Social Media Is The Problem… Or Is It?

Social media has become everyone’s favourite moral punching bag, but it is nothing more than the mere reflection of what we hate about ourselves.

There was a general consensus in America in the 1980s that heavy metal music was corrupting the youth and hip-hop was glorifying violence. In the 1990s, the adults had moved on from the corrupt music and focused their hysterics on the harmful effects of violent video games. The Columbine Massacre of 1999 further cemented the belief that video games were to blame. Back then, school shootings were a rarity, and the only plausible explanation for this horror was that the corruptive new form of entertainment was the cause of it all. Now, we look back at heavy metal music with nostalgia — hip-hop has become a part of the global culture and teenagers are getting paid millions of dollars to play violent video games.

And now, we are in the grip of yet another moral panic, and this time, the culprit is social media.

The song may have changed, but the instruments remain the same. “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” reads one article in The Atlantic. “Social Media Can Steal Childhood” reads another in the Bloomberg Business Weekly. YouTube feeds are filled with motivational speakers telling us how we are wasting our lives on social media, glued to our smartphone screens and away from real human connection. The so-called self-help gurus are urging us all to delete social media accounts asap, because Big Tech companies are, in fact, “tobacco farmers in T-shirts selling addictive products to kids.”

The irony of the ironies is that Netflix, the platform that literally sells its users’ attention for money, has joined the chaos to toot its horn. The Netflix film The Social Dilemma has caused a pitch of hysteria. I call it a “film” because there is no reason to call it a documentary due to the obvious absence of any scientific data supporting the argument it makes. Instead, what you get is a bunch of fear-mongers (experts, as they are called) shitting on Big Tech companies and reinforcing each others’ opinions for 90 minutes straight.

The film shows how social media can corrupt your average family. It portrays a young daughter who is driven into depression and low self-esteem by an Instagram-like app; a son who is radicalised by videos on YouTube. The family can’t sit and eat dinner for a few minutes in silence due to the unceasing notifications on their individual mobile phones. So basically, social media has fucked them all up.

Says the film on the platform that literally shares its users' attention for money. hmmm

Much like Donald Trump, The Social Dilemma is accusing all those other algorithms of what it is guilty of. It presents a grotesque simulacrum of reality by showing a bunch of supposed experts sharing the same opinion, all the while avoiding any possibility of dissent altogether. Social media defender and author Nir Eyal was also among the ‘experts’ interviewed in preparation for the film, but the entirety of his 3-hour conversation was left out of it. And only a few seconds of the interview with Jonathan Haidt, another sceptic of social media criticism, were shown.

But why does the film go to all these lengths — what’s the point in the silly tropes and exaggerated claims? The answer: to capture your attention. That’s right — Netflix happens to be one of those evil companies whose algorithm specifically targets its users with content tailored to their needs/wants. The company executives want you to spend as much time as possible on their platform so that they can continue to shower you with shitty movies and web series with stories so banal and writing so sloppy that no one should ever watch them.

Social media has become everyone’s favourite moral punching bag, from former, ‘enlightened’ tech experts, to worried teachers and parents, and the self-proclaimed prophets of the self-help industry. And look, we get it — it only takes a 10-minute video on Facebook to make you detest humanity in a way that you never thought was possible. Most of us unwittingly find ourselves embroiled in a heated argument over hot-button topics, such as if trans athletes should compete in women’s sports or whether a person assigned as male at birth can transition and become a female. At times, we have all been eager to join the anti-social media crusade and shit on Big Tech companies to our personal delight. But that may not be the solution.

Social media is a major part of our lives, and much like anything else, there has been plenty of research on its impact on politics, democracy and society as a whole. Experts have also studied the relationship between social media consumption and suicidal ideation, low self-esteem, mood changes and other mental health problems. And the results are surprising — social media is not the problem.

We are.

Common criticisms on Social Media:

1. It harms mental health

While it is true that depression, anxiety and suicide rates have seen a worrying spike among the youth, but it is not clear that social media is the cause. A lot of the research done to study the relationship between mental health problems and social media consumption is correlational — it simply assumes that because two things are happening simultaneously at the same rate, one must have caused the other.

There are certain problems in understanding the relationship between how people use social media and their personal well-being. The first one is the difficulty of distinguishing mere association from causation. Most research on this topic is flawed — it asks people how much social media they use and compares that with their well-being. Self-report studies have always been unreliable, and in this case, especially, you can never be sure whether people are distressed because they use too much social media or if they are using too much social media because they are trying to self-medicate.

