Noah Rossignol
April 2022
Social media platforms are harmful both to their users and to society as a whole. This is why, in spite of the inconvenience I incur by avoiding social media, I in general refuse to use those platforms. To give a bit more detail on what specific problems social media platforms cause here is a list of reasons I have for refusing to use them:
Before I expand on these ideas, I would like to first discuss some of the problems with the terminology we use for talking about these platforms.
I think it would be useful to come up with some other name for the things that we currently refer to as "social media" or "social networks." In this article, when I say "social media" I am referring to things like Facebook, Twitter, Tiktok, etc. These are digital platforms on the Internet (for the most part on the World Wide Web) on which users both create and consume content. The word "media" in "social media" is the plural of "medium." I.e. a social medium serves as a medium for social interaction. I see no reason for the phrase "social media" to be restricted to certain kinds of digital media. I think something like "digital content distributor" or "microblogging service" would be better terms to describe what I am talking about when I say "social media", but since these phrases are not in common use I will continue using "social media" in this article.
With that said, let's return to the specific reasons why I avoid social media.
I think enough people have already pointed out by now that the way social media companies make money in general is by selling data. I often see that articles or videos that criticize social media will focus on this issue as one of privacy. The problem they see is that your data is being sold. It is true that this is a problem for privacy. It also appears that many people are already aware of this issue, and they don't really care enough about privacy for this issue to stop them from using social media. I encourage the reader to focus instead on a different matter: why is user data valuable?
The data advertisers buy from social media companies is not intrinsically valuable, it is a means to other ends. The thing that is valuable to advertisers is your attention. They want your eyes looking at their advertisement, or your ears listening to their advertisement. To advertisers, the user data is useful for optimizing who sees what, but the important part is that the user's attention is brought to their ad. The real service social media companies perform for advertisers is acquiring the time and attention of users and selling that to advertisers. The user data just helps them do so more effectively.
So when you use social media, it's not just that you're paying with your data. You are paying your time and attention; you are literally spending your time. Personally, I consider my time to be valuable, and certainly worth more than whatever "benefit" social media services offer to me in return for spending it on them. I encourage social media users to ask themselves the following questions: What are these companies providing me in exchange for the time and attention I am giving to them? Is that worth it?
Social media platforms are designed to be addictive. As discussed above, social media companies are selling your attention. They have an incentive to acquire as much of it as possible, and getting you addicted to using their service is a great way to do this (great for them that is, not for you). These companies have both the motive and the resources to invest in what is effectively brain hacking to make their platform as addictive as possible. I would consider acquiring an addiction to be something that is a harmful development for a person's mental health.
The heavy bombardment of information to which social media platforms submit their users is taxing not only because it's a waste of time, but also because people have to expend mental energy to process new information. People only have a limited amount of time and energy, so this abundance of information lowers people's attention spans. Trying to process too many things means you're less inclined to focus on any specific thing. Besides, most of what people post on social media is garbage anyway. A lot of it is people bragging, people complaining, or some news corporation telling you about some bad thing that otherwise wouldn't have any impact on most of the people who read about it on social media.
There is also evidence that too much screen time really is harmful to psychological well-being. For a lot of people, a significant portion of their screen time is due to social media. For those people, avoiding social media would be a good way to reduce screen time, which is likely to improve psychological well-being.
Since social media companies are focused on acquiring and selling their users' attention, there is an incentive for their algorithms to only show users things from one of two categories: things they agree with, and things that they consider to be beyond reasonable. The first is obvious; people generally like to hear things that reinforce their opinions and worldview. For the second, I think that deep down, people enjoy having an opportunity to fight "The Bad Guys™". The strategy there is to show content that is shocking or offensive to the user, without actually having a strong argument that would cause the user discomfort by posing a real challenge to his world view. He can then virtue signal by making some response to the post with some sort of comment that attacks whoever made the post, which usually amounts to calling the author of it stupid and/or evil. People like having a chance to attack and hurt others when they can convince themselves that their target "deserves it."
