onfocus

"Our primitive mind knows something bad is happening, but you can’t see it. This breaks our sense of safety. We’re feeling that loss of safety. I don’t think we’ve collectively lost our sense of general safety like this. Individually or as smaller groups, people have felt this. But all together, this is new. We are grieving on a micro and a macro level."

"Our brains have a bias toward negativity in order to scan for danger and keep ourselves safe. If we don’t want to become depressed and anxious, we have to make an effort to move toward the positive. If you think of everything that can possibly go wrong all of the time, you will have given your brain the experience of bad things happening even if none of your fears come true. Use this as an opportunity to catch your negative thoughts and identify them as old mental habits rather than as truths."

"But if folks make more money off of customers when they reduce latency, there has to be some power in increasing latency."

"Shockingly, they found a positive and statistically significant relationship between the amount of coverage dedicated to mass shootings and the number of shootings that occurred in the following week."

I asked Harrison, a licensed clinical psychologist, whether Facebook would ever seek to place a limit on the amount of disturbing content a moderator is given in a day. How much is safe?

“I think that’s an open question,” he said.

“In a connected, searchable world, it’s hard to share information about extremists and their tactics without also sharing their toxic views... Labeling extremist content or disinformation as ‘fake news’ doesn’t neutralize its ability to radicalize.”