violence in social media essay

Essay on Media and Violence

Introduction

Research studies indicate that media causes violence and plays a role in desensitization, aggressive behavior, fear of harm, and nightmares. Examples of media platforms include movies, video games, television, and music. Violence in media has also been associated with health concerns. The youth have been the most common victims of media exposure and thus stand higher chances of exposure to violence (Anderson, 2016). In the contemporary world, violence in media platforms has been growing, reaching heightened levels, which is dangerous for society. When you turn on the television, there is violence, social media platforms; there is violence when you go to the movies; there is violence. Studies indicate that an average person in the United States watches videos for nearly five hours in a day. In addition, three-quarters of television content contain some form of violence, and the games being played today have elements of violence. This paper intends to evaluate the concept of media messages and their influence on violent and deviant behaviors. Television networks and video games will be considered.

The Netflix effect involves the behavior of staying home all day, ordering food, and relaxing the couch to watch Netflix programs (McDonald & Smith-Rowsey, 2016). Netflix and binge-watching have become popular among the younger generation and thus are exposed to different kinds of content being aired. Studies indicate that continuous exposure to violent materials has a negative effect on the aggressive behavior of individuals. Netflix is a global platform in the entertainment industry (Lobato, 2019). Although, the company does not have the rights to air in major countries such as China, India, and Japan, it has wide audience. One of the reasons for sanctions is the issues of content being aired by the platform, which may influence the behaviors of the young generation. The primary goal of Netflix is entertainment; it’s only the viewers who have developed specific effects that affect their violent behaviors through imitation of the content.

Television Networks

Television networks focus on feeding viewers with the latest updates on different happenings across the globe. In other instances, they focus on bringing up advertisements and entertainment programs. There is little room for violent messages and content in the networks unless they are airing movie programs, which also are intended for entertainment. However, there has been evidence in the violence effect witnessed in television networks. Studies called the “Marilyn Monroe effect” established that following the airing of many suicidal cases, there has been a growth in suicides among the population (Anderson, Bushman, Donnerstein, Hummer, & Warburton, 2015). Actual suicide cases increased by 2.5%, which is linked to news coverage regarding suicide. Additionally, some coverages are filled with violence descriptions, and their aftermath with may necessitate violent behaviors in the society. For instance, if televisions are covering mass demonstrations where several people have been killed, the news may trigger other protests in other parts of the country.

Communications scholars, however, dispute these effects and link the violent behaviors to the individuals’ perception. They argue that the proportion of witnessing violent content in television networks is minimal. Some acts of violence are associated with what the individual perceives and other psychological factors that are classified into social and non-social instigators (Anderson et al., 2015). Social instigators consist of social rejection, provocation, and unjust treatment. Nonsocial instigators are physical objects present, which include weapons or guns. Also, there are environmental factors that include loud noises, overcrowding, and heat. Therefore, there is more explanation of the causes of aggressive behaviors that are not initiated by television networks but rather a combination of biological and environmental factors.

Video games

Researchers have paid more attention to television networks and less on video games. Children spend more time playing video games. According to research, more than 52% of children play video games and spend about 49 minutes per day playing. Some of the games contain violent behaviors. Playing violent games among youth can cause aggressive behaviors. The acts of kicking, hitting, and pinching in the games have influenced physical aggression. However, communication scholars argue that there is no association between aggression and video games (Krahé & Busching, 2015). Researchers have used tools such as “Competition Reaction Time Test,” and “Hot Sauce Paradigm” to assess the aggression level. The “Hot Sauce Paradigm” participants were required to make hot sauce tor tasting. They were required to taste tester must finish the cup of the hot sauce in which the tester detests spicy products. It was concluded that the more the hot sauce testers added in the cup, the more aggressive they were deemed to be.

The “Competition Reaction Time Test” required individuals to compete with another in the next room. It was required to press a button fast as soon as the flashlight appeared. Whoever won was to discipline the opponent with loud noises. They could turn up the volume as high as they wanted. However, in reality, there was no person in the room; the game was to let individuals win half of the test. Researchers intended to test how far individuals would hold the dial. In theory, individuals who punish their opponents in cruel ways are perceived to be more aggressive. Another way to test violent behaviors for gamer was done by letting participants finish some words. For instance, “M_ _ _ ER,” if an individual completes the word as “Murder” rather than “Mother,” the character was considered to possess violent behavior (Allen & Anderson, 2017). In this regard, video games have been termed as entertainment ideologies, and the determination of the players is to win, no matter how brutal the game might be.

In this paper, fixed assumptions were used to correlate violent behaviors and media objects. But that was not the case with regards to the findings. A fixed model may not be appropriate in the examination of time-sensitive causes of dependent variables. Although the model is applicable for assessing specific entities in a given industry, the results may not be precise.

Conclusion .

Based on the findings of the paper, there is no relationship between violent behaviors and media. Netflix effect does not influence the behavior of individuals. The perceptions of the viewers and players is what matters, and how they understand the message being conveyed. Individuals usually play video games and watch televisions for entertainment purposes. The same case applies to the use of social media platforms and sports competitions. Even though there is violent content, individuals focus on the primary objective of their needs.

Analysis of sources

The sources have been thoroughly researched, and they provide essential information regarding the relationship between violent behaviors and media messages. Studies conducted by various authors like Krahé & Busching did not establish any relationship between the two variables. Allen & Anderson (2017) argue that the models for testing the two variables are unreliable and invalid. The fixed assumptions effect model was utilized, and its limitations have been discussed above. Therefore, the authors of these references have not been able to conclude whether there is a connection between violence and media messages.

Allen, J. J., & Anderson, C. A. (2017). General aggression model. The International Encyclopedia of Media Effects , 1-15.

Anderson, C. A. (2016). Media violence effects on children, adolescents and young adults. Health Progress , 97 (4), 59-62.

Anderson, C. A., Bushman, B. J., Donnerstein, E., Hummer, T. A., & Warburton, W. (2015). SPSSI research summary on media violence. Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy , 15 (1), 4-19.

Krahé, B., & Busching, R. (2015). Breaking the vicious cycle of media violence use and aggression: A test of intervention effects over 30 months. Psychology of Violence , 5 (2), 217.

Lobato, R. (2019). Netflix nations: the geography of digital distribution . NYU Press.

McDonald, K., & Smith-Rowsey, D. (Eds.). (2016). The Netflix effect: Technology and entertainment in the 21st century . Bloomsbury Publishing USA.

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April 19, 2021 | Caitlin Elsaesser, Assistant Professor of Social Work

How Social Media Turns Online Arguments Between Teens Into Real-World Violence

Social media isn’t just mirroring conflicts happening in schools and on streets – it’s triggering new ones

Teenager with headphones around his neck using his phone. A UConn researcher says social media is turning online arguments among teenagers into real-world violence.

Common social media practices like commenting and tagging can exacerbate arguments among teens and in some cases lead to violence (Adobe Stock).

The deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol in January exposed the power of social media to influence real-world behavior and incite violence. But many adolescents, who spend more time on social media than all other age groups, have known this for years.

“On social media, when you argue, something so small can turn into something so big so fast,” said Justin, a 17-year-old living in Hartford, during one of my research focus groups. (The participants’ names have been changed in this article to protect their identities.)

For the last three years, I have studied how and why social media triggers and accelerates offline violence . In my research , conducted in partnership with Hartford-based peace initiative COMPASS Youth Collaborative , we interviewed dozens of young people aged 12-19 in 2018. Their responses made clear that social media is not a neutral communication platform.

In other words, social media isn’t just mirroring conflicts happening in schools and on streets – it’s intensifying and triggering new conflicts. And for young people who live in disenfranchised urban neighborhoods, where firearms can be readily available, this dynamic can be deadly.

Internet Banging

It can result in a phenomenon that researchers at Columbia University have coined “internet banging.” Distinct from cyberbullying, internet banging involves taunts, disses, and arguments on social media between people in rival crews, cliques, or gangs. These exchanges can include comments, images, and videos that lead to physical fights, shootings and, in the worst cases, death .

It is estimated that the typical U.S. teen uses screen media more than seven hours daily, with the average teenager daily using three different forms of social media. Films such as “ The Social Dilemma ” underscore that social media companies create addictive platforms by design, using features such as unlimited scrolling and push notifications to keep users endlessly engaged.

According to the young people we interviewed, four social media features in particular escalate conflicts: comments, livestreaming, picture/video sharing, and tagging.

Comments and Livestreams

The feature most frequently implicated in social media conflicts, according to our research with adolescents, was comments. Roughly 80% of the incidents they described involved comments, which allow social media users to respond publicly to content posted by others.

Taylor, 17, described how comments allow people outside her friend group to “hype up” online conflicts: “On Facebook if I have an argument, it would be mostly the outsiders that’ll be hypin’ us up … ‘Cause the argument could have been done, but you got outsiders being like, ‘Oh, she gonna beat you up.’”

Meanwhile, livestreaming can quickly attract a large audience to watch conflict unfold in real time. Nearly a quarter of focus group participants implicated Facebook Live, for example, as a feature that escalates conflict.

Brianna, 17, shared an example in which her cousin told another girl to come to her house to fight on Facebook Live. “But mind you, if you got like 5,000 friends on Facebook, half of them watching … And most of them live probably in the area you live in. You got some people that’ll be like, ‘Oh, don’t fight.’ But in the majority, everybody would be like, ‘Oh, yeah, fight.’”

She went on to describe how three Facebook “friends” who were watching the livestream pulled up in cars in front of the house with cameras, ready to record and then post any fight.

Strategies to Stop Violence

Adolescents tend to define themselves through peer groups and are highly attuned to slights to their reputation. This makes it difficult to resolve social media conflicts peacefully. But the young people we spoke with are highly aware of how social media shapes the nature and intensity of conflicts.

A key finding of our work is that young people often try to avoid violence resulting from social media. Those in our study discussed four approaches to do so: avoidance, deescalation, reaching out for help and bystander intervention.

Avoidance involves exercising self-control to avoid conflict in the first place. As 17-year-old Diamond explained, “If I’m scrolling and I see something and I feel like I got to comment, I’ll go [to] comment and I’ll be like, ‘Hold up, wait, no.’ And I just start deleting it and tell myself … ‘No, mind my business.’”

Reaching out for support involves turning to peers, family or teachers for help. “When I see conflict, I screenshot it and send it to my friends in our group chat and laugh about it,” said Brianna, 16. But there’s a risk in this strategy, Brianna noted: “You could screenshot something on Snapchat, and it’ll tell the person that you screenshot it and they’ll be like, ‘Why are you screenshotting my stuff?’”

The deescalation strategy involves attempts by those involved to slow down a social media conflict as it happens. However, participants could not recount an example of this strategy working, given the intense pressure they experience from social media comments to protect one’s reputation.

They emphasized the bystander intervention strategy was most effective offline, away from the presence of an online audience. A friend might start a conversation offline with an involved friend to help strategize how to avoid future violence. Intervening online is often risky, according to participants, because the intervener can become a new target, ultimately making the conflict even bigger.

Peer Pressure Goes Viral

Young people are all too aware that the number of comments a post garners, or how many people are watching a livestream, can make it extremely difficult to pull out of a conflict once it starts.

Jasmine, a 15-year-old, shared, “On Facebook, there be so many comments, so many shares and I feel like the other person would feel like they would be a punk if they didn’t step, so they step even though they probably, deep down, really don’t want to step.”

There is a growing consensus across both major U.S. political parties that the large technology companies behind social media apps need to be more tightly regulated. Much of the concern has focused on the dangers of unregulated free speech .

But from the vantage point of the adolescents we spoke with in Hartford, conflict that occurs on social media is also a public health threat. They described multiple experiences of going online without the intention to fight, and getting pulled into an online conflict that ended up in gun violence. Many young people are improvising strategies to avoid social media conflict. I believe parents, teachers, policymakers and social media engineers ought to listen closely to what they are saying.

Originally published in The Conversation .

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Violence, media effects, and criminology.

Nickie D. Phillips Nickie D. Phillips Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice, St. Francis College
https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264079.013.189
Published online: 27 July 2017

Debate surrounding the impact of media representations on violence and crime has raged for decades and shows no sign of abating. Over the years, the targets of concern have shifted from film to comic books to television to video games, but the central questions remain the same. What is the relationship between popular media and audience emotions, attitudes, and behaviors? While media effects research covers a vast range of topics—from the study of its persuasive effects in advertising to its positive impact on emotions and behaviors—of particular interest to criminologists is the relationship between violence in popular media and real-life aggression and violence. Does media violence cause aggression and/or violence?

The study of media effects is informed by a variety of theoretical perspectives and spans many disciplines including communications and media studies, psychology, medicine, sociology, and criminology. Decades of research have amassed on the topic, yet there is no clear agreement about the impact of media or about which methodologies are most appropriate. Instead, there continues to be disagreement about whether media portrayals of violence are a serious problem and, if so, how society should respond.

Conflicting interpretations of research findings inform and shape public debate around media effects. Although there seems to be a consensus among scholars that exposure to media violence impacts aggression, there is less agreement around its potential impact on violence and criminal behavior. While a few criminologists focus on the phenomenon of copycat crimes, most rarely engage with whether media directly causes violence. Instead, they explore broader considerations of the relationship between media, popular culture, and society.

media exposure
criminal behavior
popular culture
media violence
media and crime
copycat crimes

Media Exposure, Violence, and Aggression

On Friday July 22, 2016 , a gunman killed nine people at a mall in Munich, Germany. The 18-year-old shooter was subsequently characterized by the media as being under psychiatric care and harboring at least two obsessions. One, an obsession with mass shootings, including that of Anders Breivik who ultimately killed 77 people in Norway in 2011 , and the other an obsession with video games. A Los Angeles, California, news report stated that the gunman was “an avid player of first-person shooter video games, including ‘Counter-Strike,’” while another headline similarly declared, “Munich gunman, a fan of violent video games, rampage killers, had planned attack for a year”(CNN Wire, 2016 ; Reuters, 2016 ). This high-profile incident was hardly the first to link popular culture to violent crime. Notably, in the aftermath of the 1999 Columbine shooting massacre, for example, media sources implicated and later discredited music, video games, and a gothic aesthetic as causal factors of the crime (Cullen, 2009 ; Yamato, 2016 ). Other, more recent, incidents have echoed similar claims suggesting that popular culture has a nefarious influence on consumers.

Media violence and its impact on audiences are among the most researched and examined topics in communications studies (Hetsroni, 2007 ). Yet, debate over whether media violence causes aggression and violence persists, particularly in response to high-profile criminal incidents. Blaming video games, and other forms of media and popular culture, as contributing to violence is not a new phenomenon. However, interpreting media effects can be difficult because commenters often seem to indicate a grand consensus that understates more contradictory and nuanced interpretations of the data.

In fact, there is a consensus among many media researchers that media violence has an impact on aggression although its impact on violence is less clear. For example, in response to the shooting in Munich, Brad Bushman, professor of communication and psychology, avoided pinning the incident solely on video games, but in the process supported the assertion that video gameplay is linked to aggression. He stated,

While there isn’t complete consensus in any scientific field, a study we conducted showed more than 90% of pediatricians and about two-thirds of media researchers surveyed agreed that violent video games increase aggression in children. (Bushman, 2016 )

Others, too, have reached similar conclusions with regard to other media. In 2008 , psychologist John Murray summarized decades of research stating, “Fifty years of research on the effect of TV violence on children leads to the inescapable conclusion that viewing media violence is related to increases in aggressive attitudes, values, and behaviors” (Murray, 2008 , p. 1212). Scholars Glenn Sparks and Cheri Sparks similarly declared that,

Despite the fact that controversy still exists about the impact of media violence, the research results reveal a dominant and consistent pattern in favor of the notion that exposure to violent media images does increase the risk of aggressive behavior. (Sparks & Sparks, 2002 , p. 273)

In 2014 , psychologist Wayne Warburton more broadly concluded that the vast majority of studies have found “that exposure to violent media increases the likelihood of aggressive behavior in the short and longterm, increases hostile perceptions and attitudes, and desensitizes individuals to violent content” (Warburton, 2014 , p. 64).

Criminologists, too, are sensitive to the impact of media exposure. For example, Jacqueline Helfgott summarized the research:

There have been over 1000 studies on the effects of TV and film violence over the past 40 years. Research on the influence of TV violence on aggression has consistently shown that TV violence increases aggression and social anxiety, cultivates a “mean view” of the world, and negatively impacts real-world behavior. (Helfgott, 2015 , p. 50)

In his book, Media Coverage of Crime and Criminal Justice , criminologist Matthew Robinson stated, “Studies of the impact of media on violence are crystal clear in their findings and implications for society” (Robinson, 2011 , p. 135). He cited studies on childhood exposure to violent media leading to aggressive behavior as evidence. In his pioneering book Media, Crime, and Criminal Justice , criminologist Ray Surette concurred that media violence is linked to aggression, but offered a nuanced interpretation. He stated,

a small to modest but genuine causal role for media violence regarding viewer aggression has been established for most beyond a reasonable doubt . . . There is certainly a connection between violent media and social aggression, but its strength and configuration is simply not known at this time. (Surette, 2011 , p. 68)

The uncertainties about the strength of the relationship and the lack of evidence linking media violence to real-world violence is often lost in the news media accounts of high-profile violent crimes.

Media Exposure and Copycat Crimes

While many scholars do seem to agree that there is evidence that media violence—whether that of film, TV, or video games—increases aggression, they disagree about its impact on violent or criminal behavior (Ferguson, 2014 ; Gunter, 2008 ; Helfgott, 2015 ; Reiner, 2002 ; Savage, 2008 ). Nonetheless, it is violent incidents that most often prompt speculation that media causes violence. More specifically, violence that appears to mimic portrayals of violent media tends to ignite controversy. For example, the idea that films contribute to violent crime is not a new assertion. Films such as A Clockwork Orange , Menace II Society , Set it Off , and Child’s Play 3 , have been linked to crimes and at least eight murders have been linked to Oliver Stone’s 1994 film Natural Born Killers (Bracci, 2010 ; Brooks, 2002 ; PBS, n.d. ). Nonetheless, pinpointing a direct, causal relationship between media and violent crime remains elusive.

Criminologist Jacqueline Helfgott defined copycat crime as a “crime that is inspired by another crime” (Helfgott, 2015 , p. 51). The idea is that offenders model their behavior on media representations of violence whether real or fictional. One case, in particular, illustrated how popular culture, media, and criminal violence converge. On July 20, 2012 , James Holmes entered the midnight premiere of The Dark Knight Rises , the third film in the massively successful Batman trilogy, in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. He shot and killed 12 people and wounded 70 others. At the time, the New York Times described the incident,

Witnesses told the police that Mr. Holmes said something to the effect of “I am the Joker,” according to a federal law enforcement official, and that his hair had been dyed or he was wearing a wig. Then, as people began to rise from their seats in confusion or anxiety, he began to shoot. The gunman paused at least once, several witnesses said, perhaps to reload, and continued firing. (Frosch & Johnson, 2012 ).

The dyed hair, Holme’s alleged comment, and that the incident occurred at a popular screening led many to speculate that the shooter was influenced by the earlier film in the trilogy and reignited debate around the impact about media violence. The Daily Mail pointed out that Holmes may have been motivated by a 25-year-old Batman comic in which a gunman opens fire in a movie theater—thus further suggesting the iconic villain served as motivation for the attack (Graham & Gallagher, 2012 ). Perceptions of the “Joker connection” fed into the notion that popular media has a direct causal influence on violent behavior even as press reports later indicated that Holmes had not, in fact, made reference to the Joker (Meyer, 2015 ).

A week after the Aurora shooting, the New York Daily News published an article detailing a “possible copycat” crime. A suspect was arrested in his Maryland home after making threatening phone calls to his workplace. The article reported that the suspect stated, “I am a [sic] joker” and “I’m going to load my guns and blow everybody up.” In their search, police found “a lethal arsenal of 25 guns and thousands of rounds of ammunition” in the suspect’s home (McShane, 2012 ).

Though criminologists are generally skeptical that those who commit violent crimes are motivated solely by media violence, there does seem to be some evidence that media may be influential in shaping how some offenders commit crime. In his study of serious and violent juvenile offenders, criminologist Ray Surette found “about one out of three juveniles reports having considered a copycat crime and about one out of four reports actually having attempted one.” He concluded that “those juveniles who are self-reported copycats are significantly more likely to credit the media as both a general and personal influence.” Surette contended that though violent offenses garner the most media attention, copycat criminals are more likely to be career criminals and to commit property crimes rather than violent crimes (Surette, 2002 , pp. 56, 63; Surette 2011 ).

Discerning what crimes may be classified as copycat crimes is a challenge. Jacqueline Helfgott suggested they occur on a “continuum of influence.” On one end, she said, media plays a relatively minor role in being a “component of the modus operandi” of the offender, while on the other end, she said, “personality disordered media junkies” have difficulty distinguishing reality from violent fantasy. According to Helfgott, various factors such as individual characteristics, characteristics of media sources, relationship to media, demographic factors, and cultural factors are influential. Overall, scholars suggest that rather than pushing unsuspecting viewers to commit crimes, media more often influences how , rather than why, someone commits a crime (Helfgott, 2015 ; Marsh & Melville, 2014 ).

