Ian Axel Anderson, a Caltech faculty researcher in applied social psychology, discusses psychological and interpersonal processes that influence media use and human-computer interaction. Dr Anderson has studied how Internet companies exploit social-psychological processes – such as habit formation, social learning, and attention span – in ways that threaten democracy and the rule of law. He is a member of the Coalition for Independent Technology Research.1

Dr. Anderson’s experiments have studied habits, online posting and scrolling behavior, hate speech, extremism, conspiracies, rumors, well-being, identity, stereotypes, and social media influence. He mentioned "The Facebook Papers",2 which were tens of thousands of Facebook's internal documents that former Facebook employee and whistleblower Frances Haugen released to the Securities and Exchange Commission and The Wall Street Journal in 2021.3 These documents establish that Facebook executives knew that their algorithms were creating problems for many users and others including proactively inciting violence such as the genocide of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar but prioritized company income over the wellbeing of users and society more generally.4 Anderson said that Facebook's content moderation policies in the US and Europe are much more friendly to users and society than in many other countries.

Mark Twain observed, "How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and how hard it is to undo that work again!"5 Anderson discusses research supporting this observation. This problem is exacerbated by the "continued influence effect", which is the tendency for misinformation to continue to influence memory and reasoning even after a person agrees that the information was erroneous.6 A more subtle effect is that people who read only headlines on social media have less actual knowledge while thinking they know more than people who catch a standard news broadcast or read a longer report in a standard newspaper (but not a tabloid); the actual knowledge of both may translate into increased civic participation, but the actions of those informed by social media headlines are less likely to be constructive.7

For countering misinformation in social media, crowdsourcing trustworthyness, i.e., judgments of news source quality, seems to be effective.8

Anderson is interviewed by Karl Brooks and Spencer Graves. 

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Coalition for Independent Technology Research members (https://independenttechresearch.org/members), accessed 2024-08-05.

Wikipedia, "2021 Facebook leak" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Facebook_leak).

Wikipedia, "Frances Haugen" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Haugen).

Wikipedia, "Rohingya genocide" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohingya_genocide). In defense of the decisions by executives of Facebook and Meta, they could be fired if they prioritized the wellbeing of users over shareholder value.

Wikiquote, Mark Twain.

The "Continued influence effect" is listed in a table in the section on "Other memory biases" in the Wikipedia article on "List of cognitive biases" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases#Other_memory_biases). See also Cacciatore, Michael A. (9 April 2021), "Misinformation and public opinion of science and health: Approaches, findings, and future directions", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118 (15): e1912437117.

Svenja Schäfer and Christian Schemer (2024-01-03) "Informed participation? An investigation of the relationship between exposure to different news channels and participation mediated through actual and perceived knowledge", Frontiers in Psychology, 14.

Gordon Pennycook and David G. Rand (2019-01-28) "Fighting misinformation on social media using crowdsourced judgments of news source quality", PNAS: Psychological and Cognitive Sciences, 116 (7) 2521-2526.