Column: Social media addiction, the threat it poses on young girls and the age of disinformation

Social media is statistically proven as especially harmful to young people, yet nearly everyone has a social media account.

According to Statista, 79% of Americans aged 12 and older have a social media account. The majority of students at the University of South Carolina are aged 18 to 24. Sprout Social found that this age range is most popular on platforms like Youtube, Twitter, and Pinterest (there are more children aged 13 to 17 on Instagram and Snapchat). In the 18 to 24 age range specifically, 90% use Youtube, 76% use Facebook, 75% use Instagram, 73% use Snapchat, 44% use Twitter, and 38% use Pinterest.

Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist at Google and co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, created and circulated a presentation at Google saying, “Never before in history have 50 designers, 20- to 35-year-old white guys in California, made decisions that would have an impact on two billion people. Two billion people will have thoughts that they didn’t intend to have.”

When Larry Page, former CEO of Google, was briefed on the presentation the following day, it was as if Harris’s presentation had never existed.

Harris stressed that the golden rule was that “If you’re not paying for the product, then you are the product.”

Justin Rosenstein, a former engineer at Facebook and Google and co-founder of Asana supports that, “Our attention is the product being sold to advertisers.”

The social media experience is heavily reliant on AI centered around engagement, growth, and advertising to retain user’s interest, keep them sharing content and make money off of them.

Harris stated that “They build models that predict our actions, and whoever has the best model wins … All of the things we’ve ever done, all the clicks we’ve ever made, all the videos we’ve watched, all the likes … gets brought back into building a more and more accurate model. The model, once you have it, you can predict the kinds of things that person does.”

Guillaume Chaslot, a former Google software engineer and YouTube employee, supports the claim that the business model is built to retain our attention.

“People think the algorithm is designed to give them what they really want, only it’s not. The algorithm is actually trying to find a few rabbit holes that are very powerful, trying to find which rabbit hole is the closest to your interest. And then if you start watching one of those videos, then it will recommend it over and over again,” said Chaslot. 

The most obvious method in which social media has changed human behavior is through technology addiction. In a study done by Reviews, 75.4% of participants admitted that they were addicted to their phones.

Harris explained, “You don’t know when you’re gonna get [a notification] or if you’re gonna get something, which operates just like the slot machines in Vegas. It’s not enough that you use the product consciously. I wanna … implant, inside of you, an unconscious habit so that you are being programmed at a deeper level.”

Harris stresses that unconscious manipulation and control is the driving force behind these psychological tricks.

Chamath Palihapitiya, a former executive at Facebook, said that “We curate our lives around this perceived sense of perfection because we get rewarded in these short-term signals–hearts, likes, thumbs-up–and we conflate that with value, and we conflate it with truth. And instead, what it really is is fake, brittle popularity that’s short-term and that leaves you even more, and admit it, vacant and empty [than] before you did it.”

Palihapitiya explained social media as if each of us is a fading celebrity, desperate for a taste of the spotlight, a sign that we matter.

The addictive aspect to refreshing our feed is a psychology term called intermittent positive reinforcement.

Dr. Anna Lembke, Chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic at Stanford University, said that “Social media is a drug. We have a basic biological imperative to connect with other people. This directly affects the release of dopamine in the reward pathway. There’s no doubt that a vehicle like social media, which optimizes this connection between people, is going to have the potential for addiction.”

Although Jeff Seibert, a former employee at Twitter, knows how the tricks work, he is familiar with picking up his phone and losing 20 minutes. He said, “What I want people to know is that everything they’re doing online is being watched, is being tracked, is being measured. Every single action you take is carefully monitored and recorded. Exactly what image you stop and look at, for how long you look at it.”

Tim Kendall, former president of Pinterest, former director of monetization for Facebook, and CEO of Moment, recalled a time when he was glued to his phone with his children in the other room and explained, “It’s interesting that knowing what was going on behind the curtain, I still wasn’t able to control my usage. So, that’s a little scary.”

Kendall recognizes how addictive social media is, which is why he said that he and his wife, “don’t let [their] kids have really any screen time.”

Harris explained the dangers of social media and its resulting effect on body image, that “We were not evolved to have social approval being dosed to us every five minutes. That was not at all what we were built to experience.”

Some teens and pre-teens are experiencing body dysmorphia because of the way they look with Snapchat filters. Some go so far as to get plastic surgery to look more like models or filters.

Jonathan Haidt, Ph.D., stated that “[Children] are much less comfortable taking risks. The rates at which they get driver’s licenses have been dropping. The number who have ever gone out on a date or had any kind of romantic interaction is dropping rapidly. This is a real change in a generation.” Haidt provides two charts demonstrating the increase in self-harm and suicide rates since 2009 when social media was made available on mobile phones.

Dr. Haidt provides three rules justified by research to make life easier for families regarding social media: (1) all devices out of the bedroom at a fixed time every night; (2) no social media until high school; and (3) work out a time budget with your child(ren).

How we get our information and its reliability has also dramatically changed as a result of social media. Many shared the idea that social media promotes fake news because it is more engaging than real news, and an MIT study found that fake news circulates six times faster on Twitter than real news. 

Rosenstein concurred, “Algorithms and manipulative politicians are becoming so expert at learning how to trigger us, getting so good at creating fake news that we absorb as if it were real, and confusing us into believing those lies. It’s as though we have less and less control over who we are and what we believe.”

We are living in a disinformation age in which we see information curated to our own beliefs. For example, if someone in Aiken, South Carolina Googles the words, “Climate change is,” he or she will have different suggested links from someone living in Sacramento, California. 

Marco Rubio, United States Senator of Florida, expressed this sentiment “We are a nation of people… that no longer speak to each other. We are a nation of people who have stopped being friends with people because of who they voted for in the last election. We are a nation of people who have isolated ourselves to only watch channels that tell us that we’re right.”

Steve Jobs, a deceased co-founder of Apple, once said, “What a computer is to me, is it’s the most remarkable tool that we’ve ever come up with. And it’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.”

Harris argues that “If something is a tool, it genuinely is just sitting there, waiting patiently. If something is not a tool, it’s demanding things from you. It’s seducing you. It’s manipulating you. It wants things from you. And we’ve moved away from having a tools-based technology environment to addiction- and manipulation-based technology environment. That’s what’s changed. Social media isn’t a tool that’s just waiting to be used. It has its own goals, and it has its own means of pursuing them by using your psychology against you.” 

There are two methods to combatting the harmful effects of social media: the internal and external way.

With the internal way, you need to uninstall apps that are wasting your time, reduce or turn off notifications, do not engage with ads or recommended links, fact-check all information found on the internet from people you do and do not agree with, and use a search engine that respects your privacy. 

Harris said, “What I see is a bunch of people who are trapped by a business model, an economic incentive, and shareholder pressure that makes it almost impossible to do something else.” With the external method, we address our responsibility to demand more from creators of social media to combat the negative things it causes.