Given the public interest, there is relatively little research devoted to exactly what copycat crimes are and how they occur. Part of the problem of studying these types of crimes is the difficulty defining and measuring the concept. In an effort to clarify and empirically measure the phenomenon, Surette offered a scale that included seven indicators of copycat crimes. He used the following factors to identify copycat crimes: time order (media exposure must occur before the crime); time proximity (a five-year cut-off point of exposure); theme consistency (“a pattern of thought, feeling or behavior in the offender which closely parallels the media model”); scene specificity (mimicking a specific scene); repetitive viewing; self-editing (repeated viewing of single scene while “the balance of the film is ignored”); and offender statements and second-party statements indicating the influence of media. Findings demonstrated that cases are often prematurely, if not erroneously, labeled as “copycat.” Surette suggested that use of the scale offers a more precise way for researchers to objectively measure trends and frequency of copycat crimes (Surette, 2016 , p. 8).

Media Exposure and Violent Crimes

Overall, a causal link between media exposure and violent criminal behavior has yet to be validated, and most researchers steer clear of making such causal assumptions. Instead, many emphasize that media does not directly cause aggression and violence so much as operate as a risk factor among other variables (Bushman & Anderson, 2015 ; Warburton, 2014 ). In their review of media effects, Brad Bushman and psychologist Craig Anderson concluded,

In sum, extant research shows that media violence is a causal risk factor not only for mild forms of aggression but also for more serious forms of aggression, including violent criminal behavior. That does not mean that violent media exposure by itself will turn a normal child or adolescent who has few or no other risk factors into a violent criminal or a school shooter. Such extreme violence is rare, and tends to occur only when multiple risk factors converge in time, space, and within an individual. (Bushman & Anderson, 2015 , p. 1817)

Surette, however, argued that there is no clear linkage between media exposure and criminal behavior—violent or otherwise. In other words, a link between media violence and aggression does not necessarily mean that exposure to violent media causes violent (or nonviolent) criminal behavior. Though there are thousands of articles addressing media effects, many of these consist of reviews or commentary about prior research findings rather than original studies (Brown, 2007 ; Murray, 2008 ; Savage, 2008 ; Surette, 2011 ). Fewer, still, are studies that specifically measure media violence and criminal behavior (Gunter, 2008 ; Strasburger & Donnerstein, 2014 ). In their meta-analysis investigating the link between media violence and criminal aggression, scholars Joanne Savage and Christina Yancey did not find support for the assertion. Instead, they concluded,

The study of most consequence for violent crime policy actually found that exposure to media violence was significantly negatively related to violent crime rates at the aggregate level . . . It is plain to us that the relationship between exposure to violent media and serious violence has yet to be established. (Savage & Yancey, 2008 , p. 786)

Researchers continue to measure the impact of media violence among various forms of media and generally stop short of drawing a direct causal link in favor of more indirect effects. For example, one study examined the increase of gun violence in films over the years and concluded that violent scenes provide scripts for youth that justify gun violence that, in turn, may amplify aggression (Bushman, Jamieson, Weitz, & Romer, 2013 ). But others report contradictory findings. Patrick Markey and colleagues studied the relationship between rates of homicide and aggravated assault and gun violence in films from 1960–2012 and found that over the years, violent content in films increased while crime rates declined . After controlling for age shifts, poverty, education, incarceration rates, and economic inequality, the relationships remained statistically non-significant (Markey, French, & Markey, 2015 , p. 165). Psychologist Christopher Ferguson also failed to find a relationship between media violence in films and video games and violence (Ferguson, 2014 ).

Another study, by Gordon Dahl and Stefano DellaVigna, examined violent films from 1995–2004 and found decreases in violent crimes coincided with violent blockbuster movie attendance. Here, it was not the content that was alleged to impact crime rates, but instead what the authors called “voluntary incapacitation,” or the shifting of daily activities from that of potential criminal behavior to movie attendance. The authors concluded, “For each million people watching a strongly or mildly violent movie, respectively, violent crime decreases by 1.9% and 2.1%. Nonviolent movies have no statistically significant impact” (Dahl & DellaVigna, p. 39).

High-profile cases over the last several years have shifted public concern toward the perceived danger of video games, but research demonstrating a link between video games and criminal violence remains scant. The American Psychiatric Association declared that “research demonstrates a consistent relation between violent video game use and increases in aggressive behavior, aggressive cognitions and aggressive affect, and decreases in prosocial behavior, empathy and sensitivity to aggression . . .” but stopped short of claiming that video games impact criminal violence. According to Breuer and colleagues, “While all of the available meta-analyses . . . found a relationship between aggression and the use of (violent) video games, the size and interpretation of this connection differ largely between these studies . . .” (APA, 2015 ; Breuer et al., 2015 ; DeCamp, 2015 ). Further, psychologists Patrick Markey, Charlotte Markey, and Juliana French conducted four time-series analyses investigating the relationship between video game habits and assault and homicide rates. The studies measured rates of violent crime, the annual and monthly video game sales, Internet searches for video game walkthroughs, and rates of violent crime occurring after the release dates of popular games. The results showed that there was no relationship between video game habits and rates of aggravated assault and homicide. Instead, there was some indication of decreases in crime (Markey, Markey, & French, 2015 ).

Another longitudinal study failed to find video games as a predictor of aggression, instead finding support for the “selection hypothesis”—that physically aggressive individuals (aged 14–17) were more likely to choose media content that contained violence than those slightly older, aged 18–21. Additionally, the researchers concluded,

that violent media do not have a substantial impact on aggressive personality or behavior, at least in the phases of late adolescence and early adulthood that we focused on. (Breuer, Vogelgesang, Quandt, & Festl, 2015 , p. 324)

Overall, the lack of a consistent finding demonstrating that media exposure causes violent crime may not be particularly surprising given that studies linking media exposure, aggression, and violence suffer from a host of general criticisms. By way of explanation, social theorist David Gauntlett maintained that researchers frequently employ problematic definitions of aggression and violence, questionable methodologies, rely too much on fictional violence, neglect the social meaning of violence, and assume the third-person effect—that is, assume that other, vulnerable people are impacted by media, but “we” are not (Ferguson & Dyck, 2012 ; Gauntlett, 2001 ).

Others, such as scholars Martin Barker and Julian Petley, flatly reject the notion that violent media exposure is a causal factor for aggression and/or violence. In their book Ill Effects , the authors stated instead that it is simply “stupid” to query about “what are the effects of [media] violence” without taking context into account (p. 2). They counter what they describe as moral campaigners who advance the idea that media violence causes violence. Instead, Barker and Petley argue that audiences interpret media violence in a variety of ways based on their histories, experiences, and knowledge, and as such, it makes little sense to claim media “cause” violence (Barker & Petley, 2001 ).

Given the seemingly inconclusive and contradictory findings regarding media effects research, to say that the debate can, at times, be contentious is an understatement. One article published in European Psychologist queried “Does Doing Media Violence Research Make One Aggressive?” and lamented that the debate had devolved into an ideological one (Elson & Ferguson, 2013 ). Another academic journal published a special issue devoted to video games and youth and included a transcript of exchanges between two scholars to demonstrate that a “peaceful debate” was, in fact, possible (Ferguson & Konijn, 2015 ).

Nonetheless, in this debate, the stakes are high and the policy consequences profound. After examining over 900 published articles, publication patterns, prominent authors and coauthors, and disciplinary interest in the topic, scholar James Anderson argued that prominent media effects scholars, whom he deems the “causationists,” had developed a cottage industry dependent on funding by agencies focused primarily on the negative effects of media on children. Anderson argued that such a focus presents media as a threat to family values and ultimately operates as a zero-sum game. As a result, attention and resources are diverted toward media and away from other priorities that are essential to understanding aggression such as social disadvantage, substance abuse, and parental conflict (Anderson, 2008 , p. 1276).

Theoretical Perspectives on Media Effects

Understanding how media may impact attitudes and behavior has been the focus of media and communications studies for decades. Numerous theoretical perspectives offer insight into how and to what extent the media impacts the audience. As scholar Jenny Kitzinger documented in 2004 , there are generally two ways to approach the study of media effects. One is to foreground the power of media. That is, to suggest that the media holds powerful sway over viewers. Another perspective is to foreground the power and heterogeneity of the audience and to recognize that it is comprised of active agents (Kitzinger, 2004 ).

The notion of an all-powerful media can be traced to the influence of scholars affiliated with the Institute for Social Research, or Frankfurt School, in the 1930–1940s and proponents of the mass society theory. The institute was originally founded in Germany but later moved to the United States. Criminologist Yvonne Jewkes outlined how mass society theory assumed that members of the public were susceptible to media messages. This, theorists argued, was a result of rapidly changing social conditions and industrialization that produced isolated, impressionable individuals “cut adrift from kinship and organic ties and lacking moral cohesion” (Jewkes, 2015 , p. 13). In this historical context, in the era of World War II, the impact of Nazi propaganda was particularly resonant. Here, the media was believed to exhibit a unidirectional flow, operating as a powerful force influencing the masses. The most useful metaphor for this perspective described the media as a “hypodermic syringe” that could “‘inject’ values, ideas and information directly into the passive receiver producing direct and unmediated ‘effects’” (Jewkes, 2015 , pp. 16, 34). Though the hypodermic syringe model seems simplistic today, the idea that the media is all-powerful continues to inform contemporary public discourse around media and violence.

Concern of the power of media captured the attention of researchers interested in its purported negative impact on children. In one of the earliest series of studies in the United States during the late 1920s–1930s, researchers attempted to quantitatively measure media effects with the Payne Fund Studies. For example, they investigated how film, a relatively new medium, impacted children’s attitudes and behaviors, including antisocial and violent behavior. At the time, the Payne Fund Studies’ findings fueled the notion that children were indeed negatively influenced by films. This prompted the film industry to adopt a self-imposed code regulating content (Sparks & Sparks, 2002 ; Surette, 2011 ). Not everyone agreed with the approach. In fact, the methodologies employed in the studies received much criticism, and ultimately, the movement was branded as a moral crusade to regulate film content. Scholars Garth Jowett, Ian Jarvie, and Kathryn Fuller wrote about the significance of the studies,

We have seen this same policy battle fought and refought over radio, television, rock and roll, music videos and video games. Their researchers looked to see if intuitive concerns could be given concrete, measurable expression in research. While they had partial success, as have all subsequent efforts, they also ran into intractable problems . . . Since that day, no way has yet been found to resolve the dilemma of cause and effect: do crime movies create more crime, or do the criminally inclined enjoy and perhaps imitate crime movies? (Jowett, Jarvie, & Fuller, 1996 , p. 12)

As the debate continued, more sophisticated theoretical perspectives emerged. Efforts to empirically measure the impact of media on aggression and violence continued, albeit with equivocal results. In the 1950s and 1960s, psychological behaviorism, or understanding psychological motivations through observable behavior, became a prominent lens through which to view the causal impact of media violence. This type of research was exemplified by Albert Bandura’s Bobo Doll studies demonstrating that children exposed to aggressive behavior, either observed in real life or on film, behaved more aggressively than those in control groups who were not exposed to the behavior. The assumption derived was that children learn through exposure and imitate behavior (Bandura, Ross, & Ross, 1963 ). Though influential, the Bandura experiments were nevertheless heavily criticized. Some argued the laboratory conditions under which children were exposed to media were not generalizable to real-life conditions. Others challenged the assumption that children absorb media content in an unsophisticated manner without being able to distinguish between fantasy and reality. In fact, later studies did find children to be more discerning consumers of media than popularly believed (Gauntlett, 2001 ).

Hugely influential in our understandings of human behavior, the concept of social learning has been at the core of more contemporary understandings of media effects. For example, scholar Christopher Ferguson noted that the General Aggression Model (GAM), rooted in social learning and cognitive theory, has for decades been a dominant model for understanding how media impacts aggression and violence. GAM is described as the idea that “aggression is learned by the activation and repetition of cognitive scripts coupled with the desensitization of emotional responses due to repeated exposure.” However, Ferguson noted that its usefulness has been debated and advocated for a paradigm shift (Ferguson, 2013 , pp. 65, 27; Krahé, 2014 ).

Though the methodologies of the Payne Fund Studies and Bandura studies were heavily criticized, concern over media effects continued to be tied to larger moral debates including the fear of moral decline and concern over the welfare of children. Most notably, in the 1950s, psychiatrist Frederic Wertham warned of the dangers of comic books, a hugely popular medium at the time, and their impact on juveniles. Based on anecdotes and his clinical experience with children, Wertham argued that images of graphic violence and sexual debauchery in comic books were linked to juvenile delinquency. Though he was far from the only critic of comic book content, his criticisms reached the masses and gained further notoriety with the publication of his 1954 book, Seduction of the Innocent . Wertham described the comic book content thusly,

The stories have a lot of crime and gunplay and, in addition, alluring advertisements of guns, some of them full-page and in bright colors, with four guns of various sizes and descriptions on a page . . . Here is the repetition of violence and sexiness which no Freud, Krafft-Ebing or Havelock Ellis ever dreamed could be offered to children, and in such profusion . . . I have come to the conclusion that this chronic stimulation, temptation and seduction by comic books, both their content and their alluring advertisements of knives and guns, are contributing factors to many children’s maladjustment. (Wertham, 1954 , p. 39)

Wertham’s work was instrumental in shaping public opinion and policies about the dangers of comic books. Concern about the impact of comics reached its apex in 1954 with the United States Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency. Wertham testified before the committee, arguing that comics were a leading cause of juvenile delinquency. Ultimately, the protest of graphic content in comic books by various interest groups contributed to implementation of the publishers’ self-censorship code, the Comics Code Authority, which essentially designated select books that were deemed “safe” for children (Nyberg, 1998 ). The code remained in place for decades, though it was eventually relaxed and decades later phased out by the two most dominant publishers, DC and Marvel.

Wertham’s work, however influential in impacting the comic industry, was ultimately panned by academics. Although scholar Bart Beaty characterized Wertham’s position as more nuanced, if not progressive, than the mythology that followed him, Wertham was broadly dismissed as a moral reactionary (Beaty, 2005 ; Phillips & Strobl, 2013 ). The most damning criticism of Wertham’s work came decades later, from Carol Tilley’s examination of Wertham’s files. She concluded that in Seduction of the Innocent ,

Wertham manipulated, overstated, compromised, and fabricated evidence—especially that evidence he attributed to personal clinical research with young people—for rhetorical gain. (Tilley, 2012 , p. 386)

Tilley linked Wertham’s approach to that of the Frankfurt theorists who deemed popular culture a social threat and contended that Wertham was most interested in “cultural correction” rather than scientific inquiry (Tilley, 2012 , p. 404).

Over the decades, concern about the moral impact of media remained while theoretical and methodological approaches to media effects studies continued to evolve (Rich, Bickham, & Wartella, 2015 ). In what many consider a sophisticated development, theorists began to view the audience as more active and multifaceted than the mass society perspective allowed (Kitzinger, 2004 ). One perspective, based on a “uses and gratifications” model, assumes that rather than a passive audience being injected with values and information, a more active audience selects and “uses” media as a response to their needs and desires. Studies of uses and gratifications take into account how choice of media is influenced by one’s psychological and social circumstances. In this context, media provides a variety of functions for consumers who may engage with it for the purposes of gathering information, reducing boredom, seeking enjoyment, or facilitating communication (Katz, Blumler, & Gurevitch, 1973 ; Rubin, 2002 ). This approach differs from earlier views in that it privileges the perspective and agency of the audience.

Another approach, the cultivation theory, gained momentum among researchers in the 1970s and has been of particular interest to criminologists. It focuses on how television television viewing impacts viewers’ attitudes toward social reality. The theory was first introduced by communications scholar George Gerbner, who argued the importance of understanding messages that long-term viewers absorb. Rather than examine the effect of specific content within any given programming, cultivation theory,

looks at exposure to massive flows of messages over long periods of time. The cultivation process takes place in the interaction of the viewer with the message; neither the message nor the viewer are all-powerful. (Gerbner, Gross, Morgan, Singnorielli, & Shanahan, 2002 , p. 48)

In other words, he argued, television viewers are, over time, exposed to messages about the way the world works. As Gerbner and colleagues stated, “continued exposure to its messages is likely to reiterate, confirm, and nourish—that is, cultivate—its own values and perspectives” (p. 49).

One of the most well-known consequences of heavy media exposure is what Gerbner termed the “mean world” syndrome. He coined it based on studies that found that long-term exposure to media violence among heavy television viewers, “tends to cultivate the image of a relatively mean and dangerous world” (p. 52). Inherent in Gerbner’s view was that media representations are separate and distinct entities from “real life.” That is, it is the distorted representations of crime and violence that cultivate the notion that the world is a dangerous place. In this context, Gerbner found that heavy television viewers are more likely to be fearful of crime and to overestimate their chances of being a victim of violence (Gerbner, 1994 ).

Though there is evidence in support of cultivation theory, the strength of the relationship between media exposure and fear of crime is inconclusive. This is in part due to the recognition that audience members are not homogenous. Instead, researchers have found that there are many factors that impact the cultivating process. This includes, but is not limited to, “class, race, gender, place of residence, and actual experience of crime” (Reiner, 2002 ; Sparks, 1992 ). Or, as Ted Chiricos and colleagues remarked in their study of crime news and fear of crime, “The issue is not whether media accounts of crime increase fear, but which audiences, with which experiences and interests, construct which meanings from the messages received” (Chiricos, Eschholz, & Gertz, p. 354).

Other researchers found that exposure to media violence creates a desensitizing effect, that is, that as viewers consume more violent media, they become less empathetic as well as psychologically and emotionally numb when confronted with actual violence (Bartholow, Bushman, & Sestir, 2006 ; Carnagey, Anderson, & Bushman, 2007 ; Cline, Croft, & Courrier, 1973 ; Fanti, Vanman, Henrich, & Avraamides, 2009 ; Krahé et al., 2011 ). Other scholars such as Henry Giroux, however, point out that our contemporary culture is awash in violence and “everyone is infected.” From this perspective, the focus is not on certain individuals whose exposure to violent media leads to a desensitization of real-life violence, but rather on the notion that violence so permeates society that it has become normalized in ways that are divorced from ethical and moral implications. Giroux wrote,

While it would be wrong to suggest that the violence that saturates popular culture directly causes violence in the larger society, it is arguable that such violence serves not only to produce an insensitivity to real life violence but also functions to normalize violence as both a source of pleasure and as a practice for addressing social issues. When young people and others begin to believe that a world of extreme violence, vengeance, lawlessness, and revenge is the only world they inhabit, the culture and practice of real-life violence is more difficult to scrutinize, resist, and transform . . . (Giroux, 2015 )

For Giroux, the danger is that the normalization of violence has become a threat to democracy itself. In our culture of mass consumption shaped by neoliberal logics, depoliticized narratives of violence have become desired forms of entertainment and are presented in ways that express tolerance for some forms of violence while delegitimizing other forms of violence. In their book, Disposable Futures , Brad Evans and Henry Giroux argued that as the spectacle of violence perpetuates fear of inevitable catastrophe, it reinforces expansion of police powers, increased militarization and other forms of social control, and ultimately renders marginalized members of the populace disposable (Evans & Giroux, 2015 , p. 81).

Criminology and the “Media/Crime Nexus”

Most criminologists and sociologists who focus on media and crime are generally either dismissive of the notion that media violence directly causes violence or conclude that findings are more complex than traditional media effects models allow, preferring to focus attention on the impact of media violence on society rather than individual behavior (Carrabine, 2008 ; Ferrell, Hayward, & Young, 2015 ; Jewkes, 2015 ; Kitzinger, 2004 ; Marsh & Melville, 2014 ; Rafter, 2006 ; Sternheimer, 2003 ; Sternheimer 2013 ; Surette, 2011 ). Sociologist Karen Sternheimer forcefully declared “media culture is not the root cause of American social problems, not the Big Bad Wolf, as our ongoing public discussion would suggest” (Sternheimer, 2003 , p. 3). Sternheimer rejected the idea that media causes violence and argued that a false connection has been forged between media, popular culture, and violence. Like others critical of a singular focus on media, Sternheimer posited that overemphasis on the perceived dangers of media violence serves as a red herring that directs attention away from the actual causes of violence rooted in factors such as poverty, family violence, abuse, and economic inequalities (Sternheimer, 2003 , 2013 ). Similarly, in her Media and Crime text, Yvonne Jewkes stated that U.K. scholars tend to reject findings of a causal link because the studies are too reductionist; criminal behavior cannot be reduced to a single causal factor such as media consumption. Echoing Gauntlett’s critiques of media effects research, Jewkes stated that simplistic causal assumptions ignore “the wider context of a lifetime of meaning-making” (Jewkes, 2015 , p. 17).

