I think this is merely an adjustment to how people use social media.<p>Regular people expressing their opinion on public media is only a 10-year old phenomenon. But people have been self-censoring in real life forever.<p>There are things you say at work and things you say at home. There are the subjects you avoid at family gatherings not to spoil the weekend, and you usually don't want all your neighbors to know what you've been up to over your vacations.<p>Social media being new, people didn't realize the consequences and started expressing stuff they wouldn't have otherwise.<p>Yes, people adapt, and share less. Perhaps it's social cooling, but maybe it needs cooling a little bit.
I have noticed I avoid watching "inappropriate" things on netflix because I am afraid of the suggestions they will generate, which inevitably everyone will see when I bring it up on the TV. The few times I did, I thumbs-downed it to avoid that.<p>I wonder how much unconventional content is being harmed by this. It's really annoying.
Using social media at all, feels very risky. No matter what you say it can be taken out of context, or the context will change within the next decade and you can be made out to be a monster.<p>I was actually able to find tons of friends and partners back in 2019 when I disconnected from social media. Even though there's a slight temptation to go back being trapped in the house, it's like the temptation to take another drink when you've already had too many.<p>In fact during the pandemic I decided to delete my Reddit account, I found it was making me very angry for naught.
Yeah. I see my friends sharing less and less content on FB these days. But then again, most stuff you see on a typical FB feed today is ads, groups, fanpages, Marketplace and whatnot. Definitely way less content related to friends (other than their fanpage comments).
Can we just go ten years back where everything was more spontaneous and candid? Where the thing to raise your pressure was your crush's hot beach photos, not people making themselves idiots in politically charged flamewars.
I love this article. It hits home as well. I stopped posting a long time ago on sites that tie my posts to my identity (thank you HN for at least not being overt).<p>I hope that we as a society can adopt to this understanding. It may mean normalizing things that are now considered to be deviant. The question is where we draw boundaries. And the reality is that the second we start drawing any boundaries, is the second we fall back into the social cooling trap.<p>It is like a giant compressor operating on the entire planet's behavior.
It's interesting. I definitely find myself censoring myself online at times. But I also find myself self-censoring offline: at work, with my girlfriend, family.. you name it. Filtering oneself is an important trait.<p>On the other hand, self-censoring oneself to not criticize the current government or make an off-color political joke feels like oppression.
This is also known as a "chilling effect"; A prime example of this is the self-censorship [0] of Wikipedia-readers after Snowden revealed that the US government was collecting data on people reading Wikipedia articles.<p>[0]: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect#Chilling_effects_on_Wikipedia_users" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect#Chilling_effec...</a>
Panopticon is a very old idea about this issue<p><a href="https://ethics.org.au/ethics-explainer-panopticon-what-is-the-panopticon-effect/" rel="nofollow">https://ethics.org.au/ethics-explainer-panopticon-what-is-th...</a>
This just sounds like being a polite human in public spaces? Common advice was always to avoid talking about politics and religion or anything else controversial in places you need to get along.
Literally for decades I have been explaining to people that email is like a postcard, i.e. always assume your message is visible publicly.<p>When social media became popular, I extended the analogy to it, and yet people continue to be shocked and amazed when their online conversations spread further than they realized.<p>Wanna keep a secret? Don’t tell anyone!
Old site that I first saw on HN bringing up this issue: <a href="https://www.socialcooling.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.socialcooling.com/</a>
I became interested in economics just because I was searching for some boring stuff to post in my Facebook feed to lower my insurance quote on a Camaro SS.
I think many out there that are a victim of social cooling. Probably way more than we realize due to their silence.<p>You have to think twice about posting or messaging anything because you have to assume that the service will later be breached and your privacy exposed. Similarly, you have to weigh the consequences of simply signing up for a service in the first place due to the risk of the service or company being breached later.<p>I also think the archiving sites that want to download and archive everything add more to social cooling than anything else.
