For all the research and conversation we’ve had about social media, it’s amazing that we still get these things so wrong.

If you watched Mountainhead, the HBO original movie about four tech titans meeting up in the mountains for a long weekend, you may have been disturbed by the storyline in which a sloppy software update on a social media platform allowed anyone to generate deepfakes, triggering chaos and violence across the globe. Maybe you wondered: Could that actually happen?

In some ways, it already has. In 2017, Myanmar’s military launched what has been called a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya. Nationalist groups and those with ties to the military purposefully flooded Facebook with hate speech and fake news stories to fuel unrest and hostility. Facebook further escalated the violence by amplifying these posts, according to a claim in an Amnesty International Report commissioned to investigate the company’s role.

The outcome in Myanmar was extraordinary, but it didn’t require anything extraordinary to happen. Instead, it unfolded through the entirely ordinary things we do on social media every day.

We scroll, lurk, like, share—often without much thought, sometimes without even really reading. For better or worse, we assume we are at least aware of our own social media habits. But is that assumption accurate?

Research across many domains has shown that people routinely make inaccurate self-assessments. We misjudge our academic abilities (Chemers et al., 2001); our skill level (Odean, 1998); others’ knowledge (Fussell & Krauss, 1991); our susceptibility to health risks (Weinstein, 1980); and even our future emotional states

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