Although they most often reject a “violent media cause violence” relationship, criminologists do not dismiss the notion of media as influential. To the contrary, over the decades much criminological interest has focused on the construction of social problems, the ideological implications of media, and media’s potential impact on crime policies and social control. Eamonn Carrabine noted that the focus of concern is not whether media directly causes violence but on “how the media promote damaging stereotypes of social groups, especially the young, to uphold the status quo” (Carrabine, 2008 , p. 34). Theoretically, these foci have been traced to the influence of cultural and Marxist studies. For example, criminologists frequently focus on how social anxieties and class inequalities impact our understandings of the relationship between media violence and attitudes, values, and behaviors. Influential works in the 1970s, such as Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order by Stuart Hall et al. and Stanley Cohen’s Folk Devils and Moral Panics , shifted criminological critique toward understanding media as a hegemonic force that reinforces state power and social control (Brown, 2011 ; Carrabine, 2008 ; Cohen, 2005 ; Garland, 2008 ; Hall et al., 2013 /1973, 2013/1973 ). Since that time, moral panic has become a common framework applied to public discourse around a variety of social issues including road rage, child abuse, popular music, sex panics, and drug abuse among others.

Into the 21st century , advances in technology, including increased use of social media, shifted the ways that criminologists approach the study of media effects. Scholar Sheila Brown traced how research in criminology evolved from a focus on “media and crime” to what she calls the “media/crime nexus” that recognizes that “media experience is real experience” (Brown, 2011 , p. 413). In other words, many criminologists began to reject as fallacy what social media theorist Nathan Jurgenson deemed “digital dualism,” or the notion that we have an “online” existence that is separate and distinct from our “off-line” existence. Instead, we exist simultaneously both online and offline, an

augmented reality that exists at the intersection of materiality and information, physicality and digitality, bodies and technology, atoms and bits, the off and the online. It is wrong to say “IRL” [in real life] to mean offline: Facebook is real life. (Jurgenson, 2012 )

The changing media landscape has been of particular interest to cultural criminologists. Michelle Brown recognized the omnipresence of media as significant in terms of methodological preferences and urged a move away from a focus on causality and predictability toward a more fluid approach that embraces the complex, contemporary media-saturated social reality characterized by uncertainty and instability (Brown, 2007 ).

Cultural criminologists have indeed rejected direct, causal relationships in favor of the recognition that social meanings of aggression and violence are constantly in transition, flowing through the media landscape, where “bits of information reverberate and bend back on themselves, creating a fluid porosity of meaning that defines late-modern life, and the nature of crime and media within it.” In other words, there is no linear relationship between crime and its representation. Instead, crime is viewed as inseparable from the culture in which our everyday lives are constantly re-created in loops and spirals that “amplify, distort, and define the experience of crime and criminality itself” (Ferrell, Hayward, & Young, 2015 , pp. 154–155). As an example of this shift in understanding media effects, criminologist Majid Yar proposed that we consider how the transition from being primarily consumers to primarily producers of content may serve as a motivating mechanism for criminal behavior. Here, Yar is suggesting that the proliferation of user-generated content via media technologies such as social media (i.e., the desire “to be seen” and to manage self-presentation) has a criminogenic component worthy of criminological inquiry (Yar, 2012 ). Shifting attention toward the media/crime nexus and away from traditional media effects analyses opens possibilities for a deeper understanding of the ways that media remains an integral part of our everyday lives and inseparable from our understandings of and engagement with crime and violence.

Over the years, from films to comic books to television to video games to social media, concerns over media effects have shifted along with changing technologies. While there seems to be some consensus that exposure to violent media impacts aggression, there is little evidence showing its impact on violent or criminal behavior. Nonetheless, high-profile violent crimes continue to reignite public interest in media effects, particularly with regard to copycat crimes.

At times, academic debate around media effects remains contentious and one’s academic discipline informs the study and interpretation of media effects. Criminologists and sociologists are generally reluctant to attribute violence and criminal behavior directly to exposure to violence media. They are, however, not dismissive of the impact of media on attitudes, social policies, and social control as evidenced by the myriad of studies on moral panics and other research that addresses the relationship between media, social anxieties, gender, race, and class inequalities. Scholars who study media effects are also sensitive to the historical context of the debates and ways that moral concerns shape public policies. The self-regulating codes of the film industry and the comic book industry have led scholars to be wary of hyperbole and policy overreach in response to claims of media effects. Future research will continue to explore ways that changing technologies, including increasing use of social media, will impact our understandings and perceptions of crime as well as criminal behavior.

The Impact of Electronic Media Violence: Scientific Theory and Research

L. rowell huesmann.

The University of Michigan

Since the early 1960s research evidence has been accumulating that suggests that exposure to violence in television, movies, video games, cell phones, and on the internet increases the risk of violent behavior on the viewer’s part just as growing up in an environment filled with real violence increases the risk of them behaving violently. In the current review this research evidence is critically assessed, and the psychological theory that explains why exposure to violence has detrimental effects for both the short run and long run is elaborated. Finally, the size of the “media violence effect” is compared with some other well known threats to society to estimate how important a threat it should be considered.

One of the notable changes in our social environment in the 20 th and 21st centuries has been the saturation of our culture and daily lives by the mass media. In this new environment radio, television, movies, videos, video games, cell phones, and computer networks have assumed central roles in our children’s daily lives. For better or worse the mass media are having an enormous impact on our children’s values, beliefs, and behaviors. Unfortunately, the consequences of one particular common element of the electronic mass media has a particularly detrimental effect on children’s well being. Research evidence has accumulated over the past half-century that exposure to violence on television, movies, and most recently in video games increases the risk of violent behavior on the viewer’s part just as growing up in an environment filled with real violence increases the risk of violent behavior. Correspondingly, the recent increase in the use of mobile phones, text messaging, e-mail, and chat rooms by our youth have opened new venues for social interaction in which aggression can occur and youth can be victimized – new venues that break the old boundaries of family, neighborhood, and community that might have protected our youth to some extent in the past. These globe spanning electronic communication media have not really introduced new psychological threats to our children, but they have made it much harder to protect youth from the threats and have exposed many more of them to threats that only a few might have experienced before. It is now not just kids in bad neighborhoods or with bad friends who are likely to be exposed to bad things when they go out on the street. A ‘virtual’ bad street is easily available to most youth now. However, our response should not be to panic and keep our children “indoors” because the “streets” out there are dangerous. The streets also provide wonderful experiences and help youth become the kinds of adults we desire. Rather our response should be to understand the dangers on the streets, to help our children understand and avoid the dangers, to avoid exaggerating the dangers which will destroy our credibility, and also to try to control exposure to the extent we can.

Background for the Review

Different people may have quite different things in mind when they think of media violence. Similarly, among the public there may be little consensus on what constitutes aggressive and violent behavior . Most researchers, however, have clear conceptions of what they mean by media violence and aggressive behavior.

Most researchers define media violence as visual portrayals of acts of physical aggression by one human or human-like character against another. This definition has evolved as theories about the effects of media violence have evolved and represents an attempt to describe the kind of violent media presentation that is most likely to teach the viewer to be more violent. Movies depicting violence of this type were frequent 75 years ago and are even more frequent today, e.g., M, The Maltese Falcon, Shane, Dirty Harry, Pulp Fiction, Natural Born Killers, Kill Bill . Violent TV programs became common shortly after TV became common in American homes about 55 years ago and are common today, e.g., Gunsmoke, Miami Vice, CSI, and 24. More recently, video games, internet displays, and cell phone displays have become part of most children’s growing-up, and violent displays have become common on them, e.g., Grand Theft Auto, Resident Evil, Warrior .

To most researchers, aggressive behavior refers to an act that is intended to injure or irritate another person. Laymen may call assertive salesmen “aggressive,” but researchers do not because there is no intent to harm. Aggression can be physical or non-physical. It includes many kinds of behavior that do not seem to fit the commonly understood meaning of “violence.” Insults and spreading harmful rumors fit the definition. Of course, the aggressive behaviors of greatest concern clearly involve physical aggression ranging in severity from pushing or shoving, to fighting, to serious assaults and homicide. In this review he term violent behavior is used to describe these more serious forms of physical aggression that have a significant risk of seriously injuring the victim.

Violent or aggressive actions seldom result from a single cause; rather, multiple factors converging over time contribute to such behavior. Accordingly, the influence of the violent mass media is best viewed as one of the many potential factors that influence the risk for violence and aggression. No reputable researcher is suggesting that media violence is “the” cause of violent behavior. Furthermore, a developmental perspective is essential for an adequate understanding of how media violence affects youthful conduct and in order to formulate a coherent response to this problem. Most youth who are aggressive and engage in some forms of antisocial behavior do not go on to become violent teens and adults [ 1 ]. Still, research has shown that a significant proportion of aggressive children are likely to grow up to be aggressive adults, and that seriously violent adolescents and adults often were highly aggressive and even violent as children [ 2 ]. The best single predictor of violent behavior in older adolescents, young adults, and even middle aged adults is aggressive behavior when they were younger. Thus, anything that promotes aggressive behavior in young children statistically is a risk factor for violent behavior in adults as well.

Theoretical Explanations for Media Violence Effects

In order to understand the empirical research implicating violence in electronic media as a threat to society, an understanding of why and how violent media cause aggression is vital. In fact, psychological theories that explain why media violence is such a threat are now well established. Furthermore, these theories also explain why the observation of violence in the real world – among the family, among peers, and within the community – also stimulates aggressive behavior in the observer.

Somewhat different processes seem to cause short term effects of violent content and long term effects of violent content, and that both of these processes are distinct from the time displacement effects that engagement in media may have on children. Time displacement effects refer to the role of the mass media (including video games) in displacing other activities in which the child might engage which might change the risk for certain kinds of behavior, e.g. replacing reading, athletics, etc. This essay is focusing on the effects of violent media content, and displacement effects will not be reviewed though they may well have important consequences.

Short-term Effects

Most theorists would now agree that the short term effects of exposure to media violence are mostly due to 1) priming processes, 2) arousal processes, and 3) the immediate mimicking of specific behaviors [ 3 , 4 ].

Priming is the process through which spreading activation in the brain’s neural network from the locus representing an external observed stimulus excites another brain node representing a cognition, emotion, or behavior. The external stimulus can be inherently linked to a cognition, e.g., the sight of a gun is inherently linked to the concept of aggression [ 5 ], or the external stimulus can be something inherently neutral like a particular ethnic group (e.g., African-American) that has become linked in the past to certain beliefs or behaviors (e.g., welfare). The primed concepts make behaviors linked to them more likely. When media violence primes aggressive concepts, aggression is more likely.

To the extent that mass media presentations arouse the observer, aggressive behavior may also become more likely in the short run for two possible reasons -- excitation transfer [ 6 ] and general arousal [ 7 ]. First, a subsequent stimulus that arouses an emotion (e.g. a provocation arousing anger) may be perceived as more severe than it is because some of the emotional response stimulated by the media presentation is miss-attributed as due to the provocation transfer. For example, immediately following an exciting media presentation, such excitation transfer could cause more aggressive responses to provocation. Alternatively, the increased general arousal stimulated by the media presentation may simply reach such a peak that inhibition of inappropriate responses is diminished, and dominant learned responses are displayed in social problem solving, e.g. direct instrumental aggression.

The third short term process, imitation of specific behaviors, can be viewed as a special case of the more general long-term process of observational learning [ 8 ]. In recent years evidence has accumulated that human and primate young have an innate tendency to mimic whomever they observe [ 9 ]. Observation of specific social behaviors around them increases the likelihood of children behaving exactly that way. Specifically, as children observe violent behavior, they are prone to mimic it. The neurological process through which this happens is not completely understood, but it seems likely that “mirror neurons,” which fire when either a behavior is observed or when the same behavior is acted out, play an important role [ 10 , 4 ].

Long-term Effects

Long term content effects, on the other hand, seem to be due to 1) more lasting observational learning of cognitions and behaviors (i.e., imitation of behaviors), and 2) activation and desensitization of emotional processes.

Observational learning

According to widely accepted social cognitive models, a person’s social behavior is controlled to a great extent by the interplay of the current situation with the person’s emotional state, their schemas about the world, their normative beliefs about what is appropriate, and the scripts for social behavior that they have learned [ 11 ]. During early, middle, and late childhood children encode in memory social scripts to guide behavior though observation of family, peers, community, and mass media. Consequently observed behaviors are imitated long after they are observed [ 10 ]. During this period, children’s social cognitive schemas about the world around them also are elaborated. For example, extensive observation of violence has been shown to bias children’s world schemas toward attributing hostility to others’ actions. Such attributions in turn increase the likelihood of children behaving aggressively [ 12 ]. As children mature further, normative beliefs about what social behaviors are appropriate become crystallized and begin to act as filters to limit inappropriate social behaviors [ 13 ]. These normative beliefs are influenced in part by children’s observation of the behaviors of those around them including those observed in the mass media.

Desensitization

Long-term socialization effects of the mass media are also quite likely increased by the way the mass media and video games affect emotions. Repeated exposures to emotionally activating media or video games can lead to habituation of certain natural emotional reactions. This process is called “desensitization.” Negative emotions experienced automatically by viewers in response to a particular violent or gory scene decline in intensity after many exposures [ 4 ]. For example, increased heart rates, perspiration, and self-reports of discomfort often accompany exposure to blood and gore. However, with repeated exposures, this negative emotional response habituates, and the child becomes “desensitized.” The child can then think about and plan proactive aggressive acts without experiencing negative affect [ 4 ].

Enactive learning

One more theoretical point is important. Observational learning and desensitization do not occur independently of other learning processes. Children are constantly being conditioned and reinforced to behave in certain ways, and this learning may occur during media interactions. For example, because players of violent video games are not just observers but also “active” participants in violent actions, and are generally reinforced for using violence to gain desired goals, the effects on stimulating long-term increases in violent behavior should be even greater for video games than for TV, movies, or internet displays of violence. At the same time, because some video games are played together by social groups (e.g., multi-person games) and because individual games may often be played together by peers, more complex social conditioning processes may be involved that have not yet been empirically examined. These effects, including effects of selection and involvement, need to be explored.

The Key Empirical Studies

Given this theoretical back ground, let us now examine the empirical research that indicates that childhood exposure to media violence has both short term and long term effects in stimulating aggression and violence in the viewer. Most of this research is on TV, movies, and video games, but from the theory above one can see that the same effects should occur for violence portrayed on various internet sites (e.g., multi-person game sites, video posting sites, chat rooms) and on handheld cell phones or computers.

Violence in Television, Films, and Video Games

The fact that most research on the impact of media violence on aggressive behavior has focused on violence in fictional television and film and video games is not surprising given the prominence of violent content in these media and the prominence of these media in children’s lives.

Children in the United States spend an average of between three and four hours per day viewing television [ 14 ], and the best studies have shown that over 60% of programs contain some violence, and about 40% of those contain heavy violence [ 15 ]. Children are also spending an increasingly large amount of time playing video games, most of which contain violence. Video game units are now present in 83% of homes with children [ 16 ]. In 2004, children spent 49 minutes per day playing video, and on any given day, 52% of children ages 8–18 years play a video game games [ 16 ]. Video game use peaks during middle childhood with an average of 65 minutes per day for 8–10 year-olds, and declines to 33 minutes per day for 15–18 year-olds [ 16 ]. And most of these games are violent; 94% of games rated (by the video game industry) as appropriate for teens are described as containing violence, and ratings by independent researchers suggest that the real percentage may be even higher [ 17 ]. No published study has quantified the violence in games rated ‘M’ for mature—presumably, these are even more likely to be violent.

Meta-analyses that average the effects observed in many studies provide the best overall estimates of the effects of media violence. Two particularly notable meta-analyses are those of Paik and Comstock [ 18 ] and Anderson and Bushman [ 19 ]. The Paik and Comstock meta-analysis focused on violent TV and films while the Anderson and Bushman meta-analysis focused on violent video games.

Paik and Comstock [ 18 ] examined effect sizes from 217 studies published between 1957 and 1990. For the randomized experiments they reviewed, Paik and Comstock found an average effect size ( r =.38, N=432 independent tests of hypotheses) which is moderate to large compared to other public health effects. When the analysis was limited to experiments on physical violence against a person, the average r was still .32 (N=71 independent tests). This meta-analysis also examined cross-sectional and longitudinal field surveys published between 1957 and 1990. For these studies the authors found an average r of .19 (N=410 independent tests). When only studies were used for which the dependent measure was actual physical aggression against another person (N=200), the effect size remained unchanged. Finally, the average correlation of media violence exposure with engaging in criminal violence was .13.

Anderson and Bushman [ 19 ] conducted the key meta-analyses on the effects of violent video games. Their meta-analyses revealed effect sizes for violent video games ranging from .15 to .30. Specifically, playing violent video games was related to increases in aggressive behavior ( r = .27), aggressive affect ( r =.19), aggressive cognitions (i.e., aggressive thoughts, beliefs, and attitudes), ( r =.27), and physiological arousal ( r = .22) and was related to decreases in prosocial (helping) behavior ( r = −.27). Furthermore, when studies were coded for the quality of their methodology, the best studies yielded larger effect sizes than the “not-best” studies.

One criticism sometimes leveled at meta-analyses is based on the “file drawer effect.” This refers to the fact that studies with “non-significant” results are less likely to be published and to appear in meta-analyses. However, one can correct for this problem by estimating how many “null-effect” studies it would take to change the results of the meta-analysis. This has been done with the above meta-analyses, and the numbers are very large. For example, Paik and Comstock [ 18 ] show that over 500,000 cases of null effects would have to exist in file drawers to change their overall conclusion of a significant positive relation between exposure to media violence and aggression.

While meta-analyses are good of obtaining a summary view of what the research shows, a better understanding of the research can be obtained by examining a few key specific studies in more detail.

Experiments

Generally, experiments have demonstrated that exposing people, especially children and youth, to violent behavior on film and TV increases the likelihood that they will behave aggressively immediately afterwards. In the typical paradigm, randomly selected individuals are shown either a violent or non-violent short film or TV program or play a violent or non-violent video game and are then observed as they have the opportunity to aggress. For children, this generally means playing with other children in situations that might stimulate conflict; for adults, it generally means participating in a competitive activity in which winning seems to involve inflicting pain on another person.

Children in such experiments who see the violent film clip or play the violent game typically behave more aggressively immediately afterwards than those viewing or playing nonviolence (20, 21, 22). For example, Josephson (22) randomly assigned 396 seven- to nine-year-old boys to watch either a violent or a nonviolent film before they played a game of floor hockey in school. Observers who did not know what movie any boy had seen recorded the number of times each boy physically attacked another boy during the game. Physical attack was defined to include hitting, elbowing, or shoving another player to the floor, as well as tripping, kneeing, and other assaultive behaviors that would be penalized in hockey. For some children, the referees carried a walkie-talkie, a specific cue that had appeared in the violent film that was expected to remind the boys of the movie they had seen earlier. For boys rated by their teacher as frequently aggressive, the combination of seeing a violent film and seeing the movie-associated cue stimulated significantly more assaultive behavior than any other combination of film and cue. Parallel results have been found in randomized experiments for preschoolers who physically attack each other more often after watching violent videos [ 21 ] and for older delinquent adolescents who get into more fights on days they see more violent films [ 23 ].

In a randomized experiment with violent video games, Irwin & Gross [ 24 ] assessed physical aggression (e.g., hitting, shoving, pinching, kicking) between boys who had just played either a violent or a nonviolent video game. Those who had played the violent video game were more physically aggressive toward peers. Other randomized experiments have measured college students’ propensity to be physically aggressive after they had played (or not played) a violent video game. For example, Bartholow &Anderson [ 25 ] found that male and female college students who had played a violent game subsequently delivered more than two and a half times as many high-intensity punishments to a peer as those who played a nonviolent video game. Other experiments have shown that it is the violence in video games, not the excitement that playing them provokes, that produces the increase in aggression [ 26 ].

In summary, experiments unambiguously show that viewing violent videos, films, cartoons, or TV dramas or playing violent video games “cause” the risk to go up that the observing child will behave seriously aggressively toward others immediately afterwards. This is true of preschoolers, elementary school children, high school children, college students, and adults. Those who watch the violent clips tend to behave more aggressively than those who view non-violent clips, and they adopt beliefs that are more “accepting” of violence [ 27 ].

One more quasi-experiment frequently cited by game manufacturers should be mentioned here. Williams and Skoric [ 28 ] have published the results of a dissertation study of cooperative online game playing by adults in which they report no significant long-term effects of playing a violent game on the adult’s behavior. However, the low statistical power of the study, the numerous methodological flaws (self-selection of a biased sample, lack of an adequate control group, the lack of adequate behavioral measures) make the validity of the study highly questionable. Furthermore, the participants were adults for whom there would be little theoretical reason to expect long-term effects.

