Jakub: What's wrong with U Arnie? I have to unlike...
Arnie: Hasta la vista.
Shortly after yesterday's U.S. Supreme Court's decision to guarantee same-sex marriage as a fundamental constitutional right in all U.S. states, facebook launched a tool to let its users show their support by using a rainbow filter (via).
“I’m so happy for all of my friends and everyone in our community who can finally celebrate their love and be recognized as equal couples under the law. We still have much more to do to achieve full equality for everyone in our community, but we are moving in the right direction.” Mark Zuckerberg
A great many celebrities used the rainbow filter, among them Arnold Schwarzenegger. When one of his followers communicated that he had to "unlike" (Jakub got 293 "likes" for the comment), Arnie's hilarious response was: "Hasta la vista." (a comment with 646 "likes").
Update (28 June '15): After a short while, the scores of Jakub vs. Arnie were 757 : 4.722 for Arnie. By the next morning, the posting had been shared 10.000 times and liked 250.522 times.
The "translation experiment" is a so-called video experiment to promote the new Lithuanian website www.svetimageda.lt, an online "handbook" with advices how to react to e.g. racist and homophobic hate speech in social and mass media. The short clip shows reactions of people who have been asked to translate racist facebook postings addressed to the person sitting in front of them.
"We predict that due to potential chronic traits and/or their adaptation to a Facebook culture of shallow processing and agreement, frequent Facebook users are highly susceptible to persuasive messages compared to less frequent users."
According to a study carried out by Rauch and Schanz in 2013, there is a positive correlation between the frequency of Facebook usage and agreement with racist messages online. The authors presented participants (n=623, all "white") three messages (one egalitarian, two racist). In general, participants were more likely to agree with the egalitarian message. In particular, there was a difference between high and low frequency users, i.e., high frequency users showed a higher tendency to agree with the two racist messages (a "superiority message" about whites being superior and a "victim message" about whites being the most oppressed ethnicity in the US). However, frequency is only one aspect that seems to be associated with this tendency; information seeking behaviour is another one. Those strongly motivated to seek information had a more positive attitude to the egalitarian message and a more negative attitude to the racist messages compared to low information seekers. The authors conclude that high frequency users and low information seekers show similar responses to both racist and anti-racist messages, "almost as if they were agreeing blindly" with messages. This is all correlational, causality is not clear. Social network sites such as Facebook are there to connect and the very combination of shallow processing and need to connect possibly "provides a warm, moist breeding ground for the spread of opinions, publicly and not-so-publicly. Racist ones among them." (via and via).
