Is social media a drug ?

Hello everyone, My name is Aniket Kumar and I have been sober for almost two weeks. For the past 3 years of my life, I was severely addicted to Instagram. I use to start and end my day with a device in my hand, scrolling the infinite feed. It had a huge negative impact on my mental health. It got so worse that I got incapable of expressing thoughts and emotions without the help of memes. I was in a dilemma. The use of social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Redditt, Snapchat, WhatsApp, and Pinterest has become the cornerstone of modern communication and connection as it allows users to create a sense of belonging and redefine their way of being. Social media companies started with a positive mission, to connect people. But, that's not how it turned out to be.

Let's start our journey with a simple quote by Tristan Harris (Google, Former Design Ethicist),

"If you're not paying for the product, then you are the product."

The biggest perk of social media is that it's free. You don't have to pay anything to avail its benefits. But, these are some of the most valuable corporations out there. Then how do they make money?

"Advertisements"

Just think about all the times when you open up your Instagram and saw certain ads for the things about which you were talking with your friends. These targeted advertisements are the reason that these corporations make big bucks. So, the real consumers of social media are advertisers and the product is you.

The advertisers are paying for your attention, engagement, and the guarantee provided by these social media companies, to slightly change your behavior and views regarding a commodity, brand, company, political party are the ultimate products.

Every second that we use these applications, we are providing them with data points about ourselves. They are keeping a track of the posts that you see, like, comment, share, and how much time you spend on each post.

Yes, you read it right, how much time you spend on each post. They know how you are feeling, what ticks you off, what excites you, what interests you and they use it to create a model of you.

When I talk about "they", you must be thinking that I am referring to some evil engineers or developers who are invading your privacy and doing that villainous laugh. But, that's not the reality, "they" here is artificial intelligence, which is extensively used in these applications and its only goal is to persuade you to keep on scrolling.

Each time you hit that like button, the AI gets better at predicting what is going to keep you on that screen. For example, the Youtube recommendation system, recommends videos based on your past activity. So, Let's say that you like conspiracy theories, and one day just out of curiosity, you watched a video called, " Is the earth flat?", Is the Youtube recommendation system capable enough to change anyone's view regarding this proven fact.

Yes, it is.

It happened to one of my favorite basketball players, Kyrie Irving (Boston Celtics ). You might think that NBA stars don't all represent the apogee of intellect. Irving did, however, go to one of Tim Cook's alma maters: Duke.

Later he apologized and said, "You click a youtube video and you want to find out, how deep the rabbit hole goes and then you find yourself watching more and more videos and then suddenly you are debating about it with your friends"

Irving, though, blamed the YouTube "rabbit-hole" for believing that earth is flat but Imagine how many more kids believed him and are now down that hole. A recent survey in United States, found that 34 percent of young adults aged 18 to 24 years old, believe that the world is flat.

Think about it now, Supercomputers that are facilitating these powerful A.I, top engineers around the world working on making these applications more persuasive, and social media companies having a combined net worth of trillions of dollars, which have a clear goal of generating profits through targeted advertisements. The result is a platform that knows everything about you, can predict your every move and we know nothing about it, except the fact that there are cat videos and birthdays on it.

The lack of knowledge makes us vulnerable in front of these highly advanced applications.

To know how much vulnerable you are to these platforms,

I want you to ask yourself these seven questions,

1) Do you spend a lot of time thinking about social media or planning to use social media?

2) Do you spend time on your phone while with friends and loved ones?

3) Do you feel urges to use social media more and more?

4) Do you use social media to forget about personal problems?

5) Do you often try to reduce your use of social media without success?

6) Do you become restless or troubled if you are unable to use social media?

7) Do you use social media first thing in the morning and right before sleeping?

If the answer to some of these questions is “yes,” then you may have or be developing an addiction to using social media. Let's go through some facts and studies done on this topic.

The amount of time that people spend on social media is constantly increasing. The average user now spends approximately 136 minutes – over 2 hours – on social networking sites each day.

According to a study published in the Journal of Behavioral Addictions, not only does time spent on social media platforms waste countless hours of the day, but excessive use is also starting to affect peoples’ decision-making abilities and make them more likely to engage in “risky behaviors.”

