Last week I wrote about the mental health issues related to social media. This week, let’s pull that critical lens back a little further to evaluate five additional problems with social media.
Problem #1: Social Media Is Addictive
Most social networks and their content creators are fighting for your attention. After all, why – with all the other things you could be doing online – should you pay attention to them?
To ensure that not only will you visit once, but you’ll visit again and again (and again), social media platforms and posters have every incentive to be as addictive as possible.
And they’re getting better at it. Social media addition has become prevalent enough to spark some serious discussion in the mental health field, as well as in the field of ethics.
Learn the basic stats of social media addiction here.
Check if you have any symptoms of social media addiction here.
Problem #2: Social Media Kills Productivity
This shouldn’t be a surprise given the addictive nature of social media, but turns out it’s difficult to focus – let alone get into one of those highly productive “flow” states – when you are only a ping or click away from social media.
What you intend to be a quick check on that notification that just popped up on your phone can turn into a massive time sink. That one thing leads to another ad infinitum (see: addictive nature of social media) in something I’ve heard referred to rather aptly as “going down the rabbit hole.”
Learn more about the effect of social media on workplace productivity here.
Problem #3: Social Media Enables the Spread of Misinformation
To quote that line frequently misattributed to Winston Churchill: “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to put its pants on.”
Misinformation spread by social media takes many forms. It could be benign, in which someone misquotes or misremembers something (like the falsely attributed Churchill quote). It could also be an intentional falsehood: catfishing, posing as someone else, lying to further yourself or a political cause, even propaganda.
For the vast majority of social media platforms, there is no fact-checking, no editorial staff ensuring that the information being spread is true.
To make matters worse, we are more likely to share information that we have an emotional gut-reaction to – which also happens to be information more likely to be false. This knee-jerk proclivity for sharing is something that attention-seekers and propagandists are happy to exploit.
Read about why social media is so good at spreading accidental and intentional misinformation and biases here.
Problem #4: Social Media Encourages Extremism and Echo Chambers
Analysts have demonstrated time and again that social media is more likely to encourage extremism and echo chambers where the only opinions we hear are the same as our own.
There are a number of reasons for this. Social media users tend to engage with like-minded users, which leads to framing your ideas for a specific audience of like-minded peers, and exacerbates in-group/out-group thinking. In certain cases, this culminates in stoking fears about out-groups and posting increasingly extreme content as that’s what gets the most attention.
Social media platforms also contribute to this by showing only cultivated content that aligns with your likes, as opposed to content that challenges your views. (This one-sided-ness is part of why I find my Facebook feed and YouTube recommendations so predictable and boring, I think.)
Read about how social media builds extremist divisions here.
Problem #5: Social Media Contributes to “Mean World Syndrome”
Mean World Syndrome is a concept originated by George Gerbner in the 1970s to describe how mass media’s content tends to make viewers believe that the world is much more dangerous than it actually is.
While Gerbner was originally focused on television’s impact on society, Mean World Syndrome has been argued to apply to many other mass media technologies, including social media.
When you log onto Facebook or Twitter and scroll through a list of grievances, horrors, tearjerkers, and nastiness, the feelings you come away with are fear, hopelessness, anger, and jaded cynicism about humanity. That is Mean World Syndrome.
Learn more about what Mean World Syndrome is and how it manifests in television and social media here.
Read about ways to combat Mean World Syndrome thoughts and perceptions here.