Facebook Linked to Attacks on Refugees
Facebook use rose to one standard deviation above the national average, attacks on refugees increased by about 50 percent.
Nationwide, the researchers estimated in an interview, this effect drove one- tenth of all anti-refugee violence.
The study bolstered a growing body of research, they said, finding that social media scrambles users’ perceptions of outsiders, of reality, even of right and wrong.
Facebook declined to comment on the study, but a spokeswoman said in an email, “Our approach on what is allowed on Facebook has evolved over time and continues to change as we learn from experts in the field.”
The company toughened a number of restrictions on hate speech during and after the study’s sample period. Still, experts believe that much of the link to violence doesn’t come through overt hate speech, but rather through subtler and more pervasive ways that the platform distorts users’ picture of reality and social norms.
When refugees first arrived, so many locals volunteered to help that Anette Wesemann, who runs Altena’s refugee integration center, couldn’t keep up. She’d find Syrian or Afghan families attended by entourages of self-appointed life coaches and German tutors. “It was really moving,” she said. But when Ms. Wesemann set up a Facebook page to organize food drives and volunteer events, it filled with anti-refugee vitriol. Some posts appeared to come from outsiders, joined by a few locals. Over time, their anger proved infectious, dominating the page.
Links between Facebook and anti-refugee violence would be indirect, researchers say, but begin with the algorithm that determines each user’s newsfeed.
That algorithm is built around a core mission: promote content that will maximize user engagement. Posts that tap into negative, primal emotions like anger or fear perform best and so proliferate.
That is how anti- refugee sentiment can seem unusually common on Facebook, even in a pro-refugee town like Altena. Even if only a minority of users express anti-refugee views, once they dominate the newsfeed, this can have consequences for everyone else.
People instinctively conform to their community’s social norms, which are normally a brake on bad behavior. Facebook scrambles that process. It isolates people from moderating voices or authority figures, siphons them into like-minded groups and promotes content that engages their emotions.
“You can get this impression that there is widespread community support for violence,” said Betsy Paluck, a social psychologist at Princeton University in New Jersey. “And that changes your idea of whether, if you acted, you wouldn’t be acting alone.”
In his office, Gerhard Pauli, a grandfatherly local prosecutor, flipped through printouts of social media posts that the police had pulled from Mr. Denkhaus’s cellphone.
Mr. Denkhaus messaged near constantly with friends to share articles and memes disparaging foreigners. At first they trafficked in provocations, ironically addressing one another as “mein Führer.”
Over time, they appeared to lose sight of the line separating trolling from sincere hate, a process referred to as “irony poisoning.”
“He said to his partner one day, ‘And now we have to do something,’ ” Mr. Pauli said. Mr. Denkhaus and a friend doused the attic of a refugee group house with gasoline and set it on fire. No one was hurt.
In court, his lawyer would argue that Mr. Denkhaus had shown no outward animus toward refugees before that night. It was only online that he’d dabbled in hate.
Though Altena’s residents condemned Mr. Denkhaus, his was not the last act of violence. Last year, the mayor was stabbed by a man said to be outraged by his pro-refugee policies. Mr. Pauli suspected a social media link: Local pages had filled with hateful comments toward the mayor just before the attack.
In Traunstein, a Bavarian mountainside town, Facebook use and anti-refugee violence rates are both unusually high. Rolf Wasserman, an artist, is not politically influential in any traditional sense. Though conservative, he is hardly extremist. But he is furiously active on Facebook.
He is what the researchers call a superposter.
He posts a steady stream of ru- mors, opinion columns and news reports on crimes committed by refugees. Though none crosses into hate speech or fake news, in the aggregate, they portray Germany as beset by dangerous foreigners.
“On Facebook, it’s possible to reach people who are not highly political, to bring information to them,” he said. “You can build peoples’ political views.”
When casual users open Facebook, often what they see is a world shaped by superposters. Their exaggerated worldviews allow them to collectively dominate newsfeeds.
Facebook’s algorithm elevates a class of superposters like Mr. Wasserman who, in the aggregate, give readers an impression that social norms are more hostile to refugees and more distrustful of authority than they really are.
Natascha Wolff, who teaches at a vocational school, has found that young people often express the most anti- refugee views. They seem to draw, she said, on things they saw on Facebook — and a mistaken belief that everyone agrees.
Any rumor or tidbit about foreigners, she said, “sure gets around fast.
The University of Warwick researchers tested their findings by examining every sustained internet outage in their study window.
Whenever internet access went down in an area with high Facebook use, attacks on refugees dropped significantly. And they dropped by the same rate at which heavy Facebook use is thought to boost violence.
This spring, internet services went down for several days or weeks, depending on the block, in the Berlin suburb of Schmargendorf.
Esperanza Muñoz, who moved here from Colombia in the 1980s, found the outage relaxing. She socialized more with neighbors and followed the news less.
“Social media, it’s an illusion,” she said.
Ms. Muñoz said that Facebook communities in Colombia seemed even more prone to outrage. “It really was as if there was only one opinion,” she said, describing her Facebook feed during recent Colombian elections. “We’re only informed in one direction, and that’s really not good.”
This hints at what experts consider one of the most important lessons of the study. If Facebook can be linked to hundreds of attacks even in Germany, its effect could be far more severe in countries like Colombia with weaker institutions, weaker social media regulations and more immediate histories of political violence.
“People wouldn’t say these things with their own mouths,” Ms. Muñoz said. “But it’s easy for them to share it online.”