I think this kind of thing may be hard to study, at least for prominent issues, because the effects have been magnified by the creation of media to exploit it. Not only do people reinforce things for each other, but they have authoritative-seeming sources to point to. Those sources are in fact carefully crafted for that purpose, partly for political gain, partly for the sheer commercial power of being perceived as the only acceptable information source.
Once you've bought into the notion that everybody else is lying to you, no amount of getting outside your social circle is going to help. You can simply reject their reality and substitute your own. The cause-and-effect of these superpowered propaganda machines and social networks are hard to untangle; they arose together and influenced each other.
We're never going to figure out how to rebuild trust until we can figure out how to redesign our systems of government and commerce to not reward lying and manipulation, or at least to mitigate its appeal. The problem has never been that we don't know how to overcome human biases, the problem is that we don't even really want to because exploiting them for political power and financial gain is so lucrative.
My opinion, which is obviously reflecting my own bias, is that there is a very large segment of the US who really ought to know better, and that there isn't much we can do until they choose to do so. They've crossed the line from the ordinary kind of biases, selfishness, and differences of opinion to active malice.
That has been exploited by those seeking power and money, but that exploitation is so transparent that they can't be unaware. They accede to it because their top priority has become the fight itself and defeating their opponents -- even though those opponents are fellow citizens. That allows them to buy into even the most obvious deceptions, because it affirms for them the deeper truth.
I've expressed this in nonpartisan terms, but I'm willing to bet that everybody knows who I'm talking about, and they will object. I'm not going to engage -- the whole point here is that I don't believe engaging will achieve anything. And it also means that their attempts to convince me will similarly be ignored -- either because I'm right, or precisely because I'm wrong. The irony bugs the hell out of me.
>I've expressed this in nonpartisan terms, but I'm willing to bet that everybody knows who I'm talking about
Honestly, I have no idea. Reading the first two paragraphs my first thought was that it's scary that I have no idea what side of the political divide this might more fully describe. Then I came to this sentence and realized that you did have a side you were thinking of.
Imagine if every time a nerdy news site got popular and influential, a whole group of astroturfers descended on it. At first it would be companies with commercial interests (and sometimes the nerdy news site would even be formed by a company as a kind of place to express and maybe influence opinions). As the nerdy news site became more and more popular, the news stories would shift from highly technical issues, to more political ones. Over time, the comments section would start to become more polarised as people rallied to support their chosen points of view. Conversations and ideas would carefully be stoked or extinguished by people wishing to push the concensus view in one direction or the other.
At some point it becomes really obvious what is happening. Anybody who lived through the rise and fall of Slashdot has already seen it. However, before it becomes really obvious, is it actually clear what's going on? Does one really understand one is being manipulated? When one jumps into a conversation and pushes an important point, is it obvious that the point originated at this very nerdy news site? Are we all clear on how we formed our ideas, who influenced us and where we got the supporting evidence to convince ourselves that we've got it right? Or do we rely on our gut feelings and participate in the echo chamber?
I don't believe anybody really understands the extent to which they are manipulated. That's the nature of manipulation.
>that there is a very large segment of the US who really ought to know better
My take is not so optimistic. Intelligence is roughly normally distributed, and the fat middle, 100±1 stddev or so, simply does not know better, and does not have the requisite brainpower to think past social conditioning, whether from friends or propaganda. Particularly when the average person has a life to live and won't spend much or any of that time verifying anything. At the very least the capable among us are better able to prioritize which facts to take time to verify, while the average person probably doesn't verify anything rigorously at all.
Again, this isn't just some necessary aspect of human nature. This is something that very powerful people actively want to be the case, because when people behave in this manner it's easier to manipulate their behavior on a broad scale. This is the explicit purpose of modern marketing.
I don't honestly think it has anything to do with being "capable", I think it has to do with having the time and resources to learn how or even why they should want to in the first place. Most people don't. Most people have to work to eat and if they're not too exhausted to do anything than passively absorb entertainment when they get home that just means their boss isn't getting their full value out of them.
If 45% of your population "ought to know better" that's not just a moral failure of a handful of people, that's a systemic problem. The solution isn't "they just need to figure it out", something very fundamental needs to change.
Yeah, though I'm afraid I can't tell you what. I think it's really fundamental, something that will require a serious reconsideration of the entire social contract.
I'll just go ahead and be less coy about it: they were so far off base when it came to same-sex marriage that it casts doubt on every bit of reasoning they claim. The arguments were absurd. They lost the fight and none of the evils they claimed came to pass.
