The Invisible Majority: How Social Media Erases 90% of Voices | Dr. Claire Robertson

90% of Twitter users are represented by only 3% of tweets. When you scroll through your feed and form opinions about what "people are saying" about politics, you're not seeing the voices of nine out of ten users. You're seeing the loudest, most extreme 10% who create 97% of all political content on the platform. In this episode of SecureTalk, host Justin Beals explores the "invisible majority problem" with Dr. Claire Robertson, Assistant Professor at Colby College. Together they examine how moderate voices have been algorithmically erased from our public discourse, creating pluralistic ignorance that threatens democracy itself. Dr. Robertson's journey began at Kenyon College during the 2016 election—a blue island in a sea of red where Trump won the county by 40 points but the campus precinct went 90% blue. Surrounded by good people who saw the same election completely differently, she dedicated her career to understanding how we end up living in different realities. Topics covered:The psychology behind false polarizationHow extreme voices get mathematically amplifiedWhy conflict drives engagement in the attention economyThe abandonment of scientific rigor in AI deploymentResearch methods for understanding our digital public square Resources: Claire E. Robertson, Kareena S. del Rosario, Jay J. Van Bavel, Inside the funhouse mirror factory: How social media distorts perceptions of norms, Current Opinion in Psychology, Volume 60, 2024, 101918, ISSN 2352-250X, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2024.101918. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352250X24001313)