Cross-sectional and longitudinal studies

Empirical cross-sectional and longitudinal studies of youth behaving and watching or playing violent media in their natural environments do not test causation as well as experiments do, but they provide strong evidence that the causal processes demonstrated in experiments generalize to violence observed in the real world and have significant effects on real world violent behavior. As reported in the discussion of meta-analyses above, the great majority of competently done one-shot survey studies have shown that children who watch more media violence day in and day out behave more aggressively day in and day out [ 18 ]. The relationship is less strong than that observed in laboratory experiments, but it is nonetheless large enough to be socially significant; the correlations obtained are usually are between .15 and .30. Moreover, the relation is highly replicable even across researchers who disagree about the reasons for the relationship [e.g., 29 ] and across countries [ 30 , 31 ].

Complementing these one-time survey studies are the longitudinal real-world studies that have shown correlations over time from childhood viewing of media violence to later adolescent and adult aggressive behavior [ 31 , 32 , 33 , 34 , 35 ]; for reviews see [ 4 , 27 , 33 ]. This studies have shown that early habitual exposure to media violence in middle-childhood predicts increased aggressiveness 1 year, 3 years, 10 years, 15 years, and 22 years later in adulthood, even controlling for early aggressiveness. On the other hand, behaving aggressively in childhood is a much weaker predictor of higher subsequent viewing of violence when initial violence viewing is controlled, making it implausible that the correlation between aggression and violent media use was primarily due to aggressive children turning to watching more violence [ 31 , 32 , 33 ]. As discussed below the pattern of results suggests that the strongest contribution to the correlation is the stimulation of aggression from exposure to media violence but that those behaving aggressively may also have a tendency to turn to watching more violence, leading to a downward spiral effect [ 13 ].

An example is illustrative. In a study of children interviewed each year for three years as they moved through middle childhood, Huesmann et al. [ 31 ] found increasing rates of aggression for both boys and girls who watched more television violence even with controls for initial aggressiveness and many other background factors. Children who identified with the portrayed aggressor and those who perceived the violence as realistic were especially likely to show these observational learning effects. A 15-year follow-up of these children [ 33 ] demonstrated that those who habitually watched more TV violence in their middle-childhood years grew up to be more aggressive young adults. For example, among children who were in the upper quartile on violence viewing in middle childhood, 11% of the males had been convicted of a crime (compared with 3% for other males), 42% had “pushed, grabbed, or shoved their spouse” in the past year (compared with 22% of other males), and 69% had “shoved a person” when made angry in the past year (compared with 50% of other males). For females, 39% of the high-violence-viewers had “thrown something at their spouse” in the past year (compared with 17% of the other females), and 17% had “punched, beaten, or choked” another adult when angry in the past year (compared with 4% of the other females). These effects were not attributable to any of a large set of child and parent characteristics including demographic factors, intelligence, parenting practices. Overall, for both males and females the effect of middle-childhood violence viewing on young adult aggression was significant even when controlling for their initial aggression. In contrast, the effect of middle-childhood aggression on adult violence viewing when controlling for initial violence viewing was not-significant, though it was positive.

Moderators of Media Violence Effects

Obviously, not all observers of violence are affected equally by what they observe at all times. Research has shown that the effects of media violence on children are moderated by situational characteristics of the presentation including how well it attracts and sustains attention, personal characteristics of the viewer including their aggressive predispositions, and characteristics of the physical and human context in which the children are exposed to violence.

In terms of plot characteristics, portraying violence as justified and showing rewards (or at least not showing punishments) for violence increase the effects that media violence has in stimulating aggression, particularly in the long run [ 27 , 36 , 37 ]. As for viewer characteristics that depend on perceptions of the plot, those viewers who perceive the violence as telling about life more like it really is and who identify more with the perpetrator of the violence are also stimulated more toward violent behavior in the long run [ 27 , 30 , 33 , 38 ]. Taken together these facts mean that violent acts by charismatic heroes, that appear justified and are rewarded, are the violent acts most likely to increase viewer’s aggression.

A number of researchers have suggested that, independently of the plot, viewers or game players who are already aggressive should be the only one’s affected. This is certainly not true. While the already aggressive child who watches or plays a lot of violent media may become the most aggressive young adult, the research shows that even initially unaggressive children are made more aggressive by viewing media violence [ 27 , 32 , 33 ]. Long term effects due appear to be stronger for younger children [ 3 , 14 ], but short term affects appear, if anything, stronger for older children [ 3 ] perhaps because one needs to have already learned aggressive scripts to have them primed by violent displays. While the effects appeared weaker for female 40 years ago [ 32 ], they appear equally strong today [ 33 ]. Finally, having a high IQ does not seem to protect a child against being influenced [ 27 ].

Mediators of Media Violence Effects

Most researchers believe that the long term effects of media violence depend on social cognitions that control social behavior being changed for the long run. More research needs to completed to identify all the mediators, but it seems clear that they include normative beliefs about what kinds of social behaviors are OK [ 4 , 13 , 27 ], world schemas that lead to hostile or non-hostile attributions about others intentions [ 4 , 12 , 27 ], and social scripts that automatically control social behavior once they are well learned [ 4 , 11 , 27 ].

This review marshals evidence that compelling points to the conclusion that media violence increases the risk significantly that a viewer or game player will behave more violently in the short run and in the long run. Randomized experiments demonstrate conclusively that exposure to media violence immediately increases the likelihood of aggressive behavior for children and adults in the short run. The most important underlying process for this effect is probably priming though mimicry and increased arousal also play important roles. The evidence from longitudinal field studies is also compelling that children’s exposure to violent electronic media including violent games leads to long-term increases in their risk for behaving aggressively and violently. These long-term effects are a consequence of the powerful observational learning and desensitization processes that neuroscientists and psychologists now understand occur automatically in the human child. Children automatically acquire scripts for the behaviors they observe around them in real life or in the media along with emotional reactions and social cognitions that support those behaviors. Social comparison processes also lead children to seek out others who behave similarly aggressively in the media or in real life leading to a downward spiral process that increases risk for violent behavior.

One valid remaining question is whether the size of this effect is large enough that one should consider it to be a public health threat. The answer seems to be “yes.” Two calculations support this conclusion. First, according to the best meta-analyses [ 18 , 19 ] the long term size of the effect of exposure to media violence in childhood on later aggressive or violent behavior is about equivalent to a correlation of .20 to .30. While some might argue that this explains only 4% to 9% of the individual variation in aggressive behavior, as several scholars have pointed out [ 39 , 40 ], percent variance explained is not a good statistic to use when predicting low probability events with high social costs. For example, a correlation of 0.3 with aggression translates into a change in the odds of aggression from 50/50 to 65/35 -- not a trivial change when one is dealing with life threatening behavior[ 40 ].

Secondly, the effect size of media violence is the same or larger than the effect size of many other recognized threats to public health. In Figure 1 from Bushman and Huesmann [ 41 ], the effect sizes for many common threats to public health are compared with the effect that media violence has on aggression. The only effect slightly larger than the effect of media violence on aggression is that of cigarette smoking on lung cancer.

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The Relative Strength of Known Public Health Threats.

In summary, exposure to electronic media violence increases the risk of children and adults behaving aggressively in the short-run and of children behaving aggressively in the long-run. It increases the risk significantly, and it increases it as much as many other factors that are considered public health threats. As with many other public health threats, not every child who is exposed to this threat will acquire the affliction of violent behavior, and many will acquire the affliction who are not exposed to the threat. However, that does not diminish the need to address the threat.

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Essays and Scholarship

The Algorithmic Management of Polarization and Violence on Social Media

How social media is designed has the potential to escalate conflict. it's becoming clear that platforms can do more to monitor their impact and discourage violence., algorithmic amplification and society.

A project studying algorithmic amplification and distortion, and exploring ways to minimize harmful amplifying or distorting effects

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Social media platforms are involved in all aspects of social life, including in conflict settings. Incidental choices about how they are designed can have profound effects on people when conflict has the potential to escalate to violence. We review theories of conflict escalation and the practice of professional peacebuilders, and distinguish between constructive conflict, which can be part of important societal changes, and destructive conflict where positions become more identity based and intractable. Platforms have largely responded to conflict through content moderation thus far, yet moderation will never affect more than a small amount of objectively policy-violating content, and expanding those efforts will only lead to more backtracking, biased enforcement, and controversy.

Instead, we draw on recently published platform experiments, the reports of content creators, international peacebuilding practitioners, and the experiences of those in conflict settings to argue that platforms often incentivize conflict actors toward more divisive and potentially violence-inducing speech, while also facilitating mass harassment and manipulation. We propose that platforms monitor for the conflict relevant side effects of prioritizing distribution based on engagement, such as the incentivization of divisive content, and that they stop optimizing for certain engagement signals (such as comments, shares, or time spent) in sensitive contexts. It may also be possible for platforms to support the transformation from destructive to constructive conflict by drawing attention to cross-cutting content, and supporting the on-platform efforts of conflict transformation professionals. To produce widespread legitimacy for these efforts, and overcome the problem of business incentives, we recommend the public creation of clear guidelines for conflict-sensitive platform design, including new kinds of practical conflict metrics.

Introduction

Polarization, violence, and social media are inextricably intertwined. Facebook commissioned and agreed with an independent report that concluded that its platform was used to foment division and incite offline violence in Myanmar (Warofka, 2018), and the same military groups that used the platform to foment violence would later restrict it to prevent opposition to a military coup (Wong, 2021). A sitting U.S. president was deplatformed by Twitter with the company acknowledging the use of its platform to incite violence based on fraudulent claims (Twitter, 2021), yet the same platform was credited with being instrumental in protests against less legitimate governments (Tufecki, 2018). Positive or negative, the power of social media to affect conflict is clear.

So far, social media platforms have mostly responded to the problem of violent conflict through content moderation. These efforts are generally reactive, focusing on specific content or crises and outbreaks of violence. Instead, we argue for the prevention of destructive society-scale conflict before escalation to physical violence occurs. Our approach is proactive, long-term, scalable, and operates through platform design rather than content moderation policy. We propose addressing underlying conflict drivers at a deeper level, with an analysis rooted in general conflict principles, informed by the experiences of professional peacebuilders. Peacebuilders are civil society practitioners who use non-violent means to reconcile differences and to collectively transform societal relationships and structures (as distinguished from peacekeeping, which refers to militarized security operations).

Social media companies did not originally envision the central role that their platforms would play in geopolitical and intercommunal conflict and these effects have arisen largely as a result of incidental decisions in service of business goals. However, evidence is accumulating for the nature of the relationship between social media and political conflict. Recent systematic reviews find a positive correlation between social media use and polarization (Kubin et al., 2021) but also positive correlations with political knowledge and participation (Lorenz-Spreen et al., 2021). Platform experiments in this area are starting to become public, as when Facebook attempted to reduce the distribution of political content (Glazer et al., 2023; Klepper & Seitz, 2021; Gizmodo, 2022). We also have the documented experiences of those living in conflict settings and how they relate to social media (Build Up, 2022; Hagey & Horwitz, 2021; Lefton et al., 2019; Schirch ed., 2021). This collective evidence has provided an important opportunity to reassess how the design of platforms relates to conflict.

Designing a platform for “better” conflict outcomes requires three things, corresponding to the three sections of this paper.

First, since not all types of conflict are inherently “bad,” we need to be more specific about our design goals. In the first section we review the fundamentals of conflict escalation, showing that large scale changes in perceptions, patterns of behavior, and societal structures occur long before the onset of physical violence. Even if the only goal is to prevent violence, social media must contend with conflict dynamics in much earlier stages of escalation. To clarify what to do in earlier stages we summarize previous discussions of the difference between “constructive” and “destructive” conflict. This includes distinguishing between “affective” polarization, where people dislike and demonize each other, and “issue” based polarization, where people disagree about specific issues. We argue that affective polarization is a reasonable place to start measuring and intervening in pre-violent platform conflict dynamics.

Second, we review the different pathways whereby platform design can facilitate conflict. In our view, there is not strong support for widespread effects from “filter bubbles.” We also don’t think conflict escalation can be addressed through more accurate or more aggressive content moderation, although this may be necessary when conflict is at a violent peak. Instead, we focus on the incentivization of the production and distribution of divisive content, and the ways that platform design can enable mass harassment and manipulation.

Finally, we synthesize the above sections to describe a number of platform design strategies that could result in healthier conflicts, focusing on three types of changes:

Change content ranking to reward productive and connecting interactions, rather than rewarding divisive content with greater distribution.
Place reasonable limits on the use of the platform to disseminate broad messages, to better mirror the safeguards of offline life.
Consider design affordances that support the on-platform work of peacebuilders, recognizing that peace is not just the absence of violent conflict, but a society in which everyone can thrive.

In order to design and evaluate effective changes, we will need a new set of conflict-aware metrics to help us understand the incentives and capabilities that platforms create and hold platforms publicly accountable for any resulting externalities. We conclude by discussing other barriers to implementation, and how future research can help.

How Conflicts Escalate

In order to talk about what platforms are and aren’t currently doing to respond to conflict, we need a framework for what conflict is, when it is undesirable, and how it escalates to physical violence. In this section, we draw from the understandings of conflict developed within the professional peacebuilding community, and by researchers in political science and social psychology.

Conflict cycles begin long before violence

In the conflict literature, a number of models look to explain the life cycle of conflict and its complex dynamics. These models differ in scope and language, but share an important characteristic: that conflict happens in a reinforcing cycle, or spiral. All of them describe the strengthening of factions, hardening of positions, and increasing distrust and fear. If these differences cannot be resolved, conflict participants may resort to violence.

Deutsch (1969) notes that conflict can occur for a variety of reasons, not just incompatibility of goals. Two parties may disagree on the best method to achieve some outcome, or may misperceive each other’s true positions, or the true state of the world. Regardless of how a conflict begins, it can take on a life of its own:

Destructive conflict is characterized by a tendency to expand and to escalate. As a result, such conflict often becomes independent of its initiating causes and is likely to continue after these have become irrelevant or have been forgotten.

… Paralleling the expansion of the scope of conflict there is an increasing reliance upon a strategy of power and upon the tactics of threat, coercion, and deception. Correspondingly, there is a shift away from a strategy of persuasion and from the tactics of conciliation, minimizing differences, and enhancing mutual understanding and good-will. And within each of the conflicting parties, there is increasing pressure for uniformity of opinion and a tendency for leadership and control to be taken away from those elements that are more conciliatory and invested in those who are militantly organized for waging conflict through combat. (Deutsch, 1969, p. 351)

Pruitt and Kim (2004) present a model where escalation operates through changes in three areas: perceptions, patterns of behavior, and societal structures. Where fewer interpersonal ties exist to counter negative stereotypes about the out-group and in-group and institutional incentives foster antagonism, people employ more severe actions or rhetoric against the "other" (Pruitt & Kim, 2004). As people witness severe actions or rhetoric, they develop a basis for mistrust, resulting in "confident negative expectations regarding another's conduct" (Lewicki et al., 1998, p. 439). These persistent confirmed negative expectations alter the nature of groups and the self-protective ways they engage, reinforcing competitive, defensive, apathetic, and combative norms for interaction. Simplification abounds as complex issues are collapsed into simplistic truths and signals of group membership, with the resulting perception being that “instead of dealing with a particular threat from Other, Party must now deal with the general issue of how to resist an immoral enemy” (Pruitt & Kim, 2004 ). This perception of the other side as immoral and threatening paves the way for the remaining transformations that complete the escalation to violence.

A related body of conflict research is framed around “polarization,” a broad concept which has been defined in many different ways (Bramson et al., 2017). Recent work in psychology and political science distinguishes between issue-based polarization, defined as the distance between parties on questions of policy, and relationship-based or affective polarization, meaning the increasing dislike, distrust, and animosity towards those from other parties or groups (Iyengar et al., 2019).

Just as some conflict can be constructive, issue-based polarization is not necessarily problematic. In contrast, affective polarization can increase the risk of escalation to violence by taking a conflict that is more specific and localized toward something more general, identity-based and antagonistic. Issue-based polarization becomes affective when we can’t change what we think or say without losing core relationships or identities. Research on belonging and social boundaries points to an understanding that we are “driven not only by what we think, but also powerfully by who we think we are” (Mason, 2018). More broadly, conflict theorists consider increased polarization a warning sign for armed conflict (Laurenson, 2019) and the deterioration of democracy (McCoy & Somer, 2019).

However escalation is described, the end point of such a destructive spiral is either a tipping point where all parties are hurting so much that structural change becomes possible, or settling into a state of “intractable conflict” (Burgess & Burgess, 2023) where structures become rigid and de-escalation becomes very difficult.

Constructive and destructive conflict

Conflict is not inherently bad. It is part of how societies change for the better, and is sometimes necessary to achieve justice. It is also an essential part of democratic debate, and necessary to hold power to account.

Conflict scholars and political theorists have developed a variety of ways of talking about the dual nature of conflict. Deutsch (1969) talks of “constructive” and “destructive” conflict, noting that, for example, two parties can disagree about methods while agreeing on goals. Mouffe (2013, pp. 191-206) distinguishes “agonistic” vs. “antagonistic” approaches to politics. McCoy and Somer (2019) are concerned with the effects of “pernicious” polarization on democracies. Political scientists talk about issue-based and affective polarization (Iyengar et al., 2019). Sociologists investigate whether a social movement brings people together or tears them apart (Coley et al., 2020). Violence is a particularly extreme and destructive type of conflict, with lasting consequences; nonetheless philosophers have argued for millennia over the possibility of a “just war.” Conversely, it is widely recognized that the mere absence of violence may hide deeper problems, leading to the concept of a “just peace” (Clements, 2004).

One fundamental difference between constructive or agonistic conflict and destructive or antagonistic conflict is how we feel about others when we take sides. When I hold an agonistic opinion, I disagree with you, but recognize your humanity and dignity when I hold an antagonistic opinion my disagreement strips you of humanity or dignity. The theory of “agonistic democracy” recognizes that political factions often have fundamentally incompatible goals, and claims this conflict is not to be eliminated (for example, through partisan victory or authoritarian pacification) but transformed. Agonistic conflict is central to democracy; antagonistic conflict can destroy it:

The aim of a pluralist democracy is to provide the institutions that will allow [conflicts] to take an agonistic form, in which opponents will treat each other not as enemies to be destroyed, but as adversaries who will fight for the victory of their position while recognizing the right of their opponents to fight for theirs. An agonistic democracy requires the availability of a choice between real alternatives. (Mouffe, 2009)

Many peacebuilding professionals subscribe to a related framework of “conflict transformation” that sees conflict, especially recurring cycles of conflict, as embedded in deeper structural problems, including systemic injustices. Conflict transformation seeks not to eliminate conflict but to change its nature (Lederach, 2003; Clements, 2004). Mouffe similarly contends that the goal of democracy is to turn antagonistic conflict between “enemies” into agonistic conflict between “adversaries.” These ideas—and the corresponding practice of those professionals who must actually defuse violence—provide an important framework for intervening in conflict dynamics on social media.

While no definition of “good” versus “bad” conflict can account for all the richness of real conflict dynamics, in this paper, we will use the terms “destructive conflict” to refer to antagonistic conflict between affectively polarized opponents and “constructive conflict” to refer to agonistic conflict about issues.

Social media and conflict escalation dynamics

Conflict escalation is a long-term process, accompanied by negative changes in society long before the appearance of violence. Arguably, these changes are themselves harmful, but even the limited goal of preventing physical violence requires attention to conflict processes at far earlier stages. In this paper we are primarily concerned with how social media can manage and de-escalate conflict during ongoing operations, rather than only responding to crises where violence erupts. This dovetails with wider calls to develop the field of conflict prevention as a potentially much more effective and far less costly approach to managing conflict (United Nations Security Council, 2019).

An understanding of conflict escalation dynamics allows an analysis of the role of platforms in escalating destructive conflicts, and suggests ways they could be designed to de-escalate conflict. Escalation is a human process, but the architecture of social media platforms can amplify existing conflict dynamics, exacerbating fault lines and reinforcing destructive patterns of behavior (Puig Larrauri & Morrison, 2022). Recent work (Guess et. al, 2023; Nyhan et. al, 2023) has been characterized by some as exonerating social media for playing a significant role in societal polarization (Clegg, 2023), but those studies examine short-term effects on average individuals, whereas we argue that conflict escalation via social media is a long-term phenomenon, affecting ecosystem incentives, and often targeting especially vulnerable individuals.

Yet escalation doesn't automatically equal violence. If the structures of society contain safeguards (strong institutions, rule of law, legitimate and trusted conflict resolution systems, etc.) then there is less risk of widespread violence (Kriesberg & Dayton, 2012; Lederach, 1997). Platforms, as one of the major mediators of both public and private communication, have a role to play in conflict resilience. At the very least, they should not create additional risk by amplifying destructive conflict escalation cycles. At best, they should create the enabling conditions for constructive conflict to unfold.

Certain types of conflict actors are primarily financially motivated, as we will see below, and platforms should not allow such actors to inflame broader divisions. It is more difficult to judge politically motivated conflict. Mass social movements universally claim to be fighting for justice, and exploiting pre-existing divisions is an effective political strategy (McCoy & Somer, 2019). How then should platforms react to polarizing strategies? One answer is to judge movements by the goals they espouse; but the means also matter, and anyway platforms are not equipped to make global judgments of who is in the right—nor should we grant them such power. Yet suppression of all conflict is authoritarian pacification, while universal support just allows conflicting parties to escalate unchecked. We argue that the correct goal of social media design is neither to eliminate conflict nor to judge the merits of specific parties, but to incentivize constructive over destructive conflict.