The result of this is the famous echo chamber effect. People only see well thought out posts from people who already agree with them, and they only see shocking and crude arguments that can't be taken seriously from people who disagree with them. The result is that they become deeply entrenched in their opinions, and believe that there's no way any decent person could possibly disagree with them. They believe, even if they won't admit that they believe this, that the only way someone could possibly have a different opinion than their own is if he is either stupid, evil, or both.
This is ultimately destructive to society as a whole. People can only have civil discourse with each other if they already agree. Discussion of any controversial issue is no longer an exercise where people try to have a reasoned debate. It has become a competition to see who can come up with the best insults of their opponents. It can split up close friends, it can even divide people from their own families. There is no attempt to try to work with others to find solutions to problems that benefit everyone. There is only, "my team has to force those bad people who disagree with us to accept our undeniably correct ideas."
While the obvious motivation for making the algorithms this way is to maximize the amount of time users spend on social media, the secondary effect of polarization is likely also seen as useful by the people who own social media companies. Divide et impera is one of the oldest tricks in the book for people who want control.
It saddens me to see what the Internet has become when I imagine what it could have been. The Internet provides the means for a more free flow of information than has ever existed in recorded history. With the Internet it is possible for anyone with an Internet connection to make his ideas available to every other person with an Internet connection. One can circumvent the publishers and broadcasters who otherwise would have the power to decide what is published and what is suppressed.
All of that was and still is theoretically possible. In practice, however, this is not how most people's experience of the Internet works. Most of the public has been herded onto social media platforms that are owned by a handful of people. Once again, a few large companies have control of the majority of information flow. They determine which ideas will be promoted, which ideas will be suppressed, and which will be banned and censored. In fact, the control over people's minds is probably stronger today than it was before the invention of the Internet, and this is primarily because of social media.
Now that people are addicted to social media, and thus the social media companies have successfully acquired a significant portion of the public's attention they dispose of that attention as they please. One can speculate that they might use the same expertise in psychology that they used to get people addicted to also skilfully manipulate their perception of reality. They have the means and methods to get group A to believe a narrative that has been prepared for group A and to get group B to belive a narrative that has been prepared for group B. They can then assure that groups A and B are too busy fighting each other and too fanatical to entertain any idea that would threaten either narrative.
Anything the social media companies suppress falls out of the public's attention. Anything social media companies promote becomes the center of the public's attention. This occurs regardless of whether the promoted issue is of any real importance to the people in question.
The thing that makes the current situation interesting is that the public has to a certain degree voluntarily surrendered their attention and the control over what information they consume to social media companies. Nobody forces anyone to give their attention to the social media companies; they voluntarily give it up. It is still technically possible for there to be a high degree of free exchange of ideas on the Internet. This will only happen in practice if people abandon social media. One of the best options is to run your own website. It is harder (but still possible) to deplatform someone who is running his own platform. A nice guide for creating your own website is here. If you find that too complicated, I think neocities is another good option.
There are a few other useful things for which people use social media even though there exist better alternatives. For direct messaging friends and family there is email, and a plethora of instant messaging services. I like XMPP for instant messaging. For searching for people and businesses there are search engines. It's true that the major search engines are just as bad as social media in terms of violating user privacy and censoring things, but there are options such as duckduckgo that are less bad. As for video conferencing, I have heard good things about Jitsi.
If people really want to avoid all of the problems described in this article, this will require a major shift in their Internet habits. It's not as simple as finding something similar to social media to replace it. Looking for an alternative social media platform is like if I convinced someone to stop smoking crack and then he asked me which drug he should use as an alternative. I would respond that he shouldn't use drugs at all. Spending hours scrolling through a feed of vapid content curated by some algorithm is something that should be avoided entirely. Both individuals and society as a whole will be better off if we return to a focus on one-to-one interpersonal relationships.