It didn’t take long for the owner of Facebook’s new Twitter-like new app, called Threads, to get tens of millions of people signing up for it within the first couple of days this week.
But why are so many people jumping on this newest platform so quickly and what does that say about where we are when it comes to social media?
A recent study may give us some clues. The social scientists in this study analyzed close to 60-million Facebook posts to measure how user’s use it.
They discovered that the more controversial the posts, the faster and more widely they spread to a larger number of other people who read it. And that held true regardless of the particular topic.
Other studies have shown predicted results with posts that spread the fastest cause more controversial and often negative reactions and may be more likely to cause polarized engagement, even including what could be called hate speech.
And now with a federal judge’s recent ruling about free speech being threatened by government efforts to keep fake news and false truths from spreading, social media could become an even more wild and more dangerous wild west in the digital world in which we live.
And that suggests that personal responsibility may never be as important as it is now.
(Photo Getty Images)