In the remainder of this article, we examine how the current design of social media often increases incentives towards destructive conflict and reduces incentives towards constructive conflict, and what can be done about it.

The relationship between social media and conflict

The most comprehensive reviews of the relationship between social media and constructs like “polarization” suggest a positive correlation (Kubin et al., 2021; Lorenz-Spreen et al., 2021) The question of causation is more complex, and requires a deeper analysis of several plausible causal mechanisms and a variety of relevant evidence. Many of these questions center around the recommender systems that algorithmically select content for each user, because one of the core questions of conflict-sensitive platform design is who is exposed to what.

Filter bubbles are probably not driving polarization

The “filter bubble,” “echo chamber,” and “rabbit hole” metaphors encompass a variety of hypotheses about the possibility of narrow or one-sided exposure to information. These metaphors have been central to discussions of the relationship between social media and polarization for the last decade. If these hypotheses are true, then polarization could be reduced by increasing exposure to counter-ideological content.

However, the accumulated evidence does not support the idea that filter bubbles are driving increases in polarization, at least for most users. Social media has been found to broaden the information diets of most users (Barberá, 2020). The divisions that exist on platforms generally pre-date social media (Boxell et al., 2020). Further, increasing exposure diversity on social media may only have small effects on polarization (Stray, 2022), or in some cases, can even make polarization worse (Bail et al., 2018). A recent experiment increasing cross-cutting content (Nyhan et al., 2023) had no detectable effect on survey-based polarization measures after two months, which is consistent with the hypothesis that individual level filter bubbles are probably not strong enough to be driving societal polarization.

Meta-analyses of the positive effects of intergroup contact suggest that it is not mere exposure to the outgroup that produces change, but rather the quality of that exposure (Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006) including factors such as a cooperative environment, common goals, equal status, and norms endorsing contact. Clearly, many online interactions with alternative viewpoints do not meet these criteria, suggesting possible reasons why the mere exposure to counter-attitudinal information online does not have the desired effect.

There is a related family of theories about “rabbit holes,” the idea that recommender systems are making people more extreme as a result of a feedback loop between user beliefs and recommender outputs (Thorburn et al., 2023). An effect of this nature appears in certain stylized simulations of recommender operation (Mansoury et al., 2020; Carroll et al., 2021). Some studies of YouTube show this effect using bots that click randomly (Brown et al., 2022). However, users do not click randomly so this approach greatly overestimates rabbit hole effects (Ribeiro et al., 2023), and users don’t watch extreme videos on YouTube more than they consume them across the broader web (Hosseinmardi et al., 2021), which suggests a limited causal role for YouTube’s recommender.

One notable limitation of these studies is that they generally focus on average effects, whereas studies of radicalization often focus on individuals who commit extreme acts (e.g. Koehler, 2014; Roose, 2019). For these more extreme individuals, there are typically both online and offline processes at play (Gill et al., 2017, Baugut & Neumann, 2020) suggesting that processes may be longer-term and involve ecosystem-level effects. Generally, we believe that there are more widespread and reliable phenomena than “filter bubbles” and “rabbit holes” for conceptualizing the relationship between social media, polarization, and conflict.

Social media’s broader negative impact on conflict dynamics

While criticisms based on filter bubbles and rabbit holes may exaggerate short-term impact on the average person, there remain areas where social media does impact the broader population and therefore has a responsibility for conflict outcomes.

There have always been actors who deliberately escalate conflict by heightening the divisions between groups. These have been called “conflict entrepreneurs” (Friis, 1999; Ripley, 2021) or “political entrepreneurs” (McCoy & Somer, 2019). Escalating conflict tends to be more destructive when the motivations of actors are more about furthering their own goals, rather than achieving a societal benefit (Ripley, 2021). The efforts of such actors have been aided and amplified by the affordances of platforms. In addition, many actors who would otherwise refrain from divisive tactics have reported being pushed towards more antagonistic rhetoric, in order to receive increased distribution.

In this section, we lay out evidence for how social media platforms are impacting conflict escalation dynamics across the globe, leading to more destructive conflict. Note that we do not claim that social media is the primary driver of conflict, nor that the harms of social media outweigh the benefits which seem to include, for example, greater political knowledge and participation (Lorenz-Spreen et al., 2021). Further, many of the processes we identify have long existed in other forms of media, for example, the use of radio to escalate violence in Rwanda (Puig Larrauri & Morrison, 2022). Rather, we are saying that certain social media dynamics are negative externalities and significant drivers of destructive conflict, regardless of the relative contribution of other drivers of conflict or the good that social media may do in other domains.

The enabling of mass harassment and manipulation

Social media’s open system enables individual untrusted actors to target individuals en masse without the offline constraints of privacy, negative feedback, and the need to protect their reputation. For business reasons, social media systems are often designed with public visibility as the default setting (Frenkel & Kang, 2021) and users on social media platforms may sign up for accounts without realizing that they are discoverable by strangers by default. This means that conflict actors can reach a wide array of targets, without the high economic costs or social consequences they would normally experience offline. Youth, the elderly, and particularly vulnerable individuals are usually afforded some protection from strangers by others in the community who mediate those interactions. Such protections (e.g. age-appropriate design codes) are now being added retroactively to systems that were originally designed to be as frictionless and open as possible.

This role of social media in conflict escalation has been widely recognised by peacebuilding practitioners. In 2016, a U.N. panel of experts report on South Sudan concluded that “social media has been used by partisans on all sides, including some senior government officials, to exaggerate incidents, spread falsehoods and veiled threats or post outright messages of incitement” (U.N. Security Council, 2016). More generally, the U.N.’s expert on human rights and freedom of expression stated that social media is fuelling hate speech in warzones creating an “extremely dangerous” situation for vulnerable civilians (U.N., 2022). Below we discuss three broad strategies that conflict actors have used: sock puppets, misinformation, and targeted harassment.

One strategy is to use a large number of centrally controlled accounts (“sock puppets”) to create the appearance of a mass movement, and especially to manipulate recommendation algorithms into treating such content as genuinely popular. These accounts may be bots posing as humans or they may be individually operated by real people; either way they are used deceptively. There are so many examples—many uncovered by platform teams—that the phenomenon has a name in industry practice: “coordinated inauthentic behavior” (Cinelli et al., 2022).

To take a few recent examples, a number of networks of inauthentic and hacked accounts on Twitter were found to be amplifying a narrative that Sudanese internet users opposed the government’s decision to transfer al-Bashir to the International Criminal Court (Jones, 2021). Later, a sock puppet network was found to be sharing content about the United Arab Emirates’ support for and relationship with Sudan (Jones, 2022). In both cases, these accounts were also involved in promoting inauthentic narratives in other Middle East countries. In Libya, coordinated networks have been used to bolster Khalifa Haftar’s Libyan National Army (Grossman et al., 2020) or to undermine U.N.-led attempts to forge peace (Stanford Internet Observatory, 2020). These networks have been shown to originate outside of Libya, notably in Egypt, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Russia. In the Philippines, the government has reportedly (per BuildUp’s sources) used troll armies to push narratives critical of the Communist New People’s Army and discredit a resumption of peace talks, mirroring other reports of the use of troll armies in the Philippines (Bengali & Harper, 2019).

Manipulation of information is another common approach (though it is important to note that falsehood is not required to mobilize people through divisive strategies, so eliminating misinformation would not eliminate destructive conflict). Users often have little indication of the original source of a piece of content and are therefore vulnerable to believing that content in their social feeds is trustworthy. Social proof is a powerful influence (Cialdini & Goldstein, 2004) and a small number of hyper engagers can push a narrative to make it seem popular to others, even when a wider silent majority disagrees. While the effects of Russian manipulation in the 2016 U.S. election specifically may be exaggerated (Bail et al. , 2019; Eady et al. , 2023), the wider effects of intentional misinformation are likely broad. Small groups in India have been successful at pushing narratives blaming Muslims for various societal issues (Avaaz, 2019). A relatively small group of users was responsible for the rapid growth of the Stop the Steal movements in the U.S., based on the false premise of widespread electoral fraud (Tech Policy Press, 2023). In early 2021, Brazil’s Federal Police reported that it had found evidence of “digital militias,” an elaborate network of public officials—from the Federal Cabinet all the way to the municipality—creating inauthentic pages, posts, and comments on social media to produce fake news and attack democratic institutions (Global Voices, 2022). One of the authors has seen a rise in YouTube channels created specifically to share disinformation and/or pro-military content about Myanmar. Many of these channels are run by financially motivated actors, who are creating disinformation in order to capitalize on YouTube’s monetization options. These actors are primarily based in Cambodia and Vietnam, and some are also working to produce disinformation on Ukraine.

Targeted escalation can also take the form of harassment when platforms allow a small number of harassers to hyper-engage with great effect. Online harassment particularly impacts women, people of color, and minority groups, and often spills over into offline violence. During the recent Kenyan elections, Build Up found that hashtags were used in coordination by a small number of actors on Twitter to drown out the Kenya Kwanza conversation by targeting the party with #liefesto (Build Up, 2022). In Ethiopia, there have been reports that online trolls pose as members of different ethnic groups to incite tensions between them (Selegna, 2022). In 2014, a rumor spread on Facebook that a young Buddhist woman had been raped by two Muslim men in Mandalay, Myanmar. In response, a mob formed outside the teashop of the alleged attackers, sparking altercations that led to two deaths (Waheed, 2015).

Whether financially or politically motivated, these are just a few conflict-relevant examples of the widely studied phenomenon of platform manipulation, much of which is polarizing or escalatory (King et al., 2017; DiResta et al., 2020; Ong & Cabañes, 2018). Those who want to create destructive forms of conflict now have powerful new tools to aid in this effort, and the effectiveness of these tools means that some will adopt similar tactics, while others who might moderate the space, especially women (Krook & Sanín, 2020), may find it too toxic to engage (Anderson & Auxier, 2020). Because elections are generally zero-sum competitions, the effectiveness of inauthentic tactics means that opposing partisans will feel pressure to use them, leading to the proliferation of dark public relations firms that offer disinformation for hire (Silverman et al., 2020).

These are not new observations; and large platforms have made considerable investments in detecting coordinated manipulation and harassment campaigns, though not uniformly across the globe (e.g. Meta, 2021). Smaller platforms may lack the resources, know how, or motivation. In either case, we argue that these problems should be understood as enabled by underlying design decisions. Reactive response will not be as effective in the long term as changes in the ways people can interact online. For example, WhatsApp has progressively reduced the number of groups that a message can be shared to at once, which has led to dramatic reductions in the spread of inflammatory rumors (Benton, 2022).

The incentive toward divisiveness for non-conflict actors

The design of platforms can not only benefit those seeking to intentionally divide others, but also influence those who would otherwise be more moderate. Evidence for the incentive toward divisiveness exists from three primary sources: the experiences of publishers, reports on experimental results from within platforms, and external studies of the relationship between engagement and indicators of divisiveness. In particular, most recommenders strongly favor items which the user is predicted to engage with in some way (Begani et al., 2022). Engagement is a useful signal of value to users, and essential in some form to any media business model. It is also an error-prone signal and attempting to maximize engagement can result in damaging side effects (Bengani et al., 2022). In particular, if more engagement leads to greater distribution, then content creators have an incentive to produce divisive content.

Many publishers, who do numerous experiments to understand what does or does not work to drive business relevant metrics, have reported this incentive toward divisiveness. Buzzfeed built their business on the systematic understanding of content performance leveraging frequent experimentation (Wang, 2017). Jonah Peretti, Buzzfeed’s CEO, emailed Facebook in 2018 about the fact that the most divisive content they created was getting the most virality, creating an incentive to produce more of it. He specifically blamed an algorithm change that prioritized comments and reshares. Internal analyses in response to this email reportedly confirmed that “misinformation, toxicity, and violent content are inordinately prevalent among reshares” (Hagey & Horwitz, 2021). This same perverse incentive was noted by politicians in Europe (Morris, 2021), who called Facebook’s ranking system a “hate algorithm” that deepened political polarization. Ben Sasse, a former U.S. senator who served on committees providing oversight of tech platforms, reported that many of the celebrities he had interviewed feel trapped by these incentives and that several who had tried to “break out of the vicious cycle of rage-inflammation” learned to “throw themselves back into the outrage loop” when “no one clicks” and “metrics plummet” (Sasse, 2018).

Convergent evidence for the incentives that publishers report can be found in experiments conducted by platforms that have been reported or leaked. Most public information indicates that predicted engagement is a major factor in content ranking for large platforms (Lada et al., 2021; Narayanan, 2023; Oremus & Merrill, 2021; Zhao et al.,2019). A recently reported Facebook change removed predicted comments and shares from the ranking formula for political content, and led to small reductions in platform usage (0.18% fewer visits) but also a greater than 50% decrease in “anger” emoji reactions as well as accompanying reductions in bullying, inaccurate information, and graphic content (Horwitz et al., 2023). Previous articles based on internal documents from Facebook have shown similar effects where, for example, changes away from engagement-based ranking for health related content led to a 12% decrease in misinformation and a 7% decrease in negative interactions (Klepper & Seitz, 2021).

Leaked documents made available by Gizmodo (2023), which represent a small sample of the large number of experiments that platforms have done, show more convergent results where engagement-based ranking relates to negative outcomes. In particular, they show that reducing the influence of predicted reshares in content ranking can reduce the spread of inflammatory content in at-risk countries (Anonymous, 2021), reducing the weight of downstream engagement leads to drops in misinformation prevalence (Anonymous, 2020a), reducing effect of anger reactions leads to reductions in misinformation and graphic content (Anonymous, 2020b), and that engagement incentives and measures of misinformation, graphic content, and bullying can tradeoff (Anonymous, 2019a). Taken together, the available evidence points to the existence of engagement-based incentives within Facebook’s systems consistent with the described experiences of publishers, where more divisive content performs better. Twitter recently open-sourced its algorithm (Narayanan, 2023) which revealed that Twitter similarly prioritizes content that it expects users to retweet and reply to, which means we might expect that similar conflict dynamics are playing out on that platform.

While external researchers are generally unable to do true experiments on platforms, analyses of public data and lab experiments have generated another line of evidence, showing the same relationship between engagement and divisive content. Much of this work has been on Twitter, where data has historically been more accessible. Studies using Twitter data have shown that moral-emotional language (Brady et al., 2017; de León & Trilling, 2021) and outgroup derogation (Mercandante et al., 2023; Rathje et al., 2021) are correlated with greater engagement. An experiment conducted by external researchers comparing Twitter’s algorithmic feed to its chronological feed yielded similar results where algorithmically ranked political content was not only deemed more polarizing, but also lower quality (Milli et al., 2023). Most recently, an experiment that removed reshared content from Facebook feeds led to a reduction in exposure to content from untrustworthy sources and in clicks to partisan publishers (Guess et al, 2023). Given these associations and the known platform optimization for engagement, it is unsurprising that publishers have reported an incentive toward divisive content.

Real world effects of mass harassment, manipulation, and divisive content

One possible criticism of the above studies is that they measure reductions in the distribution of content thought to be divisive but do not measure conflict outcomes directly, for example through surveys assessing affective polarization or support for violence. Do divisive narratives really matter, and do they really lead to physical violence? Evidence that they do comes from both lab studies and the experience of peacebuilders.

The effects of various kinds of divisive content have been studied widely in psychology labs, where some of the most reliable ways to generate negative intergroup attitudes toward others are to manipulate fear (Riek et al., 2006), use social influence (Turner, 1991; Mackie & Wright, 2023; Kim et al., 2021), and create competition between groups (Diehl, 1990). Theoretical models backed up by experimental evidence have outlined the mechanisms by which “immersion in a realm of online hate speech” can progress to avoidance and discrimination, and eventually increase the likelihood of violence against outgroup members (Bilewicz & Soral, 2020). Critically, some studies find that people for whom digital media is a primary source of information about politics consider hate speech to be a social norm rather than delinquent behavior (Bilewicz & Soral, 2020), making contempt of outgroups socially acceptable, decreasing intergroup empathy, and paving the path to intergroup violence.

This is corroborated by the experiences of peacebuilders who have seen divisive material propagate widely, driving conflict escalation dynamics rooted in affective polarization (Hawke, 2022). Content about specific issues of contention is often drowned out by more general, simplified, and unspecified claims. This results in the silencing of moderate voices and the acceptance of influencers with high in-group validation, such that users from formerly neutral, adjacent, or cross-cutting positions accumulate into a limited number of camps with increasing in-group cohesion and polarized affiliations. As affiliation becomes more important, there is also a reduction in the quantity and quality of meaningful communication and everyday interaction that are normal to peaceful engagement.

Examples from the field illustrate this. In the run up to the 2022 elections in Kenya, the entry of former Nairobi Governor Mike Mbuvi Sonko into the Mombasa gubernatorial race led to the emergence of online harmful content dividing Kenyans of Arab descent and non-Arab communities along the Kenyan Coast (Build Up & Search for Common Ground, 2022). A retweet network graph from this period shows three clear poles representing the three conflicting political parties. These relatively homogeneous sub-networks represent tight patterns of in-group content sharing, including many negative comments and hate speech about out-groups.

In Lebanon, a social media analysis confirmed the spread of Facebook posts and tweets attributing generalized blame for the country’s shortcomings to Syrian refugees (Build Up, 2019). The posts and tweets occurred in tandem with increasing tension between refugee and host communities, as reported by multiple U.N. agencies. Interviews with civil society actors confirmed that the spread of such content was impacting attitudes among Lebanese towards Syrian refugees. The increased presence of hate speech impacted anti-discriminatory norms, normalizing the harassment and blame of Syrian refugees.

A forthcoming report by the Sudanese Development Initiative (SUDIA) found that conversations on Facebook and Twitter are an important factor in impeding a resolution of the political stalemate. Examining conversations around four key conflict topics, the report finds that politicians respond to opinions shared on social media in ways that suggest they assign as much importance to them as to offline realities.

This incentive toward divisive content exists outside of any individual and cannot be eliminated simply by removing oneself from social media. Thus, experiments that seek to isolate the effects of social media by testing what happens to people who stay off social media (e.g. Allcott et al. , 2020; Asimovic et al., 2021) are unlikely to be able to measure the full effect on the conflict ecosystem. The incentive toward conflict will continue to operate on the publishers and politicians in a person’s community, regardless of their individual usage of social media. The same incentives also apply to a person’s friends and family, who will amplify messages from publishers and politicians, on and offline. This holds true even for contexts where a large proportion of the population is not directly connected to platforms. In South Sudan, peacebuilders found that hate speech spread on Facebook would reach people fighting on the frontlines who did not have access to the internet via a network of peers (Clifford, 2017).

Destructive conflict escalation enabled by social media affects society as a whole. To understand the broader effects, we need to move away from a paradigm of individual harms and towards collective harm—as that is what matters to peace.

Moderation is not enough to prevent conflict escalation

The fundamental weakness of moderation as a conflict management approach is that it addresses only the most obvious forms of hate speech, coordinated harassment, misinformation and incitement to violence, without considering the processes that escalate conflict to that point or the context that may make subtler forms of speech more likely to lead to violence (Dangerous Speech Project, 2021). Emphasizing cultural practice, Udupa and Pohjonen (2019) urge us to move “beyond the binary and normative divisions of acceptable and unacceptable speech [and] pay attention to the everyday online practices that underlie contemporary digital cultures.”

Furthermore, the attempt to use content moderation as a primary tool creates new negative effects, in the form of unfair over-enforcement and under-enforcement, backlash against perceived bias, and the censorship of important views (Douek, 2021). Notably, content moderation practice frequently rebounds on exactly those it is supposed to protect, including women and minorities (e.g. Dwoskin et al., 2021). These effects work against any strategy that might de-escalate and transform conflict on platform.

Objective policies cannot capture dangerous speech

Trying to separate speech into “good” and “bad” faces a number of problems as a conflict management strategy. Dangerous speech—meaning speech that leads to violence—is often as much a product of the context and history in which it is said (Dangerous Speech Project, 2021), and evaluating such context is impossible within a scaled content moderation framework (Douek, 2021; Iyer, 2022). Technology companies themselves have noted that a great deal of harmful content approaches the border of “bad speech” without actually violating platform rules, and such “borderline” content receives more engagement even when users don’t endorse it (Zuckerberg, 2018). This can be mitigated to some extent by downranking borderline content, which many platforms do (Gillespie, 2022), but this still requires complex judgments of which content is deserving of this treatment.

More fundamentally, it is not difficult to escalate conflict without violating platform policies on hate speech or incitement to violence, especially against groups that have experienced historic discrimination. Human rights scholars have documented several other types of speech that precede violence (Dangerous Speech Project, 2021) including expressions of fear and rhetoric around protecting children. Recent work has shown how fear-based speech is often more prevalent than hate speech (Saha et al., 2023; Saha et al., 2021), and examples describing how online content leads to offline violence often describe fear speech (Taub & Fisher, 2018; Hegyi, 2020).

