Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg has been quoted as saying that social media is a reflection of society.

But researchers at New York University have concluded that it's not an accurate reflection.

They say it's more like a fun house mirror

distorted by a small but vocal minority of extreme outliers. It's a finding that has

special residence in this election season.

NYU psychology professor J Van Bevel

is one of the authors of the paper that reported that research.

Mr. Van Bevel, are there particular topics or issues

that tend to be distorted more than others?

Yeah, it tends to happen for all kinds of issues online,

but there are many issues where they found, for example,

less than 1% of people are spreading the most amount of misinformation about them.

Is it possible to characterize who these people are and why they're doing it?

One of the big factors that seems to be driving this is that it's people with extreme beliefs or extreme political ideologies

and they tend to be posting by far the most content and so therefore when we tune in we're

mainly seeing views from the extremes.

But what motivates them?

Why are they doing it?

They motivate it for a lot of reasons.

One is that they're passionate about it.

And whether we're talking about politics or Taylor Swift fans,

it's something that motivates him to go and share their thoughts

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