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Social media provides a new environment that makes it possible to carefully edit the image you want to project of yourself. A study from Lund University in Sweden suggests that many people are prepared to pay to "filter out" unfavorable information.
Economists Håkan Holm and Margaret Samahita have investigated how we curate our social image on the web using game theory.
Previous studies have been conducted on, for example, how anonymity affects our willingness to act pro-socially, and thus our concern for social image. However, the internet and social media now make it possible to edit the image we want to project of ourselves retroactively. One can therefore expect other, -- less impulsive, mechanisms to control this behavior. The purpose of the study was therefore to better understand online behavior.
Each subject participated in a cooperative situation with an anonymous person, and the participants earned real money during the experiment. They could be "good" and cooperate a lot, which is costly, or be less cooperative, which costs less. They then found out that information about how much they actually cooperated could be published online along with their name, but that they could avoid this publication if they paid to censor the information. It turned out that those who cooperated less, valued the censorship highest which meant that information about this group's actions tended to be filtered out.
"That the image people share of themselves is 'softened' on the internet is perhaps not that surprising. What is new is that this is shown under experimental control and that the will to 'filter out' is so strong that one is prepared to pay for it," explains Håkan Holm.
Hakan J. Holm, Margaret Samahita. Curating social image: Experimental evidence on the value of actions and selfies. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2018; 148: 83 DOI: 10.1016/j.jebo.2018.02.008
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday March 21 2018, @03:16PM
I'll toss out some recruitment memes that as an anarcho presumably lowercase "L" libertarian you'd find life under right wing authoritarianism much more pleasant than left wing authoritarianism, just looking at last centuries death counts as a predictor of future performance.
A common meme from former libertarian-types now in the new right, is that given three paths, authoritarian leftism, passive centrism (who fights for the center, anymore... anyone?), authoritarian right, the only eventual path to libertarianism is thru the right, and they make some fairly decent historical analogies. Right wing authoritarianism led to the Declaration of Independence, communist dictatorships not so much, for very short example. A large part of that is historically right wing authoritarian dictatorships were a nice place to live unless your idea of libertarianism was "workers of the world unite" stuff in which case they are very bad places to live indeed, and contemporary propaganda about those dictatorships focuses solely on leftist revolution as being the only legitimate goal of libertarian freedom therefore the right wing dictatorships were evil, which should worry anyone interested in freedom or libertarianism for any purpose other than leftist revolution (we're only keeping the intellectuals around till the revolution succeeds, then they get cleansed is a typical left plan)
Also in the 60s the commies claimed they had all the girls so tune in drop out get some or however it went; the modern analogy is in the 10s the right wing has all the dank memes, we're simply more fun to hang out with.
There's also the cultural aspect that the new right has siphoned off most of the mid to right wing of the small L libertarians such that whats left of either small L or big L libertarians is basically the commies, except these ones want to smoke pot all day. So as an individual you can do what you want but as a group theres not many left in the group except "legalize it" and commie sympathizers. Whom you may or may not want to hang out with. But if you want to hang out with the old crew they're all new-right or alt-right or since Trump won "We the mainstream right now" which is hyper triggering to the leftists.