These kinds of speech cannot be captured by moderation policies because they are not inherently bad. Everyday activities such as the reporting of crime news can be linked to polarized attitudes (Peffley et al., 1996), but they are also important avenues to keeping oneself safe. Fear, collective emotion, and intergroup competition exist for adaptive social reasons and platforms justifiably point out that they reflect these basic human processes, which existed long before social media.

However, discussions of collective fear and competition were historically rare. The phrase “never cry wolf” illustrates the social cost of sparking fear, and the norms against using such techniques merely to attract attention. This has changed with the advent of new communications technology. For example, U.S. news headlines have come to express significantly more anger, fear, disgust, and sadness in the last two decades (Rozado et al. 2022). Platforms are not responsible for the existence of fear-driven narratives that pit groups against each other, but rather for the incentivization and amplification of such content, and the resulting escalation dynamics.

Reliance on moderation leads to b ias, censorship, and reactance

Aside from the difficulty in deciding which speech is “bad,” removing such speech is immediately troubling from a freedom of expression perspective, especially because this classification will always be incomplete and error-prone (Douek, 2021). Since errors can never be made equal across languages, moderation across parties who speak different languages will always be biased toward one side or the other, and especially towards English and other colonial languages (e.g. BSR, 2022). Differences in enforcement rates between groups will always be interpreted as evidence of bias, even when these groups have different base rates of violation (Mosleh et al., 2022). In any case these base rates are often poorly known or poorly defined, and differences in group outcomes (as opposed to differences in policy application or enforcement thresholds) is itself a widely used measure of algorithmic fairness (Mitchell et al., 2021). Removal may even inflame conflict by legitimating grievances, as an analysis of European right-wing extremism suggests (Mølmen & Ravndal, 2018).

Moreover, conflict scholars have already noted that the strategy of simply removing “bad speech” is likely to fail (Puig Larrauri & Morrison, 2022) because it does not engage with the underlying drivers of escalation. Professional conflict transformation practices do not operate by attempting to prevent people from speaking, even though it is understood that certain types of speech can escalate conflict. Peacebuilders and mediators take a “multi-partial” approach which aims to view the conflict from multiple perspectives, understand the interests of the different parties, and respect the dignity and humanity of everyone involved (Zhang et al., 2020). Peacebuilding dialogues have to let everyone experience what it's like to be listened to, as this is key to eventually transforming the conflict in a more constructive direction. Removing actors or shutting down discourse can never be a systemic solution—conflict escalation will move elsewhere, to another platform, or take a different form.

Platforms could be designed to foster peace

The identification of the dynamics that push actors toward divisiveness and facilitate harassment and manipulation also points the way toward solutions. Some form of social media is likely to exist from now on, so it behooves us to improve upon these dynamics such that when conflict plays out online, it is not primarily a way to attract financially beneficial attention, retain power, or fuel violence. Having no conflict is unrealistic and unhealthy. Rather, the conflict which occurs should be productive, contained, and agonistic conflict which does not dehumanize the other. We organize conflict-sensitive platform design strategies into two broad categories: reducing destructive conflict and increasing constructive conflict.

Reducing the facilitation of destructive conflict

The links between platform operation and conflict escalation suggest a range of strategies beyond removing content. We discuss three: reducing engagement incentives to divisiveness, collecting additional feedback to discriminate between positive and negative engagement, and changing defaults to make it harder for conflict entrepreneurs to reach large numbers of people.

Strategy One: Reduce engagement incentives to divisiveness

The strategy with the most empirical support at this time is to reduce the weight of engagement signals in content selection, for those contexts where engagement has a tendency to incentivize divisive content. Some engagement interactions have no explicit user value judgment—users can comment, reply, retweet, spend time on, or reshare content that they find objectionable or intriguing, but that they do not endorse. Using such ambiguous signals to control the distribution of material on sensitive topics is inherently risky, because it creates incentives toward conflict. Some platforms have already taken important steps to reduce such incentives. Notably, Facebook removed predicted comments and shares from its ranking formula for political content, resulting in more than a 50% decrease in anger reactions on civic content as well as accompanying reductions in bullying, inaccurate information, and graphic content (Glazer et al., 2023). We are aware of one other large platform which has taken similar steps.

Some categories of ranking signals might turn out to be too difficult to use in a conflict-sensitive manner. For example, using “time spent” as a ranking signal prioritizes content that is more attention-grabbing, so it may not be possible to use this signal in a way that does not also incentivize the production of divisive content. Facebook de-emphasized time spent as part of its meaningful social interactions change (Oremus, 2017), but it is unclear to what degree time spent still influences content ranking. Recent source code releases suggest it is not used at Twitter (Narayanan, 2023), but we know time spent is a major signal for TikTok (Smith, 2021), and is predicted by the YouTube recommender as well (Zhao et al. , 2019). Algorithmic transparency efforts could attempt to definitively determine the influence of time spent and other ambiguous signals across platforms.

Other interactions and incentives may be more subtle or context dependent, and can be detected by monitoring the spread of types of material that can be reliably identified as divisive, or more destructive than constructive. Platforms could audit their algorithms to understand which design choices are leading to the incentive toward division that publishers have reported. Ideally, these audits would be public, and allow for visibility into the experimental results that platforms use to understand the impact of design choices.

Strategy Two: Collect additional feedback to discriminate between positive and negative engagement

In addition to standard signals such as comments, shares, and time spent, other kinds of feedback signals might help users differentiate between content that is genuinely valuable, content they agree with, and content that they react to without necessarily endorsing.

A lab experiment with “like,” “recommend,” and “respect” buttons found that people were more likely to “respect” than “like” content they disagreed with (Stroud et al., 2017). Similar designs (e.g. an “informative” button) could help algorithms find and surface less divisive and more informative content. Conversely, platforms also ought to give users a prominent way to signal that content is of negative value, such as thumbs down, hide, or “see less” buttons, as such negative signals are important for moderating offline interactions and could similarly be useful online (Anonymous, 2019b).

In general, the problem of determining whether engagement means an item is genuinely valuable or merely attention-getting requires the collection of some sort of additional feedback, and there are many ways to do this including providing new user controls and directly asking a subset of users with surveys. Better conflict is one of many values we might want social media to support, and the methods to measure and operationalize these values are developing rapidly (Stray et al., 2022).

Strategy Three: Change defaults to make it harder for conflict entrepreneurs to reach large numbers of people

The third anti-escalation strategy we advocate for is a shift away from global distribution by default. Rather than defaulting to a design where any user can contact any other user, platforms could better attempt to ascertain the privacy desires of their users and enable those choices; what is good for business is not necessarily a good default from a conflict perspective. Such functionality has already proven to be a useful tool in some countries (Saini, 2020), and these tools should be made more widely accessible.

Similarly, rather than allowing a new, untrusted user the power to impact a large group of strangers, platforms should mirror real-life processes whereby individuals have to gain some level of trust to be able to reach broad groups of others. For example, Facebook has successfully used pagerank, which proxies offline reputation, to limit virality, with benefits in terms of reducing misinformation (Rodriguez, 2019). It would be better for individual users, who would be less subject to harassment from swarms of untrusted and potentially inauthentic users, and for society as a whole, if individuals who get broad distribution first need to earn some level of trust in the broader community.

Increasing incentives towards constructive conflict

Beyond reducing the facilitation of destructive conflict, platforms could be designed with constructive conflict in mind. The overall goal of this work would be to direct conflict in more constructive directions (Deutsch, 1973) rather than to suppress it entirely, in line with conflict transformation practices (Lederach, 2003). From a peacebuilding perspective, this is about promoting positive, constructive, cross-cutting encounters (Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006), cross-cutting group affiliations (Gaertner et al., 1999), more complex and diverse narratives (IFIT, 2021), and more complex, nuanced voices that model empathy and curiosity as norms. A number of studies have shown how important norms formed by example are in human behavior generally (Gelfand & Harrington, 2015) and in the online world specifically (Berry & Taylor, 2017; Bilewicz & Soral, 2020). We discuss three concrete strategies that could connect these principles to social media systems: algorithmically promoting bridging content, exposing people to alternative content, and conducting (and possibly automating) moderating encounters.

Strategy Four: Algorithmically promote bridging content

Bridging-based ranking prioritizes content that meets approval (or generates positive engagement) across diverse groups of people. This approach attempts to counteract the amplification of divisive material by favoring items which have cross-partisan appeal (Ovadya & Thorburn, 2023). A simple example is Facebook’s use of a crowdsourced survey to rate the credibility of news domains, rating as trustworthy only those with wide support (Owen, 2018). Twitter’s Community Notes system (formerly Birdwatch), which asks users for crowdsourced notes on misleading tweets, is a much more sophisticated approach. Raters rank multiple notes, and this user-note rating matrix is factored to separate out high ratings due to partisan agreement from high ratings due to overall note quality. Only those notes which are widely agreed to be high quality are displayed with the original tweet (Wojcik et al., 2022). Bridging is also the core idea of Polis, a successful deliberative democracy system that collects and clusters opinions on political issues, mapping the points of consensus (Small et al., 2021).

There are many potential ways to identify bridging content. Local peacebuilders in Build Up’s network have suggested allowing users to flag accounts which promote positive interaction or peace messaging. Promoting content which models constructive conflict is only possible if such content already exists on the platform. However, such promotion could change the incentives for the production of this type of bridging content, just as current engagement optimization incentivizes divisive content.

Strategy Five: Expose people to constructive content

Beyond highlighting user existing posts, it is also possible to foster constructive conflict by showing carefully designed messages. The Strengthening Democracy Challenge (Voelkel et al., 2023) systematically tested many different interventions (each of which had to be done online, alone, and in less than eight minutes) and found that 23 out of 25 improved intergroup attitudes, including reducing partisan animosity and reducing support for partisan violence. The interventions that most effectively reduced partisan animosity did so by either highlighting sympathetic and relatable individuals with different political beliefs, or presenting group identities that were common across partisan lines. The interventions that most effectively reduced support for partisan violence did so by correcting misperceptions of outpartisans’ views or providing pro-democratic cues from someone in the political elite. Understanding how design decisions may incentivize or disincentivize such content could help platforms make more conflict aware design choices.

Strategy Six: Support moderating encounters

When peacebuilders work on platforms they act as guides, coaches and bridge builders. They connect social media users to conversations that otherwise wouldn’t happen, expose them to other voices and resources, and attempt to shift discourse toward shared values of civility and respect. For example, The Commons project sought out Americans who were expressing polarizing views, and engaged them in a text conversation with the aim of providing a humanizing experience of communication without changing their opinion (Build Up, 2019). This approach was adapted and replicated in Kenya by a coalition of six universities, with similarly positive results (Ogenga, 2022). In Sri Lanka, the Cyber Guardians project of Search for Common Ground worked with social media influencers to change youth attitudes towards hate speech (Katheravelu, 2020). This sort of human facilitation work cannot yet be automated, but platforms could support existing peacebuilding efforts by promoting their programs in contexts where divisive conversations are likely to escalate.

Platforms might also consider providing API access to support more ambitious conflict transformation approaches. For example, it is possible to use large language models to help people rephrase their statements more constructively in a politically charged conversation (Argyle et al., 2023). Just as we have automated spelling checks in most products today, one could imagine these sorts of automated conflict assistants integrated into social media platforms.

No single design change is going to address conflict escalation in all circumstances. Conflict transformation is complex, and requires a shift in daily practices that eventually builds to a shift in societal norms. The design changes we suggest in this section could together help change the norms prevalent on platforms, away from divisiveness, hate, and fear, and towards plurality and empathy.

The challenge of metrics

As the above discussion suggests, there are many design changes that might alter the trajectory of conflict on social media. Unfortunately, theory alone cannot tell us which will work best. We must test different approaches and evaluate the results against some measure of constructive conflict.

This is illustrated by the process used to develop Twitter’s Community Notes, which tested eight different note ranking algorithms against two survey measures: agreement with misleading tweets, and trust in the appended notes (Wojcik et al.,2022). While a bridging-based ranking algorithm will involve the calculation of some sort of bridging signal—perhaps the difference in engagement across the sides in a conflict, or a matrix factorization approach like Community Notes—these types of signals cannot directly tell us what we really want to know: has a design change helped move the conflict from destructive to constructive?

So far, the conflict-relevant changes that have been implemented at platforms have mostly been evaluated using metrics designed for content moderation, such as the number of posts containing hate speech, incitement to violence, or misinformation, and the number of angry reactions generated, the number of accounts suspended for rule violations, and other similar indicators. These all have relevance to conflict, but were not designed to measure conflict intensity, nor discriminate between constructive and destructive conflict. Incitement to violence does not capture pre-violent escalation. Hate speech is not necessarily escalatory, and much violence is not driven by hate but fear (Leader Maynard & Benesch, 2016; Taub & Fisher, 2018; Hegyi, 2020). Misinformation is often divisive, but it is only one aspect of conflict.

Many other measures might provide better information about the state of a conflict. The Strengthening Democracy Challenge (Voelkel et al., 2023) tested each intervention against eight indicators: partisan animosity, support for undemocratic practices, support for partisan violence, support for undemocratic candidates, opposition to bipartisan cooperation, social distrust, and social distance, and biased evaluation of politicized facts. One could also add measures for affective polarization, dehumanization, and others.

All of these are survey measures, which can provide considerably more information than on-platform behavior alone. For example, Facebook asked users whether they perceived particular items to be “bad for the world” (Pawha, 2021; Anonymous, 2020c) which tended to be a signal of posts which were highly engaging yet more likely to contain hate speech, incitement, or graphic violence. Highly reshared content was more likely to be judged by users to be “bad for the world” (Anonymous, 2020c). This is an admittedly imperfect but potentially useful signal as to whether on-platform conflict is getting better or worse. Still, survey measures can be limited by user subjectivity and sample size, and so ideal measurement would combine methodologies across survey, content, and engagement modalities to mitigate the error of any one method (see Stray et al., 2022 for a discussion).

Ideal metrics would be public facing and previously agreed upon by external stakeholders (Stray, 2020). This is both a democratic and a pragmatic concern, as platforms may perceive no incentive to invest in conflict mitigation if they expect to be criticized regardless of anything they do. Such metrics could be used by researchers, regulators, advertisers, and the general public to hold platforms accountable for their design decisions in a way that is not currently possible. No metric is perfect, but an imperfect metric can be helpful, as long as it is not used strongly as a model objective (Manheim & Garrabrant, 2018; Zhuang & Hadfield-Menell, 2020).

In the final analysis, it is global society, not platforms, who must decide on how we evaluate conflict, including how we measure whether it is constructive or destructive.

Barriers to implementation

If platforms have made earnest efforts to improve their relationship to conflict, why do the experiences of those within conflict settings still suggest that the net effect is negative? One answer is that there are structural barriers that exist within large platforms and the business incentives they experience that may make progress difficult.

When it is easy to measure business outcomes and hard to measure societal impact, the basic desire to reduce cognitive dissonance will lead even the most well-meaning business to assume their business metrics are not at odds with societal needs. The complexity of the problem also means that there are few widely agreed-upon metrics that disambiguate constructive from destructive conflict. It will not be possible to create good metrics without the data, experimental capability and deep operational knowledge that platforms possess, yet the process of creating and legitimating a metric must also involve external stakeholders (Stray, 2020).

Beyond creating public metrics, society should help platforms by taking some of the complex decision making out of their hands. Just as building designers have clear guidelines as to what safety standards are expected of them from society, so too could society provide clear guidance to companies as to what design patterns they need to follow. The design strategies above are informed by previous work. New research could help uncover other design patterns that could eventually be incorporated into conflict-sensitive design principles for online spaces. Some part of that research will inevitably (and sometimes necessarily) be done within companies, and it is hoped that companies, academics, policymakers, and engaged citizens could eventually work together to incorporate that evidence into our overall body of knowledge. Currently, collaborations with external researchers are very difficult to arrange, but we hope that forthcoming regulation will improve that, such as the researcher data access provisions of the European Union Digital Services Act.

There is now good evidence, from multiple methods and perspectives, that social media platforms have had negative effects on societal conflict by pushing moderate actors toward divisiveness and enabling the actions of conflict entrepreneurs. These problems cannot be solved by content moderation, but must be addressed through design changes that help prevent the escalation of destructive conflict. From all of this evidence and experience, we have identified six broad strategies platforms might use to discourage destructive conflict before it escalates to violence.

Reduce engagement incentives to divisiveness. Reduce the weight of engagement signals in content selection, for those contexts where engagement has a tendency to incentivize the production of destructive conflict.
Collect additional feedback to discriminate between positive and negative engagement . New kinds of reactions (e.g. an “informative” button), controls, and user surveys might help distinguish between attention and value.
Change defaults to make it harder for conflict entrepreneurs to reach large numbers of people . Shift away from global distribution by default, and rely more on community and reputation.
Algorithmically promote bridging content. It’s not just engagement that matters, but the diversity of the people who are engaging.
Expose people to constructive content. Professional peacebuilders produce a wide variety of media designed to transform destructive conflict, and experimental evidence confirms that it shifts attitudes.
Support moderating encounters. Find ways to help people have positive online encounters, including API-level integration with peacebuilding programs that aim to connect people.

To their credit, platforms have taken some of these steps toward improving their impact on conflict that we can learn from and build upon. Ample evidence exists for a design playbook that can help platforms improve their relationship to conflict. Society has an active role to play in partnering with platforms on the development of that playbook and the measurement of results.

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Cite as: Jonathan Stray, Ravi Iyer, & Helena Puig Larrauri, The Algorithmic Management of Polarization and Violence on Social Media , 23-05 Knight First Amend. Inst. (Aug. 22, 2023) , https://knightcolumbia.org/content/the-algorithmic-management-of-polarization-and-violence-on-social-media [ https://perma.cc/4NY5-GLFV ].

Jonathan Stray is a senior scientist at the Center for Human Compatible AI at University of California, Berkeley, where he works on the design of recommender systems for better personalized news and information.

Ravi Iyer is the managing director of the Psychology of Technology Institute, which is a project of University of Southern California's Neely Center.

Helena Puig Larrauri is strategy lead & co-founder of Build Up.

Filed Under

Algorithmic Amplification

The Facts on Media Violence

By Vanessa Schipani

Posted on March 8, 2018

In the wake of the Florida school shooting, politicians have raised concern over the influence of violent video games and films on young people, with the president claiming they’re “shaping young people’s thoughts.” Scientists still debate the issue, but the majority of studies show that extensive exposure to media violence is a risk factor for aggressive thoughts, feelings and behaviors.

The link between media violence and mass shootings is yet more tenuous. Compared with acts of aggression and violence, mass shootings are relatively rare events, which makes conducting conclusive research on them difficult.

President Donald Trump first raised the issue during a meeting on school safety with local and state officials, which took place a week after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. The shooter, 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz, reportedly obsessively played violent video games.

Trump, Feb. 22: We have to look at the Internet because a lot of bad things are happening to young kids and young minds, and their minds are being formed. And we have to do something about maybe what they’re seeing and how they’re seeing it. And also video games. I’m hearing more and more people say the level of violence on video games is really shaping young people’s thoughts. And then you go the further step, and that’s the movies. You see these movies, they’re so violent.

Trump discussed the issue again with members of Congress on Feb. 28 during another meeting on school safety. During that discussion, Tennessee Rep. Marsha Blackburn claimed mothers have told her they’re “very concerned” that “exposure” to entertainment media has “desensitized” children to violence.

Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley also said during the meeting: “[Y]ou see all these films about everybody being blown up. Well, just think of the impact that makes on young people.”

The points Trump and members of Congress raise aren’t unfounded, but the research on the subject is complex. Scientists who study the effect of media violence have taken issue with how the popular press has portrayed their work, arguing that the nuance of their research is often left out.

In a 2015 review of the scientific literature on video game violence, the American Psychological Association elaborates on this point.

APA, 2015: News commentators often turn to violent video game use as a potential causal contributor to acts of mass homicide. The media point to perpetrators’ gaming habits as either a reason they have chosen to commit their crimes or as a method of training. This practice extends at least as far back as the Columbine massacre (1999). … As with most areas of science, the picture presented by this research is more complex than is usually depicted in news coverage and other information prepared for the general public.

Here, we break down the facts — nuance included — on the effect of media violence on young people.

Is Media Violence a Risk Factor for Aggression?

The 2015 report by the APA on video games is a good place to start. After systematically going through the scientific literature, the report’s authors “concluded that violent video game use has an effect on aggression.”

In particular, the authors explain that this effect manifests as an increase in aggressive behaviors, thoughts and feelings and a decrease in helping others, empathy and sensitivity to aggression. Though limited, evidence also suggests that “higher amounts of exposure” to video games is linked to “higher levels of aggression,” the report said.

The report emphasized that “aggression is a complex behavior” caused by multiple factors, each of which increases the likelihood that an individual will be aggressive. “Children who experience multiple risk factors are more likely to engage in aggression,” the report said.