TL;DR: data about us being collected, saved and published by social media makes us all more risk-averse when it comes to expressing our opinions online.<p>I tend to agree. I have a twitter account and I try to never get into political discussions there, because I know that expressing the "wrong" opinion could cost me my job, as it has others. Even expressing something that I view as positive and encouraging could be misinterpreted. I feel like around 2000-2005, there wasn't so much pressure to be politically correct. People could discuss ideas more freely. That being said, I was younger too, and less risk-averse.<p>That being said, I also remember that in the early YouTube days, comment threads were completely filled with hate. There were people posting messages like "you're ugly, you should kill yourself" constantly. You'd look at these people's accounts and you saw all the comments they posted. There were trolls who would just run around and post hate comments, particularly on LGBT videos. I really wished that someone would delete these accounts and all their associated comments, but YouTube did absolutely nothing about it for years. It was pretty depressing.
Makes me wonder if you have the corollary concept : Social Heating... my feeling is social media has a multiplicative effect on both sides of the thermometer
>Social cooling refers to the idea that if “you feel you are being watched, you change your behavior.” And the massive amounts of data being collected, especially online, is exxagerating this effect.<p>This is a strange perspective to me. I feel like I'm much more aware of being watched by the other users of a social media site when I post than of the inscrutable algorithms.
I know a lot of people are bringing this discussion back to social media which certainly has a dramatic effect, but it's interesting that there's a concurrent flame war over here: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25761017" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25761017</a> with a lot of people coming out against Apple's "Racial Equity and Justice Initiative".<p>Working at multiple tech companies and hanging out with people from others, I've never heard any techy people voice those kind of opinions in person. Are the people speaking up in that thread simply different people, or is there an afk social cooling happening too?
Interesting article, and from 2017 so we are all more aware of how the tracking measures have continued to grow continuously since then.<p>Nice example of how one fact can be used to deduce/guess/assume the following traits, which of course won't all necessarily be correct or accurate.
>>
(Example – I have an advanced degree. This simple piece of data predicts that: I despise and fear Donald Trump and the Republicans; I am a good critical thinker who understands the difference between the high journalistic standards of the New York Times or the Washington Post and the non-existent ones of Fox “News,” Breitbart, etc.; I don’t believe in alien abductions or faked moon landings; I know that evolution and climate change are true beyond any reasonable doubt; I’m not a theist, much less a Christian, Mormon, or Islamic fundamentalist; etc. All that from just one bit of data. Imagine what else others know about you and me?)
>>
My personal bigger fear which leads to cooling isn't that big corps extract data about me and try to sell me things, but rather small, dedicated Twitter mobs (I'll say it, wokes).
Anyone read the book Daemon by Daniel Suarez? Sometimes it feels like we're heading in that direction, where each person has a reputation score, and everyone can see it.
This reminds me of the Hawthorne effect<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect</a>
Isn't the opposite, a kind of social heating, what we are actually observing though? This model does not seem to predict what I feel we are actually observing.
A bunch of people just stormed the Capitol less than a week ago on account of being Terminally Online, I don't think there's a lot of evidence for this hypothesis.
It's pretty easy to post online pseudonymously so I don't feel like it's a big issue.<p>I post online a lot and the vast majority is pseudonymous or anonymous.
I am curious, since this comes from being a good critical thinker, is it provably true for each of these news sources?<p>"(Example – I have an advanced degree. This simple piece of data predicts that: I despise and fear Donald Trump and the Republicans; I am a good critical thinker who understands the difference between the high journalistic standards of the New York Times or the Washington Post and the non-existent ones of Fox “News,” Breitbart, etc.;"
Facebook is conspiring with The Man to ruin your life over thoughtcrimes, so you... use it to livestream yourself participating in an insurrection? What exactly are people self-censoring, if not conspiracies to overthrow the United States?<p>I thought this was a cool theory the first time I read it, but it's aged poorly. If anything we might have the opposite problem... social media freeing people from the norms of polite society, which turned out to be load-bearing.