Social Media Harms Us Through Connectivity, What Seems Good Isn’t [OPINION]

Love it or hate it, you can’t leave it. Your grandparents who once scoffed at younger people spending so much time online now incessantly share and update on their Facebook feeds. The president tweets out policy, and politicians engage in real-time. Social media sites have made impossibly large communities where millions of people find comfort in the companionship of strangers. Social media is globalization, but on a scale never imagined prior.

All of that sounds fantastic, a future-forward world where everyone is connected, but instead it’s caused an information overload and emotional responses that we are not equipped to deal with. Social media is harmful to us as a society despite its far-reaching potential.

The rise of social media began before cell phones were as capable as they are today. Today, social media and cell phones are intensely combined. More people worldwide own smartphones than they do computers. Since 2013, more than 60% of the time spent on social media has been with mobile devices, and the number has only grown year-to-year. The dual ability of social media to communicate and entertain, with both people close to you and strangers, makes it a very necessary utility on phones. This utility is part of what makes social media so pervasive. If it were just an entertainment portal, a way to share casual content, the adoption of social media may not be so widespread.

A more connected world can be a great thing, but it also leads to a much more intensive and accessible way for people to access information that may not be healthy for them. In an article by the New York Times, Dr. Ana Radovic says “Teens are really driven by their peers, really rewarded by peer interactions.” With a larger than ever audience of peers they can reach, this is an outlet that can be referred to as addicting by psychologists. “They’re exploring their identity, being creative, and sharing things that they’ve done, but it’s difficult for them to filter out the negative.” Between the proliferation and the accessibility of potentially negative and harmful content, much of it can be normalized and taken in a way that could cause harm for developing minds.

Gambling with mental health

Social media isn’t being referred to as addicting casually. That strong descriptor relates to how behavior scientists have engineered social media to reward usage and encourage engagement. Aza Raskin, a former Mozilla and Jawbone employee said to BBC “It’s as if they’re taking behavioral cocaine and just sprinkling it all over your interface and that’s the thing that keeps you like coming back and back and back.” Raskin was one of the engineers who designed the infinite scroll – the habit-forming method of showing content endlessly with no next page or load more buttons to click. It makes sense, social media only works if people are putting their lives on it, so by getting people to spend more of their life on social media there is more content for all.

There are hundreds, to thousands, and definitely more articles touting the ways that social media is bad for adolescents, for teens, for adults, for society as a whole. All the articles read about the same way. Nebulous effects on mental health, from peer pressure and fear of missing out (FOMO), to lack of concentration and anxiety, and the scourge of misinformation abound online all crop up in them. There’s a reason why each article reads nearly the same. These issues exist in people’s offline lives too. social media exacerbates them to an unmitigated amount.

It seems pretty evident that the personal effects of social media exist. Just as stress, anxiety, depression, and other negative afflictions can exist from offline sources. Social media just gives someone more opportunities to create and encounter those triggers. More behind the scenes is the way social media shapes our society. As a primary news source, and usually a place where people digest news first, truth and integrity are paramount. This doesn’t seem to be happening as Pew Research has found that 64% of adults believe fake news stories cause confusion. Facebook campaigns have been found to be an integral way Russia has interfered in several political processes worldwide. Currently, Facebook is undergoing a series of hearings in congress to determine the best way to defend against the stream of misinformation it has hosted.

Whether you’re being lied to, finding corners of the internet damaging to your psyche, or suffering from the addiction of social media it is clear that this technology has gone too far. Our society is too integrated into networks built by corporations that have little to no interest in preserving the quality of life for their users beyond ensuring they continue to use the service. From inhumane working conditions at Facebook to all too present bias in enforcement of rules by owners and moderators of Twitter, social media is not your friend. Nor do your friends only exist online.