Facebook is a direct contributing cause of attacks on refugees

A more interesting analysis than most.

Karsten Müller and Carlo Schwarz, researchers at the University of Warwick, scrutinized every anti-refugee attack in Germany, 3,335 in all, over a two-year span. In each, they analyzed the local community by any variable that seemed relevant. Wealth. Demographics. Support for far-right politics. Newspaper sales. Number of refugees. History of hate crime. Number of protests.

One thing stuck out. Towns where Facebook use was higher than average, like Altena, reliably experienced more attacks on refugees. That held true in virtually any sort of community — big city or small town; affluent or struggling; liberal haven or far-right stronghold — suggesting that the link applies universally.

Their reams of data converged on a breathtaking statistic: Wherever per-person Facebook use rose to one standard deviation above the national average, attacks on refugees increased by about 50 percent. Nationwide, the researchers estimated in an interview, this effect drove one-tenth of all anti-refugee violence.

It would have been nice to state what the base rate of attacks actually is, since a large fractional increase is easier starting from a small absolute level. That one-tenth ought to be emphasised a bit more, I think, since in what follows one gets the impression that Facebook is the only factor at work. Which it clearly isn't. It's small but significant, no more than that. That's not to say it might not have much broader, secondary supporting effects, but that's another topic. Here the focus is on direct violence.

If you're wondering about correlation not equalling causation, they've addressed that :

The uptick in violence did not correlate with general web use or other related factors; this was not about the internet as an open platform for mobilization or communication. It was particular to Facebook.

German internet infrastructure tends to be localized, making outages isolated but common. Sure enough, whenever internet access went down in an area with high Facebook use, attacks on refugees dropped significantly. And they dropped by the same rate at which heavy Facebook use is thought to boost violence. The drop did not occur in areas with high internet usage but average Facebook usage, suggesting it is specific to social media.

I would presume that they also account for the other variables mentioned at the start, but I don't know for sure. Flagging this one as possibly worth reading the original study.

They also give some interesting insights into why this happens. There's nothing new here, but it's interesting in context. Filter bubbles are only part of what's going on.

People instinctively conform to their community’s social norms, which are normally a brake on bad behavior. This requires intuiting what the people around us believe, something we do through subconscious social cues, according to research by Betsy Paluck, a Princeton University social psychologist.

Facebook scrambles that process. It isolates us from moderating voices or authority figures, siphons us into like-minded groups and, through its algorithm, promotes content that engages our base emotions. A Facebook user in Altena, for instance, might reasonably, but wrongly, conclude that their neighbors were broadly hostile to refugees... _Each person nudged into violence, they believe, hints at a community that has become broadly more hostile to refugees. For most users, the effect will be subtler, but, by playing out more widely, perhaps more consequential.

“You can get this impression that there is widespread community support for violence,” said Dr. Paluck. “And that changes your idea of whether, if you acted, you wouldn’t be acting alone.”

In a recent study, Dr. Paluck found that schoolchildren decide whether bullying is right or wrong based largely on what they believe their classmates think. But the students, as shorthand for figuring this out, paid special attention to a handful of influential peers..Facebook’s algorithm... elevates a class of superposters like Mr. Wasserman who, in the aggregate, give readers an impression that social norms are more hostile to refugees and more distrustful of authority than they really are. Even if no one endorses violence, it can come to feel more justifiable.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/21/world/europe/facebook-refugee-attacks-germany.html