The authors came to their conclusions because researchers have consistently found the effect across three different kinds of studies: cross-sectional studies, longitudinal studies and laboratory experiments. “One method’s limits are offset by another method’s strengths,” the APA report explains, so only together can they be used to infer a causal relationship.

Cross-sectional studies find correlations between different phenomena at one point in time. They’re relatively easy to conduct, but they can’t provide causal evidence because correlations can be spurious . For example, an increase in video game sales might correlate with a decrease in violent crime, but that doesn’t necessarily mean video games prevent violent crime. Other unknown factors might also be at play.

Longitudinal panel studies collect data on the same group over time, sometimes for decades. They’re used to investigate long-term effects, such as whether playing video games as a child might correlate with aggression as an adult. These studies also measure other risk factors for aggression, such as harsh discipline from parents, with the aim of singling out the effect of media violence. For this reason, these studies provide better evidence for causality than cross-sectional studies, but they are more difficult to conduct.

Laboratory experiments manipulate one phenomenon — in this case, exposure to media violence — and keep all others constant. Because of their controlled environment, experiments provide strong evidence for a causal effect. But for the same reason, laboratory studies may not accurately reflect how people act in the real world.

This brings us to why debate still exists among scientists studying media violence. Some researchers have found that the experimental evidence backing the causal relationship between playing video games and aggression might not be as solid as it seems.

Last July, Joseph Hilgard , an assistant professor of psychology at Illinois State University, and others published a study in the journal Psychological Bulletin that found that laboratory experiments on the topic may be subject to publication bias. This means that studies that show the effect may be more likely to be published than those that don’t, skewing the body of evidence.

After Hilgard corrected for this bias, the effect of violent video games on aggressive behavior and emotions did still exist, but it was reduced, perhaps even to near zero. However, the effect on aggressive thoughts remained relatively unaffected by this publication bias. The researchers also found that cross-sectional studies weren’t subject to publication bias. They didn’t examine longitudinal studies, which have shown that youth who play more violent video games are more likely to report aggressive behavior over time.

Hilgard looked at a 2010 literature review by Craig A. Anderson , the director of the Center for the Study of Violence at Iowa State University, and others. Published in Psychological Bulletin, this review influenced the APA’s report.

In response, Anderson took a second look at his review and found that the effect of violent video games on aggression was smaller than he originally thought, but not as small as Hilgard found. For this reason, he argued the effect was still a “societal concern.”

To be clear, Hilgard is arguing that there’s more uncertainty in the field than originally thought, not that video games have no effect on aggression. He’s also not the first to find that research on video games may be suffering from publication bias.

But what about movies and television? Reviews of the literature on these forms of media tend to be less recent, Kenneth A. Dodge , a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University, told us by email.

Dodge, also one of the authors of the 2015 APA study, pointed us to one 1994 review of the literature on television published in the journal Communication Research that concluded that television violence also “increases aggressiveness and antisocial behavior.” Dodge told us he’s “confident” the effect this analysis and others found “would hold again today.”

Dodge also pointed us to a 2006 study that reviewed the literature on violent video games, films, television and other media together. “Most contemporary studies start with the premise that children are exposed [to violence] through so many diverse media that they start to group them together,” said Dodge.

Published in JAMA Pediatrics , the review found that exposure to violent media increases the likelihood of aggressive behavior, thoughts and feelings. The review also found media decreases the likelihood of helping behavior. All of these effects were “modest,” the researchers concluded.

Overall, most of the research suggests media violence is a risk factor for aggression, but some experts in the field still question whether there’s enough evidence to conclusively say there’s a link.

Is Violent Media a Risk Factor for Violence?

There’s even less evidence to suggest media violence is a risk factor for criminal violence.

“In psychological research, aggression is usually conceptualized as behavior that is intended to harm another,” while, “[v]iolence can be defined as an extreme form of physical aggression,” the 2015 APA report explains . “Thus, all violence is aggression, but not all aggression is violence.”

The APA report said studies have been conducted on media violence’s relationship with “criminal violence,” but the authors “did not find enough evidence of sufficient utility to evaluate whether” there’s a solid link to violent video game use.

This lack of evidence is due, in part, to the fact that there are ethical limitations to conducting experiments on violence in the laboratory, especially when it comes to children and teens, the report explains. That leaves only evidence from cross-sectional studies and longitudinal studies. So what do those studies say?

One longitudinal study , published in the journal Developmental Psychology in 2003, found that, out of 153 males, those who watched the most violent television as children were more likely 15 years later “to have pushed, grabbed, or shoved their spouses, to have responded to an insult by shoving a person” or to have been “to have been convicted of a crime” during the previous year. Girls who watched the most violent television were also more likely to commit similar acts as young women. These effects persisted after controlling for other risk factors for aggression, such as parental aggression and intellectual ability.

A 2012 cross-sectional study that Anderson, at Iowa State, and others published in the journal Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice did find that the amount of violent video games juvenile delinquents played correlated with how many violent acts they had committed over the past year. The violent acts included gang fighting, hitting a teacher, hitting a parent, hitting other students and attacking another person.

However, a 2008 review of the literature published in the journal Criminal Justice and Behavior concluded that “ the effects of exposure to media violence on criminally violent behavior have not been established.” But the authors clarify: “Saying that the effect has not been established is not the same as saying that the effect does not exist.”

In contrast to the APA report, Anderson and a colleague argue in a 2015 article published in American Behavioral Scientist that “research shows that media violence is a causal risk factor not only for mild forms of aggression but also for more serious forms of aggression, including violent criminal behavior.”

Why did Anderson and his colleagues come to different conclusions than the APA? He told us that the APA “did not include the research literature on TV violence,” and excluded “several important studies on video game effects on violent behavior published since 2013.”

In their 2015 article, Anderson and his colleague clarify that, even if there is a link, it “does not mean that violent media exposure by itself will turn a normal child or adolescent who has few or no other risk factors into a violent criminal or a school shooter.” They add, “Such extreme violence is rare, and tends to occur only when multiple risk factors converge in time, space, and within an individual.”

Multiple experts we spoke with did point to one factor unique to the United States that they argue increases the risk of mass shootings and lethality of violence in general — access to guns.

For example, Anderson told us by email: “There is a pretty strong consensus among violence researchers in psychology and criminology that the main reason that U.S. homicide rates are so much higher than in most Western democracies is our easy access to guns.”

Dodge, at Duke, echoed Anderson’s point.”The single most obvious and probably largest difference between a country like the US that has many mass shootings and other developed countries is the easy access to guns,” he said.

So while scientists disagree about how much evidence is enough to sufficiently support a causal link between media violence and real world violence, Trump and other politicians’ concerns aren’t unfounded.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org is also based at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center. Hilgard, now at Illinois State, was a post doctoral fellow at the APPC.

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Science News

Social media harms teens’ mental health, mounting evidence shows. what now.

Understanding what is going on in teens’ minds is necessary for targeted policy suggestions

A teen scrolls through social media alone on her phone.

Most teens use social media, often for hours on end. Some social scientists are confident that such use is harming their mental health. Now they want to pinpoint what explains the link.

Carol Yepes/Getty Images

Increasing rigor

Concerns over the effects of social media use in children have been circulating for years, resulting in a massive body of scientific literature. But those mostly correlational studies could not show if teen social media use was harming mental health or if teens with mental health problems were using more social media.

Moreover, the findings from such studies were often inconclusive, or the effects on mental health so small as to be inconsequential. In one study that received considerable media attention, psychologists Amy Orben and Andrew Przybylski combined data from three surveys to see if they could find a link between technology use, including social media, and reduced well-being. The duo gauged the well-being of over 355,000 teenagers by focusing on questions around depression, suicidal thinking and self-esteem.

Digital technology use was associated with a slight decrease in adolescent well-being , Orben, now of the University of Cambridge, and Przybylski, of the University of Oxford, reported in 2019 in Nature Human Behaviour . But the duo downplayed that finding, noting that researchers have observed similar drops in adolescent well-being associated with drinking milk, going to the movies or eating potatoes.

Holes have begun to appear in that narrative thanks to newer, more rigorous studies.

In one longitudinal study, researchers — including Orben and Przybylski — used survey data on social media use and well-being from over 17,400 teens and young adults to look at how individuals’ responses to a question gauging life satisfaction changed between 2011 and 2018. And they dug into how the responses varied by gender, age and time spent on social media.

Social media use was associated with a drop in well-being among teens during certain developmental periods, chiefly puberty and young adulthood, the team reported in 2022 in Nature Communications . That translated to lower well-being scores around ages 11 to 13 for girls and ages 14 to 15 for boys. Both groups also reported a drop in well-being around age 19. Moreover, among the older teens, the team found evidence for the Goldilocks Hypothesis: the idea that both too much and too little time spent on social media can harm mental health.

“There’s hardly any effect if you look over everybody. But if you look at specific age groups, at particularly what [Orben] calls ‘windows of sensitivity’ … you see these clear effects,” says L.J. Shrum, a consumer psychologist at HEC Paris who was not involved with this research. His review of studies related to teen social media use and mental health is forthcoming in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research.

Cause and effect

That longitudinal study hints at causation, researchers say. But one of the clearest ways to pin down cause and effect is through natural or quasi-experiments. For these in-the-wild experiments, researchers must identify situations where the rollout of a societal “treatment” is staggered across space and time. They can then compare outcomes among members of the group who received the treatment to those still in the queue — the control group.

That was the approach Makarin and his team used in their study of Facebook. The researchers homed in on the staggered rollout of Facebook across 775 college campuses from 2004 to 2006. They combined that rollout data with student responses to the National College Health Assessment, a widely used survey of college students’ mental and physical health.

The team then sought to understand if those survey questions captured diagnosable mental health problems. Specifically, they had roughly 500 undergraduate students respond to questions both in the National College Health Assessment and in validated screening tools for depression and anxiety. They found that mental health scores on the assessment predicted scores on the screenings. That suggested that a drop in well-being on the college survey was a good proxy for a corresponding increase in diagnosable mental health disorders.

Compared with campuses that had not yet gained access to Facebook, college campuses with Facebook experienced a 2 percentage point increase in the number of students who met the diagnostic criteria for anxiety or depression, the team found.

When it comes to showing a causal link between social media use in teens and worse mental health, “that study really is the crown jewel right now,” says Cunningham, who was not involved in that research.

A need for nuance

The social media landscape today is vastly different than the landscape of 20 years ago. Facebook is now optimized for maximum addiction, Shrum says, and other newer platforms, such as Snapchat, Instagram and TikTok, have since copied and built on those features. Paired with the ubiquity of social media in general, the negative effects on mental health may well be larger now.

Moreover, social media research tends to focus on young adults — an easier cohort to study than minors. That needs to change, Cunningham says. “Most of us are worried about our high school kids and younger.”

And so, researchers must pivot accordingly. Crucially, simple comparisons of social media users and nonusers no longer make sense. As Orben and Przybylski’s 2022 work suggested, a teen not on social media might well feel worse than one who briefly logs on.

Researchers must also dig into why, and under what circumstances, social media use can harm mental health, Cunningham says. Explanations for this link abound. For instance, social media is thought to crowd out other activities or increase people’s likelihood of comparing themselves unfavorably with others. But big data studies, with their reliance on existing surveys and statistical analyses, cannot address those deeper questions. “These kinds of papers, there’s nothing you can really ask … to find these plausible mechanisms,” Cunningham says.

One ongoing effort to understand social media use from this more nuanced vantage point is the SMART Schools project out of the University of Birmingham in England. Pedagogical expert Victoria Goodyear and her team are comparing mental and physical health outcomes among children who attend schools that have restricted cell phone use to those attending schools without such a policy. The researchers described the protocol of that study of 30 schools and over 1,000 students in the July BMJ Open.

Goodyear and colleagues are also combining that natural experiment with qualitative research. They met with 36 five-person focus groups each consisting of all students, all parents or all educators at six of those schools. The team hopes to learn how students use their phones during the day, how usage practices make students feel, and what the various parties think of restrictions on cell phone use during the school day.

Talking to teens and those in their orbit is the best way to get at the mechanisms by which social media influences well-being — for better or worse, Goodyear says. Moving beyond big data to this more personal approach, however, takes considerable time and effort. “Social media has increased in pace and momentum very, very quickly,” she says. “And research takes a long time to catch up with that process.”

Until that catch-up occurs, though, researchers cannot dole out much advice. “What guidance could we provide to young people, parents and schools to help maintain the positives of social media use?” Goodyear asks. “There’s not concrete evidence yet.”

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How social media turns online arguments between teens into real-world violence

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“On social media, when you argue, something so small can turn into something so big so fast,” said Justin, a 17-year-old living in Hartford, Connecticut, during one of my research focus groups. (The participants’ names have been changed in this article to protect their identities.)

Internet banging

It can result in a phenomenon that researchers at Columbia University have coined “internet banging.” Distinct from cyberbullying, internet banging involves taunts, disses and arguments on social media between people in rival crews, cliques or gangs. These exchanges can include comments, images and videos that lead to physical fights, shootings and, in the worst cases, death .

According to the young people we interviewed, four social media features in particular escalate conflicts: comments, livestreaming, picture/video sharing and tagging.

Comments and livestreams

She went on to describe how three Facebook “friends” who were watching the livestream pulled up in cars in front of the house with cameras, ready to record and then post any fight.

Strategies to stop violence

Peer pressure goes viral

Young people are all too aware that the number of comments a post garners, or how many people are watching a livestream, can make it extremely difficult to pull out of a conflict once it starts.

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How online hate turns into real-life violence

Social media sites have become hubs for the proliferation of white-supremacist propaganda..

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White-supremacist groups use social media as a tool to distribute their message, where they can incubate their hate online and allow it to spread. But when their rhetoric reaches certain people, the online messages can turn into real-life violence.

Several incidents in recent years have shown that when online hate goes offline, it can be deadly. White supremacist Wade Michael Page posted in online forums tied to hate before he went on to murder six people at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin in 2012. Prosecutors said Dylann Roof “self-radicalized” online before he murdered nine people at a black church in South Carolina in 2015. Robert Bowers, accused of murdering 11 elderly worshipers at a Pennsylvania synagogue in October, had been active on Gab , a Twitter-like site used by white supremacists.

And just a few weeks ago , a 30-year-old D.C. man who described himself as a white nationalist was arrested on a gun charge after concerned relatives alerted police to his violent outbursts, including saying that the victims at the synagogue “deserved it.” Police say the man was online friends with Bowers.

“I think that the white-supremacist movement has used technology in a way that has been unbelievably effective at radicalizing people,” said Adam Neufeld, vice president of innovation and strategy for the Anti-Defamation League.

“We should not kid ourselves that online hate will stay online,” Neufeld added. “Even if a small percentage of those folks active online go on to commit a hate crime, it’s something well beyond what we’ve seen for America.”

Hate speech is showing up in many schools. More censorship isn’t the answer.

In 2017, white supremacists committed the majority of domestic extremist-related killings in the United States, according to a report from the Anti-Defamation League . They were responsible for 18 of the 34 murders documented by domestic extremists that year.

The influence of the Internet in fostering white-supremacist ideas can’t be underestimated, said Shannon Martinez, who helps people leave extremist groups as program director of the Free Radicals Project . The digital world gives white supremacists a safe space to explore extreme ideologies and intensify their hate without consequence, she said. Their rage can grow under the radar until the moment when it explodes in the real world.

“There’s a lot of romanticization of violence among the far-right online, and there aren’t consequences to that,” said Martinez, who was a white-power skinhead for about five years. “In the physical world, if you’re standing in front of someone and you say something abhorrent, there’s a chance they’ll punch you. Online, you don’t have that, and you escalate into further physical violence without a threat to yourself.”

How hate spreads

Internet culture often categorizes hate speech as “trolling,” but the severity and viciousness of these comments has evolved into something much more sinister in recent years, said Whitney Phillips, an assistant professor of communications at Syracuse University. Frequently, the targets of these comments are people of color, women and religious minorities, who have spoken out about online harassment and hateful attacks for as long as the social media platforms have existed, calling for tech companies to take action to curb them.

“The more you hide behind ‘trolling,’ the more you can launder white supremacy into the mainstream,” said Phillips, who released a report this year, “ The Oxygen of Amplification ,” that analyzed how hate groups have spread their messages online.

Phillips described how white-supremacist groups first infiltrated niche online communities such as 4chan, where trolling is a tradition. But their posts on 4chan took a more vicious tone after Gamergate, the Internet controversy that began in 2013 with a debate over increasing diversity in video games and that snowballed into a full-on culture war. Leaders of the Daily Stormer, a white-supremacist site, became a regular presence on 4chan as the rhetoric got increasingly nasty, Phillips said, and stoked already-present hateful sentiments on the site.

Phillips said it’s unclear how many people were radicalized through 4chan, but the hateful content spread like a virus to more mainstream sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram through shared memes and retweets, where they reach much larger audiences.

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Unlike hate movements of the past, extremist groups are able to quickly normalize their messages by delivering a never-ending stream of hateful propaganda to the masses.

“One of the big things that changes online is that it allows people to see others use hateful words, slurs and ideas, and those things become normal,” Neufeld said. “Norms are powerful because they influence people’s behaviors. If you see a stream of slurs, that makes you feel like things are more acceptable.”

While Facebook and Twitter have official policies prohibiting hate speech, some users say that their complaints often go unheard.

“You have policies that seem straightforward, but when you flag [hate speech], it doesn't violate the platform’s policies,” said Adriana Matamoros Fernández, a lecturer at the Queensland University of Technology in Australia who studies the spread of racism on social media platforms.

Facebook considers hate speech to be a “direct attack” on users based on “protected characteristics,” including race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation and gender identity, Facebook representative Ruchika Budhraja said, adding that the company is developing technology that better filters comments reported as hate speech.

Twitter’s official policy also states that it is committed to combating online abuse.

In an email, Twitter spokesman Raki Wane said, “We have a global team that works around the clock to review reports and help enforce our rules consistently.”

Both platforms have taken action to enforce these rules. Writer Milo Yiannopoulos was banned on Twitter in 2016 after he led a racist campaign against “Ghostbusters” actor Leslie Jones. In August, Facebook banned Alex Jones from its platform for violating its hate speech policy . The following month, Twitter also banned him .

But bad actors have slipped through the cracks. Before Cesar Sayoc allegedly sent 13 homemade explosives to prominent Democrats and media figures in October, political analyst Rochelle Ritchie says he targeted her on Twitter. She said she reported Sayoc to the social media site after he sent her a threatening message , telling her to “hug your loved ones real close every time you leave home.” At the time, Twitter told her that the comment did not violate its policy , but after Sayoc was arrested, the social media site said that it was “deeply sorry” and that the original tweet “clearly violated our rules.”

The rules themselves, even when followed, can fall short. Users who are banned for policy violations can easily open a new account, Matamoros Fernández said. And while technologies exist to moderate text-based hate speech, monitoring image-based posts, such as those on Instagram, is trickier. On Facebook, where some groups are private, it’s even more difficult for those who track hate groups to see what is happening.

Tech companies “have been too slow to realize how influential their platforms are in radicalizing people, and they are playing a lot of catch-up,” Neufeld said. “Even if they were willing to do everything possible, it’s an uphill battle. But it’s an uphill battle that we have to win.”

Learning from the past

While hate speech today proliferates online, the methods used by these hate groups is nothing new. The path to radicalization is similar to that used by the Nazis in the early 20th century, said Steven Luckert, a curator at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum who focuses on Nazi propaganda.

“Skillful propagandists know how to play on people’s emotions,” Luckert said. “You play upon people’s fears that their way of life is going to disappear, and you use this propaganda to disseminate fear. And often, that can be very successful.”

Most white Americans will never be affected by affirmative action. So why do they hate it so much?

The Nazis did not start their rise to power with the blatantly violent and murderous rhetoric now associated with Nazi Germany. It began with frequent, quieter digs at Jewish people that played on fears of “the other” and ethnic stereotypes. They used radio — what Luckert calls “the Internet of its time” — to spread their dehumanizing messages.

“They created this climate of indifference to the plight of the Jews, and that was a factor of the Holocaust,” Luckert said. “Someone didn’t have to hate Jews, but if they were indifferent, that’s all that was often needed.”

The antidote, Luckert says, is for people to not become immune to hate speech.

“It’s important to not be indifferent or a passive observer,” Luckert said. “People need to stand up against hate and not sit back and do nothing.”

Martinez, of Free Radicals, said that to combat the spread of hate, white Americans need to be more proactive in learning about the history of such ideologies.

She said she recently took her 11-year-old son to see the new lynching memorial in Alabama that memorializes the 4,000 victims.

She said her son was overwhelmed by what he saw. Security guards who saw the boy attempting to process the display suggested that he ask his mother to get ice cream, a treat to ease the emotional weight of the museum. Martinez refused.

“He’s a white man in America. I’m not going to let him ‘ice cream’ his way out of it,” Martinez said. “We have to shift this idea that we are somehow protecting our children by not talking about racism and violence. We can’t ice cream it away. We have to be forthcoming about our legacy of violence.”