The studies done on social media consumption basically study how much time people spend online and correlate that to their personal happiness levels. Consider this study from 2018 that found a connection between social media usage and depression, but guess what, it’s correlational.

The problem with these studies is that they compare two things with each other without telling us whether one causes the other or if it’s just a coincidence. Let’s say the divorce rate in Karachi matches exactly with the consumption of Fanta among married people, so is Fanta to blame for all the failing relationships? And the same goes here: It’s the chicken or the egg problem — you can’t tell whether excessive social media consumption is causing depression or whether depression is causing people to spend more time doomscroling on social media.

So if these studies can’t do what they are intended for — prove that social media is actually causing mental health problems — then why do we do them? Because they are simple and cheap. It is much easier to corral a hundred troubled teenagers and ask them why they are anxious and depressed and watch them point fingers at social media. It is much harder to round up hundreds of kids, enrol them in a study, and track them for years to see whether social media causes real mental health problems. But even then, how would you know if excessive social media consumption is the cause of depression and not the effect of it?

Some researchers with all the time and money have done this research, and here are some of their conclusions:

• Researchers in Finland tracked 2900 adolescents between 2014 and 2020 and found no link between social media usage and signs of anxiety and depression.
• Another version of this study was done with 600 high school and college students in Canada. And this one also did not find any connection between social media usage and symptoms of depression.
• In another study at Brigham Young University, researchers tracked the social media usage and mental health of 500 subjects between the ages of 13 and 20 from 2009 to 2017. Over 50 per cent of the subjects used social media continuously during that period, and most used it at least an hour each day. And after eight years of gruelling research, the experts did not find any causal connection between social media consumption and mental health problems.

But then what about the fear of missing out, what about Facebook stalking? What about the envy of seeing other people getting a tan on a picturesque beach somewhere in the Caribbean while you are stuck here on your couch, covered in a thin layer of Cheeto dust and doomscrolling through Twitter?

Well, a German study of over 500 people found that the more depressed and anxious social media users are, the more likely they were to stalk others online and indulge in the envy of their lives. The Canada study mentioned earlier also found that depressive symptoms in girls promoted excessive social media consumption. Therefore, the researchers are gravitating toward the conclusion that depression and anxiety cause voyeuristic social media consumption and not the other way around. So basically, the egg came first.

And then there are these other studies that you never hear about. Like the one from 2012 that found posting status updates on social media actually reduces the feeling of loneliness, or the one in 2021 that found being active on Twitter can potentially increase happiness. How about this one which showed social media decreases — yup, you read that right — symptoms of depression and anxiety. And then this other study also found evidence surrounding social media usage and mental health problems that refutes popular wisdom. In a survey of 1800 people, the Pew Research Centre concluded that spending time on social media is linked with “modestly lower levels” of stress.

But if that is the case, you might wonder, then why don’t we hear about this? Why is it that every conversation around social media inevitably morphs into a mud-slinging competition on Big Tech companies? We’ll get to that in a bit.

2. Social media causes political extremism and radicalization

Over the past several years, we have seen a rise in populist movements across the world, frequent public protests, mainstream adoption of fringe conspiracy theories by influential people, and nasty political arguments on Twitter, among other things. Because we see this all happening on social media platforms, we naturally assume that social media is causing this.

But that is not the whole story.

Studies have found that political polarisation is indeed on the rise, but mostly among the older generations who use social media — or technology, for that matter — the least. Younger generations who are most active on social media tend to have more moderate views.

Political polarization is nothing new; it has been a thing in the United States and other countries of the world for generations. And the polarization has been widening for decades, long predating the advent of the internet. And not all countries suffer equally. In fact, some countries have experienced less polarisation since the evolution of the internet.

There are a lot of sound explanations for the rising political polarisation that do not involve social media, like multiculturalism, stagnant wages, rising income inequality gap, divergences in educational attainment and economic opportunity, globalisation et cetera.

But how about fake news? You can’t possibly deny that extremists have found a springboard in the form of social media sites to catapult a barrage of lies into the mainstream media. Well, the thing about fake news is, that it does not originate on social media, but on televised news, and surprisingly, most people don’t fall for it. By its very nature, fake news sounds and feels ridiculous and abnormal, and most folks have discerned the pattern and now avoid falling for it. Not to mention that social media companies are also launching a crusade against disinformation, from Facebook and Twitter to YouTube and Reddit. It is easier to spot and identify fake news than it ever was.

