You're The Cause of Our Stress - Forum Data Analysis

[Penguin_Terminal]

Disclaimer: I’m not a data analyst nor psychologist.

Recently, I noticed a shift on the forum^[1] and decided to put a little bit of OSINT investigation to the test and try to use data gathered from reactions and likes to attempt to understand our forum’s relationship with bad news.

As a privacy community, we are inherently continuously concerned with changes in tech, good or bad. However, repeatedly reading negative stories can lead to increased anxiety and fear, potentially making us feel overwhelmed. It can also contribute and amplify other stresses in our life.

Using Myself as a Case Study

In order to better understand the impact of bad-news, I turned to analyzing my own reaction history. I’ve been on the forum since October of 2023, and have viewed (at the time of writing), over 8.2 thousand posts and liked (using the ) 1.5 thousand of them. After creating a simple program to scrape my reactions and importing them into a chart, it became apparent the how bad news has influenced my interaction. As evident by the chart, (which you might need to open in a new tab to see properly), the use of the reaction was by far the highest used reaction, tied in first with with over 78 uses.

A 2009 study by Warton University of Pennsylvania showed that anger and anxiety are some of the most effective ways of eliciting virality of online content. It shows there is a clear link between a content’s anxiety inducing properties and it’s interaction rate by users, thus increasing it’s virality. (For those who don’t want to read the study, CGP Grey has a great video on the study which helps visualize the connection between emotion and virality.)

Who’s To Blame?

The next question I wanted to address was who is to blame for anxiety inducement on the forum. The good-news and bad-news tags that have been implemented help us to see that bad news simply has more posts, more interaction, and more replies. Looking at my reactions by user, it may seem clear that @anon82669666 is the problem. So just ban them and all our problems are solved?

No, unfortunately that’s not a viable solution. I think it’s more important to address how fear mongering impacts our perception in the privacy space. We often remember and are more impacted by bad-news than good-news. Reading that “XYZ has just done ZYX to decrease privacy!” sticks more in our brain and makes us increasingly worried and paranoid about our own privacy. As I’ve written before, it’s critical that we can take a step back and recognize the leaps we’ve made in privacy and how good things are for people who care about privacy. (This is the age of front-ends, FOSS apps, & privacy services!) Even the average user has seen increased digital privacy and polls have shown that the ordinary person is more and more becoming concerned about data collection and digital security. (84% of Americans say they are “concerned about the safety and privacy of the personal data that they provide on the internet.”)

Read this EFF article if you’re interested in learning about how privacy has gotten better.

Privacy’s Not Dead - EFF

I was scrolling my mastodon feed when I saw an intresting article from EFF (if you don’t know, EFF is an organization that works to fight for privacy and against government surveillance) and I wanted to share it as it brings up a really good point: Being privacy conscious can be exhausting and mentally straining. Frequently, we worry over the news we read, feeling overwhelmed when we hear on SR that another company data’s ‘in the wind’ and it’s now in the hands of some criminal or that a privacy…

Conclusion

While it’s important to remain informed, it’s also imperative that we maintain a good relationship with negative news. We should make sure to practice self-care and be aware of the effects of fearmongering and the role it plays in our attention and interaction.

TLDR: Your mental health is important and reading bad-news can be depressing. However, we should understand the psychology that anxiety-inducing news has on us and how we can better contextualize it to be better informed and less overly influenced by negative emotion.

---

1. @InternetGhost’s post really serves as a great example of this. As does the forum’s addition of the #good-news tag. ↩︎

[Jonah]

The constant stream of bad news is also making the media in general less trustworthy in the eyes of the public, unfortunately:

Why the news is so negative — and what we can do about it

@Penguin_Terminal

Looking at my reactions by user, it may seem clear that @TheBlankSpace is the problem.

lmao

[modernluddite]

This place is generally positive it seems. I try to keep positive myself and post good news too.

This forum and privacyguides seems to present some of the best research and solutions which is what drew me into this community. Thank you all.

