Lori Falce: What is the darkest corner of social media?

People are concerned about the creeping scourge of social media ruining society.

They fear the walls of Facebook news. They fear the ugliness of X. They fear the unattainably curated beauty of Instagram. And then there’s the “is it spyware?” suspicion of a Chinese-owned TikTok.

There are valid reasons to question all of that and take steps to make the social media landscape more honest, less hostile and overall better policed.

But is this the biggest problem with social media? Or is there another site lying out there like an alligator — swimming just beneath the surface?

For me, the absolute worst is Reddit. Look at a list of sites by traffic, and Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp and others dominate, as expected. Reddit hovers somewhere under Snapchat and above LinkedIn.

What is Reddit? It is described as a social media discussion forum, established in 2005 and still functioning in a very chatboard format that is vaguely reminiscent of AOL. It doesn’t so much funnel things to you as establish locations — subreddits — for you to visit based on your interest. In reality, it would be nice if a lot of social media required that kind of effort from users to seek out rather than be deluged.

But three things make Reddit dangerous. First is anonymity. Most users have blind screen names, often assigned that way at registration. In addition, the stories shared on the site are frequently veiled by giving fake names to the parties involved.

Second is that many stories are highly questionable. Screened from fact checking by fake accounts and fake identities, there is no way to know if the incidents ever happened. But they rack up hundreds or thousands of reads, upvotes and shares despite rampant red flags.

And third is their infectious spread. A juicy Reddit story from a sub board about weddings, vacations or bosses from hell can end up recounted on social media sites with much higher reach. TikTok and YouTube, for example, both have thousands of creators who make their money just by making videos reading and reacting to Reddit stories.

Even worse, legitimate news organizations can then pick them up when they go viral. The story in that case is the reaction, but for many readers, that distinction is lost and can give a veil of legitimacy to something that might have started as a lie.

And that’s where the algorithm comes in. Social media sites make their money by knowing what you like and what makes you engage. If you click on cat videos, they give you more cat videos — and cat-related advertising. Click on videos peddling lies, you can set yourself up for more lying and the advertising that supports it.

It would be great if there was a way to prevent this — some screen that protected us from deliberate falsehoods or rehashed fiction the way we can keep our kids from adult content or gore.

But the truth is these traps are obvious. The lies are often outrageously wild — as over the top as a bad soap opera. We click on them anyway, giving in to them like the guilty pleasure of a reality show.

The problem with Reddit isn’t that it is the fully grown social media threat we see in its more popular siblings. It’s that it is the greenhouse where other problems are nurtured, and we have to choose not to transplant them.