It's not the most important issue, but it's one in which they were so obviously and overwhelmingly wrong that I think it justifies my claim that they may be similarly off-base on many other issues. I am, of course, wrong about many things myself, but nothing so egregiously and demonstrably incorrect as that. There are other issues that aren't as massively a slam-dunk, but I've seen enough egregious propaganda repeatedly refuted that it's clear to me that they're not listening.
That said, no, I can't be certain that I'm not just the victim of propaganda. That's why I put it as I did: if I'm wrong, then I'm very wrong, and it will be impossible to convince me otherwise.
Our moral intuitions are almost entirely determined by the society we live in. 30 years ago, 30% of people in the US supported gay marriage, and now it’s over 60%. Do you believe the number of good people doubled during that time?
I’m gay, and to me the animal farming industry is obviously more wrong than banning same-sex marriage. Yet almost everyone in both of the political tribes eats meat.
My values fall in line with the left in most areas, so I generally associate and agree with left-wingers. This means I get exposed to a lot of left-wing perspectives and media, so to me, it appears that the Republicans are constantly being evil. But then again, everyone on both sides is eating meat, so how different can they possibly be?
Yes, GP's argument seems to rest on the assumption that people who reach the right conclusion do so for the right reasons. But opposing discrimination against gay people didn't become more obviously right over the course of a few decades; it gained social momentum until it was the path of least resistance for the majority.
Hopefully a similar thing will happen with respect to our treatment of animals: as humane alternatives become easier and more appealing, there will be less incentive to avoid thinking about the suffering inflicted, and this will kick-start the social process whereby factory farming eventually becomes obviously indefensible to most people.
Really, my argument was that people who reach the wrong conclusion for the wrong reasons, and stick to them, are suspect. We're all guilty of that at times, of course, but it's rare to have it quite so prominently and comprehensively refuted. And it makes it hard for me to believe that anything I say will make a difference on a topic that isn't obvious.
I hope you're right about animals. It's a case where I know I'm being inconsistent. But at least I'm aware of it and trying to do better, rather than twist the rationale why my existing behavior (and misbehavior) must be correct.
I don't need people to do the right things for the right reasons. But I need them to be open to reasons.
If you feel like it shouldn't be this hard, it's because there's a massive force pushing against you. Our situation isn't an accident; the status quo actively seeks to maintain itself, and incentives become structured in such a way as to reinforce it. You can't change people's minds without changing the structures that have forced them into that configuration.
As human beings, we're predisposed to think socially; when we see an issue, we look for the individual person who is the proximal cause of that issue. We have a much harder time seeing when the issue was caused by a broader system. That's why we're constantly frustrated and thwarted by issues where it seems the problem will never go away: we dealt with the person who was at fault, why has the issue reappeared? It must be hopeless, there must be nothing to do but accept that every bad person will be replaced with another bad person. But why aren't we asking what mechanism it is that keeps replacing these "bad" people with new ones? We're stricken with learned helplessness because we can't see the structure of the system or realize the fact that we have the ability to manipulate and change it, because the problem doesn't lie in any one person but in the shape of society itself.
>They lost the fight and none of the evils they claimed came to pass.
You sure about that?
Christian bakers being hounded for years because they don't want to make a cake which artistically expresses support for gay marriage. It's worth looking at the masterpiece cakeshop case, because you realize that they've been targeted for legal harassment in a premeditated way, not simply because someone couldn't find cake.
You can look up some of the statistics on political and religious discrimination in academia and some job fields, and try to think how that would look to you if you were a conservative or a Christian.you understand that you would have to live your life in a kind of hiding, while listening to people flagrantly insult your beliefs on a regular basis to guffaws and applause.
I'd also point to how we now see little boys performing sexual dances in front of groups of adult men or offering money. Stripping, blowing kisses, and so on.
Trans kids. Hormone replacement for 12 year olds.
Then there's education. Children being taught that women are men, men or women, and so on. Your children.
If you love all these things then you wouldn't think anything was wrong, however you have to acknowledge that they're not the same as gay marriage but if gay marriage had not happened they would not have happened either. Ultimately it comes down to what do you think a healthy society should look like. If your personal values take sexual freedom has the highest value, then yes you want this direction. Others believe that society should mold individuals into healthier forms as a way of helping them and strengthening the group. These are moral intuitions, axiomatic.