The anxiety surrounding social media has existed since we’ve had technology . In Phaedrus, for instance, Plato quoted Socrates as saying that writing — one of the earliest forms of communication in human history — would lead to the degradation of humanity because it was a dead way of communicating, it couldn’t respond. Fast forward to 1876 when Alexander Graham Bell invented telephone — naysayers criticized this new invention because they thought it would lead to a rude and uncivil society where people would interrupt you with unnecessary calls over dinner

Fake news is nothing new — it has been here and it is likely to remain with us for a long long time. Back in the 18th and 19th centuries, people would anonymously publish newspaper articles or pamphlets to throw mud at their political opponents. Soon after the American Revolution, a newspaper, secretly funded by Thomas Jefferson, wrote that George Washington was plotting to become the Republic’s first president. That of course did happen, but not because Washington was actually conspiring for it. During the American Civil War, newspapers slandered Lincoln, claiming that he not only wanted to abolish slavery but also force black and white folks to intermarry.

So yeah, none of this shit is new.

3. Tech companies are profiting off the mayhem

Big Tech companies have become everyone’s favourite punching bag, from worried moms and teachers to celebrities and self-help gurus. Congress has put Mark Zuckerberg on the stand four times to answer for… well, we are still figuring that out. Executives of Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Google have been burned at the proverbial stake for public satisfaction. The assumption here is: social media is undoing the fabric of society and Big Tech is profiting off of everyone’s misery.

But like everything else we’ve discussed so far, the evidence, again, refutes popular wisdom. Social media is not destroying society, and even if you think it is, tech companies are not fanning the flames. If anything, they are spending billions of dollars trying to put it out.

For example, a recent study to find whether Google’s algorithm actively promoted disinformation found the opposite — YouTube went out of its way to promote factual and reliable news sources to its users against their more fringe competitors. Facebook has banned thousands of terrorist and extremist groups, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of accounts, like that of Donald Trump. The company recently hired over 10,000 employees from across the globe to scour its feeds and take down the disinformation before it reaches a greater audience.

Tech companies are not benefitting off this mayhem, they’re haemorrhaging money countering it. The only people who are indeed benefiting from this chaos are the self-proclaimed prophets of the self-help industry who are spreading distorted information and causing anxiety so that they can sign six-figure book deals. And now to answer your previous question, it is this tiny minority that cannot tolerate a civilised conversation on big tech and make people feel like the technology companies are out to get them — it is because of this loud one per cent that every debate surrounding social media segues into a mud-slinging shitfest.

The problem

But there is certainly a problem here, and if it is not the social media and Big Tech companies, what is it? Glad you asked.

Social media platforms do not create conspiracy theories — they give them a platform because, by definition, social media is, well, social. Free for everybody. Everybody has an equal opportunity to find each other and connect, including conspiracy theorists and racist fucktwits.

The more asymmetry there is between a person’s perceived extreme beliefs and reality, the more likely they are to spread it. The more extreme a view is, the more likely a person is to share it. And when you have a platform built specifically for that, you get a lot of shit thrown around.

Much like everything else in the world, social media follows The Pareto Principle (also called the 80/20 rule) — the majority of the output is generated by a minority of the input. Let’s call this minority the Creators, and the silent majority the Consumers. Research into social media has shown that most people only post things that are important to them — like their kid’s birthday, sister’s wedding, getting a promotion at work — or what they are really passionate about, like the global Jewish coalition beset on destroying the world.

Creators have a lot of people gathering around them that identify with them and adore them. That is because the creators represent their ideals and beliefs better than they ever could. The Consumers want to do all the things that the Creators are doing, whether it’s taking envious vacations in the Maldives, doing charity work in Zanzibar or doing climate activism in Sweden. But they can’t do all that because they don’t have the money/time/talent/energy required for it. So they gather around their favourite creators to validate them and protect them from perceived threats.

Bertrand Russel once said something that I think clearly captures the heart of this problem. He said: “The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people are full of doubts.” Creators are these egotistical fools — they are the doomsayers, the moralizers of our digital space. And it is no surprise that algorithms favour these fools because human psychology favours them and the algorithms are merely reflecting our choices back at us.

The majority of users don’t see any benefit in arguing on social media. They have lives to manage, chores to do, diapers to change and dinners to cook. They don’t care if Obama was born in Kenya or whether the Illuminati orchestrated 9/11. It doesn’t change the fact that 3000 people horribly lost their lives that day.

But there is this one group of people whose lives have been totally ruined by social media — those who work in the media and entertainment, like TV presenters, journalists, anchors, reality show hosts et cetera. With the advent of social media, their professions were turned upside down. So they go on a rampage, shitting on social media companies and portraying them as ‘vile’ and ‘evil.’ Just because they had their lunch eaten by the social media platforms, they assume the same for everyone. And the 99 per cent of the information that we see on social media comes from this tiny 1 per cent.

