Study Finds People Increasingly Afraid to Be Unique, How Social Media Algorithms Work, Forgiveness and COVID Reconciliation
August 22, 2025

A recent study published in Collabra: Psychology has found a notable decline in people’s motivation to stand out or be unique over the past two decades. Researchers analyzed data from over one million people between 2000 and 2020, measuring various aspects of uniqueness, including willingness to defend beliefs, adherence to rules, and concern over others’ reactions. Results revealed declines across all three areas. The new study was motivated by evidence suggesting that people are increasingly concerned about the social consequences of expressing opinions, particularly in online spaces where scrutiny is often harsh and widespread. Polling data and past research suggested that fear of isolation or criticism might make people more cautious about sharing beliefs or acting in ways that draw attention. At the same time, rising social anxiety and sensitivity to judgment could make people more hesitant to express uniqueness. Given these shifts, the researchers wanted to track whether and how people’s desire for uniqueness had changed over a 20-year period. The largest decline, at 6.52%, was in people’s willingness to publicly defend their beliefs. The study also found a decline, albeit less steep, in people’s willingness to break rules, indicating that people are less inclined to challenge norms or social expectations than two decades ago. Over time, people have become more reserved in behavior, choosing to conform to social norms rather than push boundaries.

A series of corporate leaks over the past few years provides a remarkable window in the hidden engines powering social media. In January 2021, a few Facebook employees posted an article on the company’s engineering blog purporting to explain the news feed algorithm that determines which of the countless posts available each user will see and the order in which they will see them. Eight months later ... a Facebook product manager turned whistleblower snuck over ten thousand pages of documents and internal messages out of Facebook headquarters. She leaked these to a handful of media outlets. Internal studies documented Instagram’s harmful impact on the mental health of vulnerable teen girls. A secret whitelist program exempted VIP users from the moderation system the rest of us face. It turns out Facebook engineers have assigned a point value to each type of engagement users can perform on a post (liking, commenting, resharing, etc.). For each post you could be shown, these point values are multiplied by the probability that the algorithm thinks you’ll perform that form of engagement. These multiplied pairs of numbers are added up, and the total is the post’s personalized score for you. Facebook, TikTok, and Twitter all run on essentially the same simple math formula. Once we start clicking the social media equivalent of junk food, we’re going to be served up a lot more of it—which makes it harder to resist. It’s a vicious cycle

Reviewing individuals’ social media to conduct ideological vetting has been a defining initiative of President Trump’s second term. As part of that effort, the administration has proposed expanding the mandatory collection of social media identifiers. By linking individuals’ online presence to government databases, officials could more easily identify, monitor, and penalize people based on their online self-expression, raising the risk of self-censorship. Most recently, the State Department issued a cable directing consular officers to review the social media of all student visa applicants for “any indications of hostility towards the citizens, culture, government, institutions or founding principles of the United States,” as well as for any “history of political activism.” This builds on earlier efforts this term, including the State Department’s “Catch and Revoke” program, which promised to leverage artificial intelligence to screen visa holders’ social media for ostensible “pro-Hamas” activity, and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ April announcement that it would begin looking for “antisemitic activity” in the social media of scores of foreign nationals. At the border, any traveler, regardless of citizenship status, may face additional scrutiny. U.S. border agents are authorized to ... examine phones, computers, and other devices to review posts and private messages on social media, even if they do not suspect any involvement in criminal activity or have immigration-related concerns.

Data brokers are required by California law to provide ways for consumers to request their data be deleted. But good luck finding them. More than 30 of the companies, which collect and sell consumers’ personal information, hid their deletion instructions from Google. This creates one more obstacle for consumers who want to delete their data. Data brokers nationwide must register in California under the state’s Consumer Privacy Act, which allows Californians to request that their information be removed, that it not be sold, or that they get access to it. After reviewing the websites of all 499 data brokers registered with the state, we found 35 had code to stop certain pages from showing up in searches. While those companies might be fulfilling the letter of the law by providing a page consumers can use to delete their data, it means little if those consumers can’t find the page, according to Matthew Schwartz, a policy analyst. “This sounds to me like a clever work-around to make it as hard as possible for consumers to find it,” Schwartz said. Some companies that hid their privacy instructions from search engines included a small link at the bottom of their homepage. Accessing it often required scrolling multiple screens, dismissing pop-ups for cookie permissions and newsletter sign-ups, then finding a link that was a fraction the size of other text on the page. So consumers still faced a serious hurdle when trying to get their information deleted.