EDIT: I think from this comment it looks like you just failed the ideological turing test (google it); you haven't been consuming the other side's propaganda/opinions straight from source, you've been consuming your side's propaganda/opinions about the other side. So fundamentally you don't know what the other side is thinking. (This is common; it's been demonstrated empirically that conservatives can predict leftists' response to political questions better than the other way around, probably because leftists control education and media so rightists are forced to consume their messages in volume, but not the other way around.)
Maybe I'm being pedantic, but the problem with that test (aside from the likelihood of self-deception) is that there are people on every side of every issue who would fail it.
edit: I actually think this is a serious point, because it speaks to the difficulty of short-cutting your way to a correct opinion by looking at the character and motives of people participating in the debate.
For any political or moral position with a non-trivial number of supporters, I could find examples of proponents being cruel, irrational, intellectually inconsistent, plainly dishonest, and so on. Not necessarily an equal number of examples -- often one side of an issue really does attract worse/dumber people -- but always enough to give you a pretty dim view of that group, and by extension that side of the debate.
And unfortunately I think this plays a big role in how we actually make up our minds. It's unsurprising, and probably necessary, that we cluster issues together and apply some social heuristics rather than independently investigating every topic in depth. 'Do the people who support this set of policies seem smart and benevolent?' is a reasonable heuristic when applied to a fair sample. But unfortunately it's also a really easy heuristic to hack, simply by cherry-picking the best/worst examples. This can be done deliberately by others, lazily by ourselves, randomly by circumstance, or blindly by social media algorithms, but in each case the effect is similar.
(Of course, the extra complication is that this heuristic can easily fail even when applied perfectly. Maybe a position is attractive to many people for bad reasons, while also being attractive to open-minded experts because the facts ultimately back it up. The experts will usually be outnumbered, so a random sample will show the majority of people with the correct opinion holding it for bad reasons.)
> I actually think this is a serious point, because it speaks to the difficulty of short-cutting your way to a correct opinion by looking at the character and motives of people participating in the debate.
An awful lot of evil has been done by people who firmly believed they were doing the right thing. I'd even go further and suggest that most evil has been done by people who thought they were in the right.
Consider also that the notions of what is right and wrong have changed considerably over time.
I wouldn't fully judge a position based on other people's motivations. It's more the difference between, do I want politician X to be brought up on charges because I take glee in him suffering and going to jail? Or do I want him to be brought up on charges because I have identified the actual moral/legal/ethical standards that I believe all politicians should subscribe to, and do I believe that failure to meet those standards is justification for prosecution (in all cases) in order to protect society?
Someone else might enjoy that politician's suffering if they are brought up on charges, but it's definitely not a necessary feeling if it's a just outcome.
So I wouldn't argue that "enjoying someone else's suffering" is sufficient to guarantee you're on the wrong side, but I would say that it's not necessary - and therefore, if any just outcome can be found without feeling satisfaction in the person's suffering, then we should individually seek to be free of enjoying the suffering of others. And encourage other people of that as well. It's simply not necessary. And I would argue that if enjoying the suffering of others becomes a larger part of your motivation, you are definitely more susceptible to be in favor of actions that are otherwise unsupported or wrong.
So, new heuristic - if the chief reason for visiting some justice on someone is because it would make them suffer, be suspicious and don't join in unless you can find an independent justification for that justice.
Schadenfreude is strong in humans especially young people (main demography of internet) and multiple papers link increased effect of it in people with depression.
It feels cyclic, increased internet usage leading to mental health problems leading to you caring less about others and isolation with negative thoughts being magnified online (who are curators?) and other normal users being driven towards it through social conformation and increased internet usage is probably caused by failures of parenting, school, society and environment. Lack of mentorship and models. Some of it could be attributed to disconnection and huge disparity in problems people face - inequality, literate supremacy, global impression and visibility in what you can get.
Social media might be perhaps incentivising some of the behaviors but it's not the root cause of it perhaps?
Maybe the notion of a good healthy society is finally crumbling due to visibility?
Being forced to admit that world is unfair most of your day is not very healthy imo and its effects are stronger the more big of a disparity there is.
I think education could help there with compulsory classes on how to deal with negative thoughts, differences and other problematic behaviors before you need to drip into antidepressants and years of therapy.
Oh not to mention the statistics trend, the one most 'rationalists' fall for. I am tired of extrapolation and over fitting in everything these days.
It hides problems so so well.
>We're never going to figure out how to rebuild trust
I'd argue the solution towards a better society is figuring out how to eliminate trust all together, rather than trying to figure out how to make it more widespread. The issue isn't, "lack of trust", its that different groups of people place arbitrary trust in sources of authority that are perceived by them to be legitimate. The answer is to promote universal skepticism and reliance on the Socratic Method in all things. Trust nothing, verify everything and value logical consistency above all things.
