Americans can become more cynical about the state of society when they see harmful behavior online. Three studies of the American public (n = 1,090) revealed that they consistently and substantially overestimated how many social media users contribute to harmful behavior online. On average, they believed that 43% of all Reddit users have posted severely toxic comments and that 47% of all Facebook users have shared false news online. In reality, platform-level data shows that most of these forms of harmful content are produced by small but highly active groups of users (3–7%). This misperception was robust to different thresholds of harmful content classification. An experiment revealed that overestimating the proportion of social media users who post harmful content makes people feel more negative emotion, perceive the United States to be in greater moral decline, and cultivate distorted perceptions of what others want to see on social media. However, these effects can be mitigated through a targeted educational intervention that corrects this misperception. Together, our findings highlight a mechanism that helps explain how people's perceptions and interactions with social media may undermine social cohesion.
Let me make sure I understand this. The solution to "users who post harmful content" on moderated platforms is to educate others that those users are the minority?
Sure, education would be good here, but I'm sure someone out there can think of another solution to this problem.
"these effects" refers to the sentence right before it, "overestimating the proportion of social media users who post harmful content makes people feel more negative emotion, perceive the United States to be in greater moral decline, and cultivate distorted perceptions of what others want to see on social media".
In other words, the overstimation of >40% when it's <10% and the effects resulting from this overestimation can be mitigated through education (that it's in fact much lower).
My point was that you can also reduce the overestimation by properly moderating these platforms. If there are fewer (or no) posts containing harmful content, then people will naturally estimate that the percentage is less. Plus, you have less harmful content.