In Silicon Valley, AI tech giants are in a bidding war, competing to hire the best and brightest computer programmers. But a different hiring spree is underway in D.C. AI firms are on an influence-peddling spree, hiring hundreds of former government officials and retaining former members of Congress as consultants and lobbyists. The latest disclosure filings show over 500 entities lobbying on AI policy—from federal rules designed to preempt state and local safety regulations to water and energy-intensive data centers and integration into government contracting and certifications. Lawmakers are increasingly making the jump from serving constituents as elected officials to working directly as influence peddlers for AI interests. Former Sen. Laphonza Butler, D-Calif., a former lobbyist appointed to the U.S. Senate to fill the seat of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, left Congress last year and returned to her former profession. She is now working as a consultant to OpenAI, the firm behind ChatGPT. Former Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., recently registered for the first time as a lobbyist. Among his initial clients is Lazarus AI, which sells AI products to the Defense Department. The expanding reach of artificial intelligence is rapidly reshaping hundreds of professions, weapons of war, and the ways we connect with one another. What's clear is that the AI firms set to benefit most from these changes are taking control of the policymaking apparatus to write the laws and regulations during the transition.

It’s no secret that cable news networks have partisan reputations. But new research shows the divide extends beyond which party a network appears to support. Over the past decade, these networks have increasingly focused on criticizing the opposing political party, a tactic researchers say is less about informing viewers and more about “selling anger.” “These networks are more interested in talking about the opposing political party rather than their own candidates. This was not the case 15, 20 years ago,” said Diego Garcia, the ... co-author of the working paper. The findings show that politics dominates cable news, accounting for about 60% of all named individuals mentioned—rising to over 75% during election years. But more revealing is who gets talked about: MSNBC spends more time discussing Republicans than Democrats, while Fox News focuses more heavily on Democrats. In 2024, Fox covered Democrats 60% of the time, with MSNBC showing the reverse. Garcia speculates that cable networks began to test different kinds of content when social media became widespread in the mid-2010s, and discovered that outrage boosts viewership. “I think Fox was the first one to figure this out, and they started pushing this negative rhetoric in their news,” he said. “They’re actually now the No. 1 cable news channel in the U.S. by far.” Fox News now commands over 60% of the cable news audience—a dramatic jump from a more evenly split landscape a decade ago.

The United States crept closer to becoming a full-blown police state yesterday when President Donald Trump made good on a promise to further militarize the nation’s capital. The power grab in the District of Columbia, which bypassed the city’s elected leaders, follows deployments of federal troops from coast to coast, surges of masked federal agents around the United States, and ... use of executive authority in ways with little precedent in modern U.S. history. “President Trump is exploiting his power and testing it in ways that could lead to more U.S. troops deployed on American soil. As we saw in Los Angeles, President Trump is willing to deploy U.S. military forces on American streets for inflammatory and political reasons,” said [Sen. Jack] Reed, the Rhode Island senator. “Normalizing the use of U.S. military forces for everyday policing risks eroding the very freedoms our servicemembers swear to protect.” Experts say that the increasing use of military forces in the interior of the United States represents an extraordinary violation of Posse Comitatus, a bedrock 19th-century law seen as fundamental to the democratic tradition in America. The Trump administration [has] authorized the deployment of National Guard troops to immigration facilities in 20 states, further entwining the military in civil and law enforcement functions. The National Guard will be deployed in Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Nebraska, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, and Virginia.