Answer is genetic modification, I believe. If you can change brain's reward system to not fall in those cracks, we can have a much better society. Instead of designing a system fit for humans, we should design humans fit for the system. :3
In other words, "our social networks" tend to have mostly like-minded people influence us, so increasing the diversity of these incoming opinions can counter bias. I'm a fan of this particular explanation: https://ncase.me/crowds/
That doesn't necessarily follow with self-selection. One group's presense may push out another, others usually do have disproportionate influence on overall bias.
On a related note, I'd argue the end of the Fairness Doctrine policy in 2011 allowed broadcasters to increasingly present a singular point-of-view to the detriment of diversity, which naturally has since made networks significantly more partisan.
The fairness doctrine went away in 1987. It was created during an era where virtually all Americans had only the big three television stations as news sources. Given the relative diversity of sources available today, serious questions exist as to whether it's reimplementation would even be constitutional.
It wouldn't need to apply to ALL media, just whatever uses communal resources, like radio spectrum. Even if there is BS out there, having sources that are regarded as "sources of record" can help with establishing an authoritative account of where things are.
Thanks, I misread the date upon quickly glancing the article on Wikipedia (and not American / quite old enough to remember it happening in 1987...)
> Given the relative diversity of sources available today
My first issue with this claim is that it's a straw man argument. I'm arguing in favor of more moderation, not less plurality. You're presenting false dichotomy by suggesting that showing both sides of an issue gets in the way of a diversity of sources.
Now for more subtle and perhaps subjective criticism: what good is a plurality of sources if all of those are simply pushing their biased agenda hard down people's throats? From society's standpoint, there seems to be consensus that the state of news media today is worse than it was a few decades ago as far as partisanship, sensationalism, clickbaiting and alarmism go.
>> Given the relative diversity of sources available today
> My first issue with this claim is that it's a straw man argument.
It's not a straw man, it's history/law. The US Supreme Court was asked to rule on the fairness doctrine in the 60s and ruled that the government has a legitimate interest in promoting a variety views that could supersede the broadcaster's right to free speech only when a limited number of sources were available (Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC). If there is a diversity of sources, then people's right to free speech trumps the government's interest in favor of more moderation.
It's not, at least based on the evidence provided by you thus far.
The Supreme Court has not ruled on the availability of sources today, so your argument can't be really considered historical.
At best you may claim that based on past ruling, the SCOTUS is likely to rule that reviving the rule would infringe on the right to free speech. Even then, I'd argue precisely for the opposite, again based on the evidence you presented, i.e. Red Lion Broadcasting Co v. FCC.
> The FCC's statutory mandate to see that broadcasters operate in the public interest and Congress' reaffirmation, in the [395 U.S. 367, 368] 1959 amendment to 315 of the Communications Act, of the FCC's view that the fairness doctrine inhered in the public interest standard, support the conclusion that the doctrine and its component personal attack and political editorializing regulations are a legitimate exercise of congressionally delegated authority. Pp. 379-386.
> 2. The fairness doctrine and its specific manifestations in the personal attack and political editorial rules do not violate the First Amendment. Pp. 386-401.
> (a) The First Amendment is relevant to public broadcasting, but it is the right of the viewing and listening public, and not the right of the broadcasters, which is paramount. Pp. 386-390.
> (b) The First Amendment does not protect private censorship by broadcasters who are licensed by the Government to use a scarce resource which is denied to others. Pp. 390-392.
> (...)
> (e) It has not been shown that the scarcity of broadcast frequencies, which impelled governmental regulation, is entirely a thing of the past, as new uses for the frequency spectrum have kept pace with improved technology and more efficient utilization of that spectrum. Pp. 396-400.
And last but certainly not least:
> Believing that the specific application of the fairness doctrine in Red Lion, and the promulgation of the regulations in RTNDA, are both authorized by Congress and enhance rather than abridge the freedoms of speech and press protected by the First Amendment
I don't see from that how one may conclude that "promoting a variety views that could supersede the broadcaster's right to free speech only when a limited number of sources [is] available", but I'm also not really familiar with case law to argue fervently one way or another.
I don't think we really want a centralized entity deciding what is "honest, fair, and equitable". I think what we want to do is reduce the incentive for media to be dishonest.
>I don't think we really want a centralized entity deciding what is "honest, fair, and equitable". I think what we want to do is reduce the incentive for media to be dishonest.