But if you’ve been paying attention it’s hard not to be a little concerned.

The goal is not to induce anxiety, but to increase awareness and try to regain control of our computers and data.

When people realize they can’t trust their phone, car, tv or anything they own not to try and do weird things behind their back, the natural response is of course stress. Which I think is the correct response to a threat.

Then you find out you don’t really own it. Yeah I’m stressed. But not by this place.

I will try to keep more positive.

Also great work OP!

[anon82669666]

@Penguin_Terminal

Looking at my reactions by user, it may seem clear that @anon82669666 is the problem.

Ouch.
Maybe I won’t post the next story about the FBI urging its employees to “look for ways” to conduct warrantless surveillance on US residents.

[harrburg]

A factor worth mentioning is that the hitching point for a lot of privacy advocacy is banking on anxiety as well. “[XYZ] is spying on you!”

Conversations tend to follow this pattern, as the calling card is that something bad is happening, and you should take steps to correct it. As you say: people care a lot more when it’s something that could be a threat. It’s very human-- animalistic, even-- to be on the lookout for danger. It’s a very powerful emotion. It’s a very good one at raising awareness too, especially when you should, at least, be a little concerned.

Being an advocate means playing on the defensive. You have to be alert, and ready to react appropiately to whatever may change. However, resourcefulness should not become paranoia-- worries need to have actionable plans.

It’s good practice after reading bad news to consider if it’s within your control, what you’re doing, what you can do.

Applying thoughtfulness into advocacy goes a long way into not bunkering down and stocking up on toilet paper, or canned soup, or whatever people are hoarding these days. Gold?

(Also-- very well written. Thank you for the thoughts, OP!)

[xe3]

The paradox of the modern world is that none of us like negative campaigning, negative advertising, negative/hyperbolic clickbait headlines or youtube videos… YET through our actions (clicks, likes, ““engagement””, donations, etc) we reinforce again and again, that these types of headlines/ads/videos are effective in motivating us to do a thing (donate to a candidate, click a youtube video, click a clickbait headline) than the more socially positive alternatives.

This is one reason why I think paying for good Journalism (or other forms of content is good). It changes the incentive structure when you pay directly, revenue is no longer tied to clicks and ad revenue, it is tied to a subscription. If the goal is getting a ‘click’ clickbait or hyperbole are effective, if the goal is building a base of subscribers who find your content valuable enough to pay for it, clickbait doesn’t help, and quality of content becomes more important. It aligns the media orgs incentives with your own. And it frees both you as a reader and the journalists/editors from the trap of clickbait which nobody likes (on the reader side or the creator side)

[Reinin]

@Penguin_Terminal

Looking at my reactions by user, it may seem clear that @anon82669666 is the problem. So just ban them and all our problems are solved?

@anon82669666 God damnit you did it again!

On a serious note, it tends to be that news is negative. It just gets more attention that way and unfortunately it makes its way onto the forum. I think @Henry’s addition of weekly wins is amazing for counter-acting this effect as it reminds us of the small victories we make along the way.

@modernluddite

When people realize they can’t trust their phone, car, tv or anything they own not to try and do weird things behind their back, the natural response is of course stress. Which I think is the correct response to a threat.

I agree that the realization that everything can spy on you certainly isn’t calming, but I feel that this was important as we slowly become disillusioned with the big corpos telling us that everything is in our best interest. It also helps make us skeptical of whenever big tech tries to inject a new fad into our heads (imagine how the reception of Alexa would’ve been if people realized back then that Amazon was storing, scanning, and hearing everything that goes on in your house!)

I believe in a being a cautionary optimistic. I know that I am being spied on, I know that my data can get hacked and leaked. Therefore, I take whatever steps I can to mitigate what I feel are the most common threats (i know, threat modeling!), and leaving the rest to fate, because what am I really going to be able to do about everything? We will never be able to completely control our privacy in 2024 to a reasonable degree, therefore we do whatever makes us more private, and therefore less vulnerable, than 90% of people.
To quote Boondocks:
“Granddad, what do you do when you can’t do nothing, but there’s nothing you can do?”
“You do what you can.”

