformation failings of Facebook, YouTube, and others. It rightfully made a splash by 2020’s five years too-late banning the hateful cesspool that was the page (called a subreddit) devoted to Donald Trump, but plenty of disinformation still festers there. But the site’s design, in which users subscribe to specific subreddits, means that users can create explicit bubbles, where they will see only the exact sorts of posts that they want. So if you’re not looking for climate denial, for example, you’re not apt to come across (or at least won't subscribe to) the “climate skeptics” subreddit.
But if you did, you might be tempted to post something and try and educate some of the users. After all, popping into an echo chamber with some reality is always helpful, right?
Maybe not, according to a new draft study. The research by Lisa Oswald and Jonathan Bright has not gone through peer-review yet, but as is customary with computer science papers, has been posted to arXiv.org as a preprint.
By looking at posts to the “climate skeptics” subreddit, they found that while posts that aligned with the r/climateskeptics subreddit’s climate denial got more upvotes from users, the ones injecting reality, coded as “dissonant,” tended to generate a lot more discussion.
And while some might have expected those users who engage with dissonant views, and are therefore exposed to facts that challenge their skepticism, might become educated enough to stop posting, the researchers found the opposite. Those who “engaged with dissonant submissions were also more likely to return to the forum.”
Now first, we feel compelled to point out that how reddit works makes this comparison more complicated than it might seem. A simple comparison of upvotes for content consonant with the denial of this subreddit versus content that is dissonant doesn’t capture reddit’s functionality.
Because how you use reddit shapes what you see. If you just scroll your own “front page,” you see a mix of the popular posts from all the different subreddits you subscribe to- so if you’re subscribed to r/climateskeptics, you’ll see posts that get upvotes, but you’re almost certainly not going to see any of those dissonant posts that are downvoted.
So how do those posts get downvotes in the first place? By the people who go directly to the r/climateskeptics page, and see all the posts there. The users that engage on those posts, then, are actually a subset of the most dedicated deniers, which in turn skews the study’s treatment of how users engage.
Their hypothesis was that users who engaged with dissonant posts would then be less likely to keep commenting, but of course they found the opposite, leading to the conclusion that there’s probably little value in trying to inject reality into an echo-chamber like this.
Which may still be true, but if the intent was to test if exposing facts to people who are only mildly bought in to the “skepticism” would effectively persuade them, this wouldn’t be a good way to test.
Because what this shows is that the diehard users who spend their days arguing about climate change online aren’t doing it because they’re interested in a good faith debate as a way to discern truth, they’re doing it because it’s fun and feels good to fight for your point of view.
And those feelings, it turns out, don’t really care about facts!