I'd be interested to hear ideas about how to do the latter in ways that don't, de facto, do the former. At some point, someone, somewhere is making a decision about what counts as "dishonest" and someone else somewhere will need disagree with them. Even if that decision is made by some algorithmic or emergent process from defined procedures, that still means a decision is being propagated.
Media as it stands is highly motivated by profit, it has to build a dedicated viewership, and enflamed emotions and viewpoints you already agree with sell much better than honest reporting. By far, I think the most even-handed media are things like PBS and NPR. If we had a large ecosystem of independent non-profit news organizations I think we would be far better off. If we were to rather limit which outlets are allowed to advertise themselves as "News" to only non-profit organizations that have to be completely transparent about all of their funding and directorship, I think it would go very far towards fixing our current situation.
I took the test mentioned in the comments and failed quite remarkably: https://perceptiongap.us/the-perception-gap-quiz/ I was certain that the world was more polarized than the tests stated. I didn't base my answers on my interactions with people in my personal life but rather on what I read from social networks, especially Twitter. I think I may be poisoning my perception of the world when I use the Internet as my lens.
I'd highly recommend How Behaviour Spreads by David Centola for anyone interested in this topic. His lecture at the Santa Fe Institute is also worth watching as a summary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0fDcUJMzkI
Sadly the article on Wikipedia singles out some of the most egregious cases (e.g. /r/incels) as "alleged examples", which in turn implies other communities (e.g. HN) aren't equally valid examples, which I don't personally view an intellectually honest assessment.
Any community is going to be an echo chamber around something.
HN is generally a "tech is good" camp, given that we're all in tech. We might recognize boundaries and nuance in there, but most HNers generally believe tech solves problems (myself included).
The concern imo is when a network, say your Facebook friends, ends up becoming a secret echo chamber without understanding it. Instead of realizing you are engaging in a biased group you assume you have a representative sampling and that people who disagree with you are the outliers.
Not to nitpick, but I’d argue HN is more of in the ‘tech is good - when it’s good’ camp.
I definitely perceive a sense of gearing towards a more ethical and responsible growth or use of technology, and that’s part of what makes me keep coming back here every day.
Totally just my own anecdotal observations, however.
What this doesn't address is why many people don't conform to this. My primary friend group is about half male, half female. Half left-ish, half right-ish, some more or less authoritarian/individualistic. Some techie, some med people, some business, some arts. We disagree on tons of stuff, political, cultural, and more, but still get along fine. None of this is intentional, either; it's not as though any of us consciously selected anything.
The obvious question, then, is why this is not the case here? What is different?
> We disagree on tons of stuff, political, cultural, and more, but still get along fine. None of this is intentional, either; it's not as though any of us consciously selected anything.
Does your friend group perhaps engage in a sort of a curation process, only allowing in new members who can disagree but still get along fine?
> The obvious question, then, is why this is not the case here? What is different?
It seems to me that this is the question humanity should be trying to answer right now. The majority of the problems the world faces right now (political polarization, inequality, climate change, you name it) share one common core problem: the inability of humans to get along as well as they "should" be able to (if each out-group would "just <do x>").
I wonder if you started intently observing the nuanced nature of conversations and "conflict" in your group, and compare that to similar conversations you observe among other people (IRL, on social media, in the news) and making a list of difference in behavior and style, perhaps some interesting patterns and ideas might rise to the top.
I also wonder if some way could be found to scale this exercise up, and collaborate with people in various fields (psychologists, neurologists, linguists, historians, mediators, rationalists, spiritualists, autism-spectrumists (neuro-Atypical people in general), etc), if some really important and pragmatic ideas might result that could actually be used to make some widespread improvements in this problem.
I guess there is some curation, yeah; we don't really invite back those who are unpleasant or can't handle being wrong. I personally don't use much social media, so that might be a difference? I'm tempted to say that people just don't do too well arguing behind a screen, me included. It's difficult to see the other person as a person. I also thinks it takes some willingness: just the other evening I conversed with someone else, not a typical acquaintance, and trying to persuade him of a point. Went through my chain of logic, got to the end, and watched him shut off when he realized where I was going. Not everyone is interested, plain and simple.
"Not many people can read and write, plain and simple" was a true statement for much of the planet not that long ago. I wonder what changed between then and now, was it just a run of good luck, or was the change somehow man-made.
We have no shortage of important and pragmatic ideas. The problem is that the people with really good ideas lack the power and influence to implement them.