[Psyvacy]

First, very happy to see someone using data of this kind to answer this question! While I am going to critique things a bit here, please do not take this as any kind of discouragement or putting-down. I see you say you’re not a data scientist or psychologist, so I’m not expecting super-rigorous analysis of what appears to be something of a passing thought here.

Second, while your general drawing on theory etc is certainly a good thing, I think your connection to the work around virality is slightly inappropriate. Virality does tend to both elicit and result from strong emotions including anxiety and anger, but it’s not the same as those things (although it’s definitely plausible it’s correlated, so I guess you could use it as a kind of proxy if you needed to). I see things that make me anxious or angry all the time, but I don’t necessarily share them and I very much doubt any have gone viral even among my friend group if I do share them. A better way would be to have noted at the time how a post made you subjectively feel - I’ve read a lot of articles that were clearly trying to make me sad or anxious or angry and I’ve just found them hilarious, for example! But if you read a (ideally random, but that’s not strictly necessary) selection of posts with various tags, then rate how you feel on various emotions (maybe on a spreadsheet?), then you’d be better placed to make that judgement. As it stands all you can say is:

1. You engage with a lot of bad-news tagged posts (a disproportionate amount? You’d need to look at how many posts are tagged of all posts, but you could probably eyeball this if it’s a really strong effect), as measured by your use of various reactions.
2. I note that you used the thumbs-up reaction as often as you used the stressed face reaction. One of those is positive, while the other, yes, likely indicates anxiety of some sort. And since neither are the default reaction (that’s the heart, I believe?) that indicates an active choice to use it, so I wouldn’t rush to the conclusion of too much anxiety. Your second-most used reactions were the celebration reaction and the rofl reaction - both very positively-coded, I would say! Although apparently there’s a reasonably strong sex difference here, which I didn’t know. Kind of cool work, I’ll have to dig deeper into it.

The article you cite also is doing something a little differently than you’re talking about. They took articles and measured the virality (in a way which I have serious doubts about, but that’s a whole other discussion) as related to the frequency of various emotionally-coded words within them. As noted above, we’ve all read posts/articles which use a lot of emotional language, only for our reaction to be very different, so this isn’t exactly a great proxy for your purpose.

In addition, they note that articles that were more positive were, all else being equal, more likely to appear on the ‘most e-mailed’ list than more negative ones. As they note:

The results indicate that content is more likely to become viral the more positive it is … This suggests that transmission is about more than simply sharing positive things and avoiding sharing negative ones. Consistent with our theorizing, content that evokes high-arousal emotions (i.e., awe, anger, and anxiety), regardless of their valence, is more viral.

So more emotionally laden terms means more viral overall, but more positive words is better than more negative words, all else being equal.

Your point about negativity bias is a good one, It’s generally well-established, but there is some interesting work which suggests it’s more common in younger people than older ones. Which anecdotally sounds right - the younger people I know are way more prone to doom-saying and worrying than the older people.

Anyway, I’ll stop now. Those were just my immediate thoughts, but like I said I’m really happy to see you using research and data and stuff to try to understand this! Keep it up!

[Psyvacy]

@harrburg

A factor worth mentioning is that the hitching point for a lot of privacy advocacy is banking on anxiety as well. “[XYZ] is spying on you!”

This is an interesting idea I’ve been trying to work out how to approach for a while now. While Henry and Jonah and Nate and that all say they try to avoid unreasonable clickbait (and I do believe them, for the record, I’m not leveling any accusations here), they admit there is some advantage to doing some clickbait, which means in some cases exaggerating the negativity of a situation. Which means there is an incentive, in some cases, to be more doom-y than less. So while Henry/Jonah/Nate have integrity and take a great deal of care, it’s entirely plausible other “advocates” aren’t so careful, especially if there’s money to be made. And it’s not necessarily clear they’re wrong - if you emphasise the severity of this tracking thing a bit - not even lying, just emphasising it more - and it leads to some number of people taking more ownership/care, it’s arguably a good thing! Particularly if there’s a financial aspect.