Back in the day when the internet did not exist and social media was not a part of our daily lives, media and entertainment companies — and the people working for them — focused on consensus. There were only a handful of news services that provided information to the people, and it was essential that they produced content that reflected the truth and resonated with the majority of the people. Treating everybody the same was essential for business.

And then came the shitstorm called the internet and boom — all of a sudden, the news and entertainment industry exploded. Tech companies sprang up everywhere, giving us one-click access to everything in the world. There were now thousands of different news and entertainment services to choose from, and the competition became cutthroat. Confronted with this new storm, the mainstream entertainment industry had to change course — they came up with new strategies and instead of focusing on consensus and delivering the same information to everyone, they began treating their audience differently. They started painting the world as a war between ‘Us’ and ‘Them’, the former being their gullible audience and the latter anyone who disagreed with their opinion (you can see an explicit manifestation of this in today’s Fox News). Come to think of it, when you have thousands of other platforms gunning for you, the best you can do is give your audience something different, something that they won’t find anywhere else. And for the media and entertainment industry, this something was a shitload of disinformation and paranoia. To their personal delight, the more extreme their views were, the more watch time these platforms had. You can still see this happening — politicians with extreme and radical views, on average, have more followers than moderates.

Social media is a reflection of what we hate about ourselves

The Good, The Bad, and the In-Between

Even though we love to shit on social media time and again, there are certain things about it that we can’t get enough of. Most of us these days are spending time online, sharing memorable and important moments of our lives with friends and family. No matter where you are, you can always find a community online that can help you out with what you’re going through. This can lead to a greater understanding and bring about real change. What happens on the internet does not always stay on the internet — it can sometimes boil over into our real world. Social media reduces the cost and complexity of organising, enabling more people to come together — it is difficult to imagine the Arab Spring and the climate movement without it.

Social media platforms have also introduced other features that contribute to making the world a less shitty place. One such feature is the donation option that enables a person sitting at a cafe in Downtown Los Angeles to make charitable donations to flood relief efforts in Balochistan in a matter of seconds. Thanks to Facebook’s blood donation feature, over 50 million people worldwide have become donors, literally saving lives.

Spending time online is much like spending time offline — it depends on the quality of your relationships and how you are spending your time. If you are swiping through peoples’ stories or continuously scrolling down the feed for minutiae of entertainment, you will feel miserable. It is like watching TV: it is fun but it has no social benefit whatsoever.

So, am I exonerating social media from any blame or criticism? Certainly not. While it is true that much of the literature surrounding social media usage and mental health problems is correlational, some may have also found causation, like this one carried out by the University of Pennsylvania. This study confirms what others have merely hinted at, with the added bonus of being one of the few scientific studies to use real experimentation that shows causation and not correlation. Most of the research surrounding social media is flawed, some because of the gaping holes in their experimental setup, others because scientists can’t see over the privacy walls of social media companies to better understand the interactions.

But in the end, nothing is perfect — social media is a double-edged sword. If used correctly, it can be a force of good, bringing people together and making close-knit online communities of like-minded people. But if it is abused, it can have potentially detrimental consequences in the form of cyberbullying, online harassment, promoting a distorted image of reality and lowering the self-esteem of struggling teenagers. In some cases, social media executives have known that their platforms are toxic to young people, and the steps they have taken to address the issue are nothing more than window dressing.

Social media is a scapegoat that we like to blame for what we hate about ourselves. Rather than owning the fact that the shit we see online is a part of us, we chastise the social media platforms for reflecting our true selves back at us. The danger for parents and policymakers is that if they assume that social media is evil, they would take steps to regulate it, and that can have drastic consequences for young people.

Key Takeaways:

If you’ve made it this far, thank you — you are an angel and I love you. Here are a few things that I want you to take away from this:

1. We blame social media for all the things that we hate to admit about ourselves.
2. Most of the research surrounding social media consumption and mental health problems is correlational, it shows association, not causation.
3. Former ‘enlightened’ tech experts, people working in the media and entertainment, and the self-proclaimed prophets of the self-help industry like shit on social media companies because they have a personal axe to grind.
4. The common criticisms of social media — it causes mental health problems and political polarisation, and Big Tech is profiting off our misery — don’t hold water when subjected to rigorous scrutiny.
5. Social media is a double-edged sword — if used correctly, it can be a force of good, bringing us all together in close-knit online communities, but if abused, it can have deleterious consequences on our mental health and our societies.