The lead author of the study, Dar Meshi said the following. "The connection between heavy social media use and impaired, risky decision making to the same impaired decisiveness found in the brains of people with substance use disorders. Similar to drug addicts, excessive social networking site (SNS) users display a preoccupation with social media platforms when they are not using them, mood modification when they access these sites, and tolerance to the social rewards obtained on these sites from interactions. These excessive SNS users also experience conflict with others because of their use, and when attempting to quit, they display withdrawal symptoms and often relapse. Most importantly, individuals with substance use and behavioral addictions have difficulty making value-based decisions."

Over the past five years, there has been a proliferation of studies assessing how excessive social media use can impact negatively on health. A recently performed study that again reviewed the latest research on the topic and showed that social media use for a minority of individuals is associated with several psychological problems, including anxiety, depression, loneliness, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, and addiction. Because social media is most frequently accessed via smartphones, their usage is intimately intertwined and their mobile nature contributes to excessive checking habits, which often derives from what is commonly labeled as the ‘fear of missing out' or FOMO.

At this point, you are probably wondering that it is not that big of a deal. I am just using social media to stay connected with my friends and I don't use it as much. My first response for you is to think of the average hours you daily spend on these applications and then have a look at your screen time. In the majority of cases, I am sure that there will be a sudden shock of a realization and if you do use it in limit then also there is something that you should be careful about on these platforms,

"Misinformation"

Consider Andy, who is worried about contracting COVID-19. Unable to read all the articles he sees on it, he relies on trusted friends for tips. When one opines on Facebook that pandemic fears are overblown, Andy dismisses the idea at first. But then the hotel where he works closes its doors, and with his job at risk, Andy starts wondering how serious the threat from the new virus really is. No one he knows has died, after all. A colleague posts an article about the COVID “scare” having been created by Big Pharma in collusion with corrupt politicians, which jibes with Andy's distrust of government. His Web search quickly takes him to articles claiming that COVID-19 is no worse than the flu. Andy joins an online group of people who have been or fear being laid off and soon finds himself asking, like many of them, “What pandemic?” When he learns that several of his new friends are planning to attend a rally demanding an end to lockdowns, he decides to join them. Almost no one at the massive protest, including him, wears a mask. When his sister asks about the rally, Andy shares the conviction that has now become part of his identity: COVID is a hoax.

A new study by three MIT scholars has found that false news spreads more rapidly on the social network Twitter than real news does — and by a substantial margin.

False news stories are 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than true stories are. It also takes true stories about six times as long to reach 1,500 people as it does for false stories to reach the same number of people. When it comes to Twitter’s “cascades,” or unbroken retweet chains, falsehoods reach a cascade depth of 10 about 20 times faster than facts. And falsehoods are retweeted by unique users more broadly than true statements at every depth of cascade.

In India, the world’s largest democracy, fact-checking news sites estimated that during the most recent parliamentary elections, the spread of misinformation increased by 40 percent compared with non-election times. In February, during Nigeria’s latest elections, false information about the supposed violence in polling stations located in opposition strongholds was widely spread. In Brazil, during the 2018 presidential elections, electoral authorities were forced to redouble their efforts to counter the spread of videos showing false alterations of results in the voting machines.

India, Nigeria, and Brazil have something in common: the prevalent use of WhatsApp, the preferred messaging app in Africa, Latin America, and many Asian countries (with 1.6 billion active users monthly, in 180 countries) to share information with family and friends.

Fake news is as old as news, and hate speech is as old as speech. But the digital age has provided a ripe environment for the virulent reproduction and visibility of both. To be clear, the promise of the betterment of the human condition held by new technologies is beyond question. But the risks have become just as apparent.

Addiction, Misinformation, and the list just keep ongoing. But we cannot deny that social media has become an integral part of our life and there are situations where you have to use social media. There are some things that you can do to get the best out of social media.

Solutions

1) Delete all the unnecessary social media applications which you don't use. It is going to be hard to decide but the best way is to just honestly ask yourself, " Is this application providing me with anything productive or is it useful in my job?"

2) Mute all the notifications.

3) Refrain from watching the recommended videos on Youtube.

4) Follow people with whom you disagree with. This way, you will get different opinions on every issue.

5) Don't use social media for at least 3 hours after you wake up and before you sleep.

6) Keep your devices out of the bedroom.

7) Before sharing any kind of information, double-check it. Do that extra google check.

For more information, on this issue, I would strongly recommend you to watch the Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma.

You can download it from this link.

Remember,

“There are only two industries that call their customers “users”: illegal drugs and software.” ~ Edward Tufte