[harrburg]

@Psyvacy

And it’s not necessarily clear they’re wrong - if you emphasise the severity of this tracking thing a bit - not even lying, just emphasising it more - and it leads to some number of people taking more ownership/care, it’s arguably a good thing!

This is my takeaway as well. No one who’s getting into the privacy space goes from ‘I guess I’ll install Ublock Origin’ to ‘I manually decode all my OTP secrets in order to decrease attack surface’ in 5 seocnds flat-- usually they learn a little and stay there, or stay somewhere in the middle.

It’s more an observation that in the There Are Wasps In Your House club, where we check for if there are wasps in our houses, there are, indeed, wasps in your house. You have to be at least vaguely on the lookout for bad news-- otherwise you can’t stay updated. I think it’s more an unavoidable effect of the ecosystem we’re in-- and, unfortunately, the venn diagram between ‘keeping watch like a meerkat for the digital hyenas’ and ‘collapsing into a paranoid echo chamber’ are not a circle, but sometimes it wanes close.

[OncommingStorm]

Got a little advice that can help:
Use only positive reactions. If you see something negative, do not use (negative) reaction. The action itself is reinforcing the feeling. Thus you want to reinforce positive feeling (e.g. heart reaction) but not to reinforce the negative ones.

[InternetGhost]

This meta analysis does put a smile on my face. I’m going to play with hiding the bad-news tag and see how it goes. Thank you for this!

[Psyvacy]

I was talking to a clinical psychologist once, and they were talking about how certain kinds of intrusive thoughts can be self-reinforcing. Note that I haven’t done any independent reading of this idea, so I don’t know it it’s true, but it’s not implausible from what I remember of neuropsych.

Basically, the idea was you have a thought which includes content you find upsetting. Your brain sees “oh, this got a reaction! It must be important to pay attention to!”, so those neurological circuits get reinforced, which means they trigger slightly easier, which means that kind of thought is likely to recur, which reinforces the circuit, etc etc until it hits some kind of equilibrium dictated by your environment, genetic factors and suchforth.

This idea is particularly important in therapies such as acceptance-commitment therapy, which I don’t know a lot about (not being a clinician), but apparently is useful for some issues.

[privateunclesam]

damn this analysis had such a huge effect that @blankspace literally left the forum . i noticed it just now lol but it seems the bad news wave might be slowing down a bit.

jokes aside; i hope @blankspace comes back

[misterstrange774]

This has to be the dumbest premise I’ve read on this forum thus far. You’re letting yourselves get worked up over emoji reactions? And what’s worse is you’re blaming another user (Blankspace) over what’s clearly a personal issue.

As for “bad news”, I hate to break it to you all but not every single news story is going to be good. Only one person in this thread has given sensible advice:

@harrburg

It’s good practice after reading bad news to consider if it’s within your control, what you’re doing, what you can do.

Fix what’s in your control, and move on.

@OncommingStorm

Got a little advice that can help:
Use only positive reactions. If you see something negative, do not use (negative) reaction. The action itself is reinforcing the feeling. Thus you want to reinforce positive feeling (e.g. heart reaction) but not to reinforce the negative ones.

This is an even worse take. So now people on this forum have to police themselves on reaction emojis because it might offend someone? While we’re at it, why don’t we just call this forum “We Happy Few”. If seeing negative emojis offends you, perhaps that’s a sign you need to step away from the internet for an hour or two. Just a thought.

And shame on @Jonah and @Henry for even entertaining this nonsense.

[Psyvacy]

You’ve very badly misunderstood both the original post and the subsequent discussion.

@misterstrange774

You’re letting yourselves get worked up over emoji reactions?

No, they’re noting an overall emotional trend, and using emoji reactions as a crude proxy to try to understand any underlying trends. The approach is flawed (though not fatally), but the attempt is laudable.