Health practitioners are becoming increasingly uneasy about the medical community making widespread use of error-prone generative AI tools. In their May 2024 research paper introducing a healthcare AI model, dubbed Med-Gemini, Google researchers showed off the AI analyzing brain scans from the radiology lab for various conditions. It identified an "old left basilar ganglia infarct," referring to a purported part of the brain — "basilar ganglia" — that simply doesn't exist in the human body. Board-certified neurologist Bryan Moore flagged the issue ... highlighting that Google fixed its blog post about the AI — but failed to revise the research paper itself. The AI likely conflated the basal ganglia, an area of the brain that's associated with motor movements and habit formation, and the basilar artery, a major blood vessel at the base of the brainstem. Google blamed the incident on a simple misspelling of "basal ganglia." It's an embarrassing reveal that underlines persistent and impactful shortcomings of the tech. In Google's search results, this can lead to headaches for users during their research and fact-checking efforts. But in a hospital setting, those kinds of slip-ups could have devastating consequences. While Google's faux pas more than likely didn't result in any danger to human patients, it sets a worrying precedent, experts argue. In a medical context, AI hallucinations could easily lead to confusion and potentially even put lives at risk.

Tor is mostly known as the Dark Web or Dark Net, seen as an online Wild West where crime runs rampant. Yet it’s partly funded by the U.S. government, and the BBC and Facebook both have Tor-only versions to allow users in authoritarian countries to reach them. At its simplest, Tor is a distributed digital infrastructure that makes you anonymous online. It is a network of servers spread around the world, accessed using a browser called the Tor Browser, which you can download for free from the Tor Project website. When you use the Tor Browser, your signals are encrypted and bounced around the world before they reach the service you’re trying to access. This makes it difficult for governments to trace your activity or block access, as the network just routes you through a country where that access isn’t restricted. But, because you can’t protect yourself from digital crime without also protecting yourself from mass surveillance by the state, these technologies are the site of constant battles between security and law enforcement interests. The state’s claim to protect the vulnerable often masks efforts to exert control. In fact, robust, well-funded, value-driven and democratically accountable content moderation — by well-paid workers with good conditions — is a far better solution than magical tech fixes to social problems ... or surveillance tools. As more of our online lives are funneled into the centralized AI infrastructures ... tools like Tor are becoming ever more important.

August 4, 2025 marks the 30th anniversary of Operation Storm. Little known outside the former Yugoslavia, the military campaign unleashed a genocidal cataclysm that violently expelled Croatia’s entire Serb population. Croat forces rampaged UN-protected areas of the self-declared Serb Republic of Krajina, looting, burning, raping and murdering their way across the province. Up to 350,000 locals fled, many on foot, never to return. Meanwhile, thousands were summarily executed. As these hideous scenes unfolded, UN peacekeepers charged with protecting Krajina watched without intervening. Meanwhile, US officials strenuously denied the horrifying massacres and mass displacement amounted to ethnic cleansing, let alone war crimes. Operation Storm was for all intents and purposes a NATO attack, carried out by soldiers armed and trained by the US and directly coordinated with other Western powers. Despite publicly endorsing a negotiated peace, Washington privately encouraged Zagreb to employ maximum belligerence, even as their ultranationalist Croat proxies plotted to strike with such ferocity that the country’s entire Serb population would “to all practical purposes disappear.” High-ranking Croat officials privately discussed methods to justify their coming blitzkrieg, including false flag attacks. In preparing for the offensive, Croatian soldiers were trained at Fort Irwin in California and the Pentagon aided in planning the operation.

In 2021, Kristen Magnuson had to make a secret deal to continue a staple of her daily routine: swimming at her local outdoor pool. During the pandemic, the state of Washington required a vaccine passport to gain access to public spaces such as restaurants, movie theaters, and gyms. Ms. Magnuson chose not to get vaccinated. So the mother of two made a covert arrangement with gym staff. She could bypass the lobby by sneaking in through a back door. Ms. Magnuson was grateful, but she felt like a second-class citizen. Now she has a plea: Can we talk about what we went through? She isn’t opposed to vaccines – her husband and children got them. She and others are asking: What would America do differently if the country could have a do-over, or faced a similar challenge in the future? Ms. Magnuson ... isn’t ready to absolve top officials until they show “a recognition of harms.” “I was surprised when some politicians and doctors said that those who remain unvaccinated should not be treated if they fall ill. People were not ‘bad’ or ‘COVidiots’ if they contracted COVID-19; they were human,” [Dr. Monica] Gandhi wrote. “There is absolutely no place for stigma, judgment, and a shame-based approach in public health.” The former NIH director [Dr. Francis Collins] proposed, instead, a reckoning modeled on South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the aftermath of apartheid. “That means people coming forward and confessing what they did that was harmful in public and asking for forgiveness,” said Dr. Collins, who was appointed by President Obama and served as a science adviser to Biden. “That’s very different than just amnesty.”

