Pareto Social Media

The “80/20 rule,” sometimes called the “Pareto Principle” says that in many contexts, about 80% of measured outcomes will result from about 20% of measured inputs.

So about 20% of the work we do each day leads to about 80% of the beneficial consequences we hope to achieve with that work, fixing about 20% of the bugs in a piece of software will eliminate about 80% of the errors and issues it suffers, and about 20% of patients within a given healthcare scheme will generate about 80% of that scheme’s expenses (usually because of chronic conditions that require repeat or perpetual treatments).

This rule isn’t perfect or universal, but it gestures at the tendency for a relatively small portion of variables to account for a relatively large portion of outcomes, and while this was originally noted by an engineer who was looking at land ownership in Italy (about 80% of the land was owned by around 20% of the population), it has since become a truism across many fields, as the same rough proportions seem to arise all over the place, if you look.

One relatively new area in which this principle has been tracked is on social networks.

The proportions are different, but a recent study by Pew Research looking at TikTok found that the top 25% of US adults using the platform produce about 98% of all videos made by this demographic. This is similar to the findings of a previous study by Pew looking at Twitter, for which they found about 25% of the most active US adults posting on the network produced around 97% of all tweets emerging from their demo.

That’s a pretty astonish ratio, considering how influential such networks have become, and it raises questions about the legitimacy of things to which we’re exposed on such networks and public discourse that is often shaped (at least in part) by platform-based conversations.

These findings mean a relatively small group of people with perhaps unrepresentative opinions and beliefs can dominate online discussion about all sorts of topics.

This can reinforce the potency of the already powerful “false consensus effect,” which can lead to the assumption that more people believe the same things we believe than actually do (because everyone on the networks we frequent seem to align with us on so many topics), but it can also amplify the impact of confirmation and conformity biases, which respectively say that we’ll tend to fixate on information that reinforces our preexisting beliefs (which is easier when those beliefs are megaphoned on social networks) and that we’ll tend to adjust our beliefs (those we actually hold and those we espouse in public) to line up with what we think “our people” (those of our group or groups we want to align ourselves with) believe.

Relatively unpopular beliefs can have outsized impact because of this amplification, and while there’s nothing inherently wrong with increasing the volume of voices that don’t otherwise have as much of an audience, this can distort perceptions about what people want and think and intend to do, which can in turn distort our perception of all sorts of ideas and conversations, altering our internal debates, but also new cycles, political conversations, elections, and other real-world outcomes.