The Tech Impact and Policy Center is proud to celebrate Dr. Angela Lee, who successfully defended her doctoral dissertation, “Beyond the Digital Town Square: Identifying and Correcting Social Media Distortion Effects,” on Monday, November 11.

At the core of Angela’s doctoral research is an exploration of the ways we talk about social media’s role in society—especially through metaphors like the “digital town square,” and how different framings influence well-being and perceptions of overall social cohesion.

Many users feel their social media feeds are full of toxic content, leading to a perception that a large proportion of users must be toxic. This, however, does not align with the empirical evidence. In fact, the majority of all content, including toxic content, is posted by a very small number of highly active users. This in turn leads to the social media version of the “mean world syndrome” that arose with the ubiquity of televisions in the late 20th century.

Through her doctoral project, Dr. Lee contributes further evidence of this mismatch between perception and reality, and tests interventions aimed at improving well-being by correcting the toxicity overestimation. To do this, Angela showed participants a short, two-paragraph message that explains this pattern clearly. The result? After just a couple of minutes of reading, people had a more accurate sense of how much toxicity there really is.

The message led to meaningful changes that Angela showed made a difference in how people perceived the state of the world. Angela also explored the metaphor of social media platforms serving as a “digital town square.” Using this imagery affected how people perceived the content they were viewing online. Likening social media instead to a “fun-house mirror” or a “reality TV show” enabled participants to better retain the message that social media is often a distorted image of reality. These results point to low-cost, scalable ways to inform and educate people to improve well-being and reduce perceived toxicity online.

Anglea first came to Stanford as an undergraduate, earning a bachelor of arts before beginning her PhD program within the Stanford Department of Communication. In her doctoral program, she was advised by Jeff Hancock, and her doctoral committee included Jeremy Bailensen, Michael Bernstein, and Byron Reeves. Dr. Lee will begin her appointment as a tenure-track assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin Madison’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication in the fall.