88 Media Violence Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

🏆 best media violence topic ideas & essay examples, ⭐ most interesting media violence topics to write about, 📑 good research topics about media violence, ❓ research questions about violence in the media.

Media Violence Effect on Youth and Its Regulation It is also important to note that the more important the media puts on violence, the more people are tempted to engage in it for the sake of attention.
Exposure to Media Violence on Behavior They are of the opinion that exposure of media violence to the children at an early age has no effect whatsoever to the change of the children’s behavior to that associated with violence. We will write a custom essay specifically for you by our professional experts 808 writers online Learn More
Media Violence and Aggressive Behavior From one perspective, it is said that the person will learn to like the violence and use it in real life.
Media Violence and Importance of Media Literacy Media literacy is the public’s ability to access, decode, evaluate and transmit a message from media. Improved media literacy and education will enable the responsible consumption of information.
Relation Between Media Violence and Cause of George Floyd The media coverage of the end of George Floyd exposed the prevalence of police brutality against a colored population that led to nationwide protests.
Violence in Media: Contribution to Public Violence Present scholarship affords a more intricate integration flanking the media and community, with the media on engendering in rank from a structure of associations as well as manipulation and with personal definitions and analysis of […]
Fear in News and Violence in Media In the proposed paper I intend to present the prevailing fear in American society and which has been produced by news media and the rise of a “problem frame” which is used to delineate this […]
Media Violence, Its Reasons and Consequences Regarding the matters of media violence, first of all, it is necessary to mention, that this term is usually regarded in two senses: Information that is provided without any will or determination by the recipient […]
The Media Violence Debate and the Risks It Holds for Social Science On the other hand, research on the matter is inconclusive showing that the correlation between violence and aggression varies from null to weak.
Media Violence and Aggression Risk Factors The topic of exposure to violence in mass media and a consequent probability of developing more aggressive behaviors is widely investigated and discussed in the literature.
Violence in Media and Accepted Norm in Society At the same time, these concerned groups represent the stratum that has the most power in influencing the spreading of media violence and mitigating its effects. The government can ensure that that rules and regulations […]
Media Violence Laws and Their Effectiveness Thesis statement: With the increasing levels of criminally assaulting behavior in the USA and other countries caused by media violence, it is assumed that the relevant laws have a significant potential for reducing the scale […]
Violence in Media and Real-Life Aggresive Behavior Regardless of the variety of factors that may be perceived as the premises of violent behavior and adverse outcomes, the existing evidence claims that the problem of increasing violence rates is inextricably linked to the […]
Canadian Media Violence, Pornography, Free Speech To fill the gap, the researchers developed a critical analysis of the problem in Canada based on the concept of “moral panic” and a study on the coverage of youth violence in the Canadian media.
Does Exposure to Media Violence Promote Aggressive Behavior? One of the major changes that have been prominent in the social environment is the satiety of the mass media. It is incorrect to focus on the irregularities witnessed in the studies whilst the researches […]
Research of Violence in the Media The left frontal lobe of the participants was analyzed and found to be more active in the control group than in the exposed group. Exposure of children to violence in the mass media leads to […]
Effects of Violence Media on Aggression In case a child is exposed to continuous violent media, chances are high that such a child would develop a deviant behavior, which might lead to the development of aggressive behavior.
The Main Cause of Increasing Violent Behavior Among Youths Is Violence in the Media Although the question is controversial, it is possible to state that the media promoting violent films, video games, and music is the cause for increasing violent behaviours because the media provokes the young people’s reflection […]
The Effects of Media Violence on People Despite the fact that there is some evidence that, lengthy exposure to violent media increases aggressive behavior in people, this exposure alone cannot cause people to become violent and aggressive for there is no established […]
Media Violence and Altruism Consistent presence of children in violent media avenues is a major factor that results to increased aggression even as they grow up. In this case, there is a close link of social aggressive behavior with […]
Media Violence and Its Effect on Children’s Aggression
Brutal Legacies: Media Violence and America’s Youth
Media Violence Should Be Restricted by Government and Does Cause Real-World
Children and the Effects of Media Violence
Reasons Why Children Suffer From Media Violence
Communication as the Easiest Way to Eliminate Media Violence on Children
Correlation Between Media Violence and Aggression
Defining Criteria for Evaluating Media Violence
Media Violence and Its Effects on Society
Correlation Between Media Violence, Video Games, and Aggressive Behavior
Juvenile Crime and the Influence of Media Violence
Linking Media Violence and Negative Behavior
Media Violence Affecting Our Mental Stability
The Link Between Media Violence and Aggressive Behavior in Children and Teens
The Relationships Between Media Violence and Crime Violence
Media Violence and Effects on the American Family
Correlation Between Media Violence and School Shootings
Media Violence and How It Affects Our Conscience
Linking Media Violence and the Violent Male Adolescents
Media Violence and Its Contributions to Aggressive Behavior in Our Society
The Controversy About Media Violence and Violent Video Games
Media Violence and Its Effects on School, Grades, and Social Activities
Analysis of the Problem Associated With Media Violence
Media Violence and Its Impact on Increasing Violence in Young People
Relationship Between Video Games and Television Media Violence
Media Violence and the Effect It Has on Actual Behavior
Television and Media Violence: Is Aggressive Behavior Linked to TV Violence?
Media Violence: Censorship Not Needed
Television and Media Violence – TV Violence and Common Sense
Media Violence Does Not Cause Violent Behavior
Television and the Effects of Media Violence on Society
Media Violence Increases the Risk of Aggressive Behavior Among Children
The American Battle Against the Culture of Media Violence
Media Violence May Increase Behavioral Violence
The Assumptions Regarding the Myth of Media Violence
Media Violence? Media Whatever You Want
The Growing Concerns Over Media Violence and Its Effect on Society
Media Violence: Not the Real Culprit for the Problems of Society
U.S. Population Consumes Much Media Violence
Media Violence Turning Good Kids Bad: Fact or Fiction?
What Is the Impact of Media Violence on Mental Health?
What Is the Contribution of Media Violence to Aggressive and Violent Behavior in Our Society?
How Common Is Concern About the Effects of Violence in Media, Video Games, the Internet, and Television?
What Are the Ways to Deal with Stress and Violence in the Media?
Should the Government Limit Violence in the Media?
How Does Violence-Based Media Affect Human Behavior?
Why Do Video Games Cause Less Violence Than Other Forms of Media?
How Do Media Violence and Advertising Affect the Minds of Young Children and Adults?
Does Violence in the Media Increase the Risk of Aggressive Behavior in Children?
What Is the Relationship Between Media Violence and Crime?
How Does Media Violence Affect Deviant Behavior, Particularly Criminal Behavior?
What Does Research Say About the Relationship Between Media Violence and Aggressive Behavior?
Is Aggressive Behavior Related to Media Violence?
Which Hypothesis Explains That Violence in the Media Causes More Aggressive Behavior?
How Does Family Conflict Increase the Effect of Media Violence Exposure on Adolescent Aggression?
What Are the Ethical Issues Related to the Portrayal of Violence in the Media?
To What Extent Does Media Violence Lead to Aggression?
What Are the Negative Consequences of Media Violence for Today’s Youth?
How Is America Dealing with a Culture of Media Violence?
Is Violence in the Media the Real Culprit of Society’s Problems?
What Is the Relationship Between Substance Abuse, Media Violence, School Violence, and Family Violence?
Does Intense Media Coverage of Violence Contribute to Its Spread in Our Society?
Is Communication the Easiest Way to End Media Violence Against Children?
What Are the Clear Connections Between Violence in the Media and Violence in Society?
To What Extent Do Sociologists Agree That Violence in the Media Leads to Violence in Real Life?
What Explanations Are Offered for Media Violence Against Women?
Does Violence in the Media Contribute to Violent Behavior Among Youth?
Is It Fact or Fiction That Media Violence Makes Good Kids Bad?
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Essays About Violence: Top 5 Examples and 7 Prompts

Violence is a broad topic and can be sensitive for many; read our guide for help writing essays about violence.

The world has grown considerably more chaotic in recent decades, and with chaos comes violence. We have heard countless stories of police brutality, mass shootings, and injustices carried out by governments; these repeating occurrences show that the world is only becoming more violent.

Violence refers to the use of physical force so as to injure, abuse, damage, or destroy . From punching a friend due to disagreement to a massacre of innocent civilians, a broad range of actions can be considered violent. Many say that violence is intrinsic to humanity, but others promote peace and believe that we must do better to improve society.

If you are writing essays about violence, go over the essay example, and writing prompts featured below.

Are you looking for more? Check out our guide packed full of transition words for essays .

1. Videogames, Violence, and Vulgarity by Jared Lovins

2. street culture, schools, and the risk of youth violence by lorine hughes, ekaterina botchkovar, olena antonaccio, and anastasiia timmer, 3. violence in media: no problem or promotes violence in society by albert miles, 4. my experience of domestic violence by ruth stewart, 5. a few thoughts about violence by jason schmidt, writing prompts on essays about violence, 1. what is violence, 2. different types of violence, 3. can social media cause people to be violent, 4. is violence truly intrinsic to humankind, 5. causes of violence, 6. violence among the youth, 7. race-based violence.

“Parents allow themselves to be ignorant of the video games their children are playing. Players allow themselves to act recklessly when they believe that playing video games for ten, twenty, or even thirty hours on end won’t have an adverse effect on their mental and physical health. People allow themselves to act foolishly by blaming video games for much of the violence in the world when in truth they should be blaming themselves.”

Lovins discusses the widespread belief that video games cause violence and ” corrupt our society.” There is conflicting evidence on this issue; some studies prove this statement, while others show that playing violent video games may produce a calming effect. Lovins concludes that it is not the games themselves that make people violent; instead, some people’s mental health issues allow the games to inspire them to commit violence.

“The risk of violence was not higher (or lower) in schools with more pervasive street culture values. Higher concentrations of street culture values within schools did not increase the likelihood of violence above and beyond the effects of the street culture values of individual students. Our results also showed that attending schools with more pervasive street culture values did not magnify the risk of violence among individual students who had internalized these same values.”

In this essay, the authors discuss the results of their study regarding “street culture” and violence. Street culture promotes toughness and dominance by using “physical force and aggression,” so one would think that students who embrace street culture would be more violent; however, the research reveals that there is no higher risk of violent behavior in schools with more “street culture”-following students.

“We have had a violent society before media was even around, and violence is just in our nature as human beings. Those who happen to stand against this are deceived by society, due to the fact that we live in a dangerous world, which will stay this way due to the inability to create proper reasoning.”

Miles writes about people blaming the media for violence in society. He believes that government media regulations, including age-based ratings, are sufficient. If these restrictions and guidelines are taken seriously, there should be no problem with violence. Miles also states that violence has existed as long as humankind has, so it is unreasonable to blame the media.

“It was when I was in the bath, and I looked down at my body and there were no bruises on it. None at all. I was shocked; it was the first time I had lived in a non-bruised body in many years. I don’t know if any other women who got out of violent situations felt their moment. The point at which they realised it was over, they could now get on with recovering. I promised myself that I would never stay with a violent partner ever, ever again. I have kept that promise to myself.”

Stewart reflects on her time with an ex-boyfriend who was violent towards her. Even though he kept hitting her, she stayed because she was used to it; her mother and stepfather were both violent during her childhood. Thankfully, she decided to leave and freed herself from the torture. She promises never to get into a similar situation and gives tips on avoiding staying with a violent partner.

“I went back and replayed the burglar scenario in my head. Suppose I’d had a gun. When would I have pulled it? When he ran out of the apartment? What were the chances I would have killed him in a panic, without ever knowing he was armed? Stupidly high. And for what? Because he tried to steal someone’s TV? No.”

In his essay, Schmidt recalls an instance in which a man pulled a gun on him, threatening him with violence. He chased a burglar down the street, but the burglar pulled a gun on him, leaving him stunned and confused enough to escape. Schmidt was so bothered by the incident that he got his own concealed carry permit; however, after reading statistics regarding gun accidents, he decided to reject violence outright and pursue peace.

As stated previously, violence is quite a broad topic, so it can be challenging to understand fully. Define the word violence and briefly overview some of its probable causes, how it manifests itself, and its effects. You can also include statistics related to violence and your own opinions on if violence is a good or bad thing.

Essays About Violence: Different types of violence

There are many types of violence, such as domestic violence, gun violence, and war. List down the commonly occurring forms of violence and explain each of them briefly. How are they connected, if they are? To keep your essay exciting and readable, do not go too in-depth; you can reserve a more detailed discussion for future essays that are specifically about one type of violence.

Social media is quite explicit and can show viewers almost anything, including violent content. Some sample essays above discuss the media’s effect on violence; based on this, is social media any different? Research this connection, if it exists, and decide whether social media can cause violence. Can social media-based pressure lead to violence? Answer this question in your essay citing data and interview research.

Many argue that humans are innately violent, and each of us has an “inner beast.” In your essay, discuss what makes people violent and whether you believe we have tendencies towards violence. Be sure to support your points with ample evidence; there are many sources you can find online.

Violence arises from many common problems, whether it be depression, poverty, or greed. Discuss one or more causes of violence and how they are interconnected. Explain how these factors arise and how they manifest violence. With an understanding of the causes of violence, your essay can also propose solutions to help prevent future violence.

Youth violence is becoming a more severe problem. News of school shootings in the U.S. has set public discourse aflame, saying that more should be done to prevent them. For your essay, give a background of youth violence in the U.S. and focus on school shootings. What motivates these school shooters? Give examples of children whose upbringing led them to commit violent acts in the future

Another issue in the U.S. today is race-based violence, most notably police brutality against African-Americans. Is there a race issue in policing in America? Or do they target offenders regardless of race? Can both be true at the same time? You decide, and make sure to explain your argument in detail.

If you’d like to learn more, in this guide our writer explains how to write an argumentative essay .Grammarly is one of our top grammar checkers. Find out why in this Grammarly review .

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Home — Essay Samples — Law, Crime & Punishment — Community Violence — Social Media As A Reason Of Violance

Social Media as a Reason of Violance

Categories: Community Violence

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Words: 1049 |

Published: Aug 16, 2019

Words: 1049 | Pages: 2 | 6 min read

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Violence in The Media Promote Violent in Society – IELTS Writing Task 2

Updated On Oct 04, 2023

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Violence in The Media Promote Violent in Society – IELTS Writing Task 2

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The Essay Writing section of the IELTS Writing Module can be a difficult task for many IELTS Aspirants. Thus, it is vital that you polish your essay writing skills before attempting the IELTS.

Below is a sample IELTS Essay for the IELTS Essay topic:

Violence in the media promotes violence in society. To what extent do you agree or disagree?

Opinion Essay (Agree/Disagree)

Introduction

Sentences 1, 2 & 3: Introduce the topic.

Sentence 4 – I agree with the notion of the essay.

Body Paragraphs

Paragraph 1 – Superhero movies and the image of ‘manly’ personality is characterized by the ability to perform violent acts.

Paragraph 2 – Crime shows inspire people and fake news may lead to riots.

Summarize and state the final opinion.

Sample Essay

From the last few decades, media has become part and parcel of our life, irrespective of age, gender or profession of a person. Different genres of programs, like comedy, romance, fantasy, animation have attracted audiences worldwide. But the genre that has enticed the maximum number of people is action which stimulates them to undertake certain wild activities. So, I think media does promote violence, and in this essay, I will further discuss my viewpoint.

Most of us like superhero movies like Avengers , Batman , Justice League, to name a few. Young children and sometimes, adults love to copy the frenzy shown in the action scenes of such movies. As a result, without supervision , they get hurt or incapacitate others in the process. For example, when a person riding a bike at high speed hits another person walking on the pavement, he may get hurt. But the person he hits may die or become a cripple for life. Secondly, the image of a ‘manly’ personality is created by the ability to fight others and defeat enemies, not paying heed to the injuries they may suffer. Young minds take up these images and make it their passion and they are diverted from the correct path.

Crime shows or popular movies based on robbery, bank loots, murders, like Money Heist , Dhoom , Catch me if you can, etc, inspire people to initiate such actions. They either imitate those crimes in the same manner or take clues of how to grab the attention of the public and rise to instant fame. Sometimes, people are led astray by the violent, partial news shared on social media. They shape the young minds in such a way that they become passionate for a wrong cause and give in to terrorism. Moreover, fake news may lead to communal riots, which disturb the balance of society.

However, the history of human civilization shows that violence has been an integral part of our society way before the advent of media. The havoc caused by wars, both internal and global, raids by invaders, and atrocities like the Holocaust by Adolf Hitler during the Second World War are few examples of how violent humans can be, even without the aid of media.

Thus, to conclude, I would like to point out the fact that although humans might be violent by nature, the projection of violence in the media in various forms definitely has aggravated the rate of violent crimes in society. So, we should be aware of the type of programs to watch and keep ourselves in a positive mindset so that we are not affected by the violent scenes on media.

Part and parcel

Meaning: an essential or integral component Eg: Walking his dog to the park and meeting his friend has become part and parcel of his life now.

Entice (past tense – enticed)

Meaning: to attract someone to a particular place or activity by offering something pleasant or advantageous Eg: The kidnapper decided to entice the child with chocolates.

Meaning: uncontrolled and excited behaviour or emotion that is sometimes violent Eg: Shiva started to dance in a frenzy when he learnt that his wife had passed away.

Supervision

Meaning: the activity of managing a department, project, etc. and of making sure that things are done correctly and according to the rules Eg: The exam was conducted under the supervision of three teachers.

Incapacitate

Meaning: to make someone unable to work or do things normally, or unable to do what they intended to do Eg: The unfortunate event killed his wife and incapacitated him for life.

Meaning: away from the correct path or correct way of doing something Eg: Youth is being led astray by their addiction to wrong activities.

Meaning: of or relating to a part rather than the whole Eg: “Today we can see a partial moon in the sky.”

Meaning: confusion and lack of order, especially causing damage or trouble Eg: The tornado created havoc in and around the village.

Meaning: an extremely cruel, violent, or shocking act Eg: The group of criminals was hanged to death for the atrocities they have committed.

Aggravate (past tense – aggravated)

Meaning: to make worse, more serious, or more severe Eg: Her infection was aggravated by the usage of the wrong medicine.

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Abstract Media violence poses a threat to public health inasmuch as it leads to an increase in real-world violence and aggression. Research shows that fictional television and film violence contribute to both a short-term and a long-term increase in aggression and violence in young viewers. Television news violence also contributes to increased violence, principally in the form of imitative ...
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Published: Aug 16, 2019. In today's age social media is becoming more and more instantaneous and keeping up with it all is our youth. The days of seeing your fifth grade best friend until summers over, is now over. Adolescents are communicating daily with their peers. If there was a fight during fifth period, it is now all over twitter with ...
Violence in The Media Promote Violent in Society
Below is a sample IELTS Essay for the IELTS Essay topic: Violence in the media promotes violence in society. To what extent do you agree or disagree? Outline Essay Type. Opinion Essay (Agree/Disagree) Introduction. Sentences 1, 2 & 3: Introduce the topic. Sentence 4 - I agree with the notion of the essay. Body Paragraphs

Essay on Media and Violence

Cite this page

UConn Today

How Social Media Turns Online Arguments Between Teens Into Real-World Violence

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Article contents

Media Exposure, Violence, and Aggression

Media Exposure and Copycat Crimes

Media Exposure and Violent Crimes

Theoretical Perspectives on Media Effects

Criminology and the “Media/Crime Nexus”

Further Reading

Related Articles

The Impact of Electronic Media Violence: Scientific Theory and Research

Background for the Review

Theoretical Explanations for Media Violence Effects

Short-term Effects

Long-term Effects

Observational learning

Desensitization

Enactive learning

The Key Empirical Studies

Violence in Television, Films, and Video Games

Experiments

Cross-sectional and longitudinal studies

Moderators of Media Violence Effects

Mediators of Media Violence Effects

The Algorithmic Management of Polarization and Violence on Social Media

Introduction

How Conflicts Escalate

Conflict cycles begin long before violence

Constructive and destructive conflict

Social media and conflict escalation dynamics

The relationship between social media and conflict

Filter bubbles are probably not driving polarization

Social media’s broader negative impact on conflict dynamics

The enabling of mass harassment and manipulation

The incentive toward divisiveness for non-conflict actors

Real world effects of mass harassment, manipulation, and divisive content

Moderation is not enough to prevent conflict escalation

Objective policies cannot capture dangerous speech

Reliance on moderation leads to b ias, censorship, and reactance

Platforms could be designed to foster peace

Reducing the facilitation of destructive conflict

Strategy One: Reduce engagement incentives to divisiveness

Strategy Two: Collect additional feedback to discriminate between positive and negative engagement

Strategy Three: Change defaults to make it harder for conflict entrepreneurs to reach large numbers of people

Increasing incentives towards constructive conflict

Strategy Four: Algorithmically promote bridging content

Strategy Five: Expose people to constructive content

Strategy Six: Support moderating encounters

The challenge of metrics

Barriers to implementation

Filed Under

The Facts on Media Violence

Is Media Violence a Risk Factor for Aggression?

Is Violent Media a Risk Factor for Violence?

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