@misterstrange774

And what’s worse is you’re blaming another user (Blankspace) over what’s clearly a personal issue.

That’s what psychologists call “a joke”. They’re very new, you might not have heard of them before.

@misterstrange774

So now people on this forum have to police themselves on reaction emojis because it might offend someone?

Literally nobody even remotely suggested this.

@misterstrange774

If seeing negative emojis offends you, perhaps that’s a sign you need to step away from the internet for an hour or two.

If seeing a month-old post makes you do a long respond where you insult everyone involved with patently false claims, maybe you’re the one who needs a break?

[Jordan]

@privateunclesam

damn this analysis had such a huge effect that @blankspace literally left the forum . i noticed it just now lol but it seems the bad news wave might be slowing down a bit.

They left a post in the Regulars chat explaining why they were closing their account, they weren’t banned and they didn’t leave because of this thread. For the sake of their privacy I won’t go into more detail, they were a valued member of our community

[misterstrange774]

@Jordan

They left a post in the Regulars chat explaining why they were closing their account, they weren’t banned and they didn’t leave because of this thread. For the sake of their privacy I won’t go into more detail, they were a valued member of our community

Ah, I see. Well if that’s the case, then I retract my statement about Blankspace and apologize on that part of my comment.

@Psyvacy

If seeing a month-old post makes you do a long respond where you insult everyone involved with patently false claims, maybe you’re the one who needs a break?

You do realize that posts get boosted on the home page when a fresh reply comes in right? Besides, I fail to see what the age of the thread has to do with anything, whether it’s an hour or a month old.

@Psyvacy

Literally nobody even remotely suggested this.

Perhaps you missed the quote I included from OncommingStorm. They specifically suggest to not use negative reaction emojis.

[Psyvacy]

@misterstrange774

You do realize that posts get boosted on the home page when a fresh reply comes in right? Besides, I fail to see what the age of the thread has to do with anything, whether it’s an hour or a month old.

Yeah, you’re right. You saw a post that made you mad. How could I possibly expect you to actually read it and react like a mature, capable adult? Clearly I was expecting too much, and I apologise. I will henceforth treat you as you have been acting - like an entitled five-year-old.

@misterstrange774

Perhaps you missed the quote I included from OncommingStorm. They specifically suggest to not use negative reaction emojis.

Do you mean this one?

@OncommingStorm

Got a little advice that can help:
Use only positive reactions. If you see something negative, do not use (negative) reaction. The action itself is reinforcing the feeling. Thus you want to reinforce positive feeling (e.g. heart reaction) but not to reinforce the negative ones.

(emphasis added)

The one which very obviously is making a recommendation to the OP about how they can manage their emotional reactions in a way which is more conducive to their emotional well-being? If other people also see it and take something from it, that’s… not a bad thing at all?

At no point has anyone said “people should change how they talk because it makes other people feel bad”, which is your contention.

Go play with your blocks, or hang out on Twitter or Youtube comment sections, or whatever else emotionally stunted children do. The adults are talking, and your tantrum over people talking about stuff you’re clearly unable or unwilling to understand is not helpful.

[misterstrange774]

@Psyvacy

Yeah, you’re right. You saw a post that made you mad. How could I possibly expect you to actually read it and react like a mature, capable adult?

You mean how you seem to keep misreading my point on policing reactions (NOT how they talk)? If you’re going to call out my points at least quote them properly…that is a forum function afterall.

@Psyvacy

The adults are talking, and your tantrum over people talking about stuff you’re clearly unable or unwilling to understand is not helpful.

Ah yes, because linking emojis to someone’s mental health isn’t a massive stretch in itself. If attributing tiny, harmless images of facial expressions to “mental health” is a measure of adult thinking, then I’ll gladly take my so-called “childish” brain.

@Psyvacy

Go play with your blocks

That’s a suggestion we ALL could take. Playing with blocks would be more beneficial to mental health versus sulking on a forum, making monsters out of benign things such as emoji reactions.