[The] universality of music, its ability to elicit the same emotions in diverse audiences, is exactly what inspires the work of Chicago-based nonprofit Crossing Borders Music. Composed of artists trained mainly in the Western classical tradition, the group compiles and performs music from Haitian, Palestinian, Rohingya, Native American and many other marginalized communities via free concerts held in libraries, cultural centers and university spaces. “Often, we find that in the West, refugees and immigrants are defined only by the conflict in their home countries,” says Tom Clowes ... the founder of Crossing Borders. “But nobody wants to be defined by the worst things that have happened to them, especially when it’s not even something that they’ve done, but something that’s happened to them.” The nonprofit’s musical collaborations and concerts are a bid to not just showcase these diverse and complex musical traditions, but also to create empathy and understanding for immigrants and other communities who often get overlooked because of race, ethnicity, disability, gender, sexual orientation, identity or past trauma. Crossing Borders reaches over 10,000 people in person and online each year and organized 27 free concerts in 2024. “And when we hear audience members say our music defied their expectations or broadened their worldview, or that they felt their culture was affirmed and uplifted, we know we’re fulfilling our mission,” Clowes says.

The idea that American health insurance companies are using AI to analyze and adjudicate claims for approval or denial sounds terrifying, but one North Carolinian is using AI to fight back. When Raleigh resident Neal Shah had a claim denied for his wife’s chemotherapy drugs, he thought it was rare, that he was the only one, that it was just bad luck. Litigating his case on phone calls that lasted for hours changed the husband and father, and he set about creating a sophisticated app that uses artificial intelligence to compare claims denial forms against health insurance contracts, before automatically drafting an appeal letter. “For a doctor to write this, it’s not rocket science, but it still takes hours,” Shah told ABC News 11, adding that a well-written appeal letter, sent in immediately, can sometimes get denials reversed within days or weeks, but most people either don’t know they can appeal, or don’t know on what grounds they can appeal. In fact, according to Shah’s research, 850 million claims denials occur every year, and less than 1% are ever appealed. That’s where Counterforce Health comes in, a startup that’s created a free-to-use app for claims denials. For Counterforce Health, Shah brought onboard Riyaa Jadhav, a Jill of all trades who has helped grow and expand the undertaking. Together, they’ve built Counterforce to the point where it boasts a 70% success rate in appealing claims.

Israel may be known as the Start-up Nation, famed for its tech start-ups that are supported by one of the largest venture-capital industries per capita in the world. But Israeli-Palestinian relations have been relentlessly grim. Initiatives like Tech2Peace are trying to bridge divides between the two communities. The student and volunteer-led programme brings Israeli and Palestinian youths together to learn tech skills - 3D and graphic design, website creation, app development - and to engage in conflict resolution dialogue. [Participant Zada] Haj says she had "zero knowledge" of animation or 3D modelling before, but by the end of the session she was able to turn her ideas into creation and develop skills that would help her get a job. Palestinian entrepreneur Adnan Awni Jaber also says Tech2Peace was the gateway for him to make Jewish friends in Israel. "I believe that technology can break walls between any two sides of the conflict because it's borderless," he tells the BBC. When [Tomer Cohen] and his Israeli and Palestinian co-founders were thinking of ways they could foster long-term partnerships between youngsters, they came up with the idea of giving them life skills that could enable them to continue working together. "We thought, OK, let's do this with technology and programming," says Mr Cohen. "When young people come to our seminar, they're not thinking, 'OK, you're Palestinian and I'm Israeli,' they're thinking, 'I want to improve my life and you want to, as well. We have something in common'."

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