That we already have many useful ideas doesn't seem like a particularly good reason to not continue looking for others, or just looking to see if anything interesting is going on in the world, like the majority of the public seemingly becoming more irrational as time progresses.
> The problem is that the people with really good ideas lack the power and influence to implement them.
I wonder if anything could be done about that. I guess it would require at least some new kinds of thinking and likely cooperation, so perhaps not.
One possible explanation is that the present diversity of your friend group is a temporary phenomenon, and over time the group will tend to divide along one or more lines. I've personally experienced that.
> people often strenuously resist such diversification efforts
Yes, that would make sense.
Didn't look at the study, but if the depicted diagrams are representative of the phenomenon, people might just have used linear extrapolation to estimate population sizes. Extrapolation is just an improved form of lying, ask any mathematician. But could it really be called bias?
That aside, I also believe that I have a right to bias. This is equivalent to having a right to an opinion in almost all cases. If not, please specify the difference.
> This is equivalent to having a right to an opinion in almost all cases. If not, please specify the difference.
I would argue "bias" is a subconscious variation of having an opinion. It's fine to have opinions, so long as you think critically about them and chose a rational opinion based on well-defined principles and / or assumptions. It's not equally fine to discredit disconforming evidence simply due to cognitive dissonance.
>That aside, I also believe that I have a right to bias. This is equivalent to having a right to an opinion in almost all cases. If not, please specify the difference.
This is like arguing that you have a "right" to have your car veer in one direction or another. Sure you do, but the point is that this tendency makes it harder to drive straight (or hold objectively correct or valid points of view) so it doesn't make sense that you would want to.
And insofar as these biases affect other peoples' lives (e.g. racial prejudice), part of your responsibility as a citizen means making valid decisions in those areas.
I don't have personal experience with this organization, but it's one I've heard of for bringing diverse viewpoints together: https://www.livingroomconversations.org/
I went to an inner-city high school, which was fairly well integrated. I took a mix of honors and regular classes. Much of my extended family consists of evangelical conservatives. Through this lens, I saw the reality of segregation in my state, city, and school. I listen more than I talk, and tend to answer with questions rather than opinions.
As an adult my filter bubble has shrunk drastically and most people I know are quite like-minded. I didn't just predict Trump winning very early in the game; I was the only person in my filter bubble who wasn't completely blindsided by his victory.
So my answer is race/class integrated public schooling with forced bussing and limits on regular/honors/AP classes (eg, nobody can take more than 60% in any given track). But of course that's highly biased by my single anecdote.
Do social networks have a business case to diversify the connections of people on it? If people are encouraged to adhere to a limited number of affiliations and be firm in that group identity, then doesn’t that make it easier for advertisers to target them?
If you're open to connecting with new people, it's easier to introduce you to someone who's really into product X and recommends it to all their friends.
> If people are encouraged to adhere to a limited number of affiliations and be firm in that group identity, then doesn’t that make it easier for advertisers to target them?
I think so. If I sell motorcycles and I only have enough budget to show ads to one cohort and have two options:
A) a person who likes motorcycles but has no / very few friends who like motorcycles (presumably a diverse group)
B) a person who likes motorcycles and all their friends like motorcycles (a firm group identity)
I'm picking group B. If I'm successful in selling them a motorcycle, it's free advertising to many more eligible buyers. Plus, even if I'm not there's a chance they might talk about my ad if it's memorable enough and spread via word of mouth.
I would guess two work are two good things cross-purpose a bit. They would want good targetting data quality which homogeneity helps but a heterogeneous set of intrests is worth more to advertise to as more potential demand for the same share.
Teenagers and young were long favored for television advertisements not because of having more of their income disposable or long term loyalty (although nice bonuses) but because they were less set in their ways. And influencing is always what they sold.
This intuitively makes sense to me, but I'm sure there's plenty more research to be done on the topic. As a whole though, I think this is definitely a very hard problem to solve.
If you're interested in this sort of thing, and interested in seeing how we can use technology to build better and more meaningful social networks, you should check out VC3 (https://vc3.club). I started a discussion group specifically for topics in this problem area, and we would love to have you join the conversation.
Another study from 2016 suggests that social networks tend to lead users to become increasingly polarized regardless of the content or promotion algorithm:
Once you've bought into the notion that everybody else is lying to you, no amount of getting outside your social circle is going to help. You can simply reject their reality and substitute your own. The cause-and-effect of these superpowered propaganda machines and social networks are hard to untangle; they arose together and influenced each other.