Social Media’s Triumphs and Deadly Implications

The bad with social media

• People who use it to mainly view will often view people’s profiles that display a very lavish wealthy lifestyle. First of all this isn’t what it seems (more on that later) and second, it makes the viewer feel that their life is inadequate increasing their chance for depression and such
• High profile influencers are often able to display a large amount of wealth because they are being paid by very rich people (almost all of whom are men) to have sex with them, (and probably do lots of other sexually related things).
• It takes your data (often without you realizing it). Many people do have a problem with this. I don’t have that much of a problem with it outright (maybe I can go into detail on that, maybe not, I don’t know). But I do have a problem with the main thing it is used for which is:
• Social media companies are like any company where their primary aim is to make money. And the way they have found will make the most money is to sell ad space on their platforms. And the way to generate the most revenue per add is to do two things:
  • Keep users on the platform for as long as possible (in other words: optimize for time on site)
    • And it just so happens that to do this you need to keep feeding them new content after they have finished looking at one thing so their dopamine (and other good brain chemicals) keep spiking
    • And also in order to do this you need to enlist emotion in user. And it seems that anger or rage (negative emotions) are more powerful when it comes to getting most people to stay on a site longer. This anger and rage is often fueled by content that points out bad things a group you are not a part of is doing. Like right-wing users looking at content that talks shit about left-wing people. This really taps into the tribalistic nature of humans.
  • Degrade the psychological state of the users to their basic instincts (dumbing them down). This is because dumbed down people – in a “zombie” like state – are more likely to click on an ad and purchase something
    • And it just so happens that in order to dumb down the users you have to feed them content that reinforces their already held beliefs
• As Danel Schmactenberger says, the continual feeding of reinforced content that is meant to enlist rage in the user is dividing the user base (and by extent the population on a whole) so people become more extreme in whatever views they hold which in turn is a threat to democracy. Because for democracy to work properly you need to have a large majority of the country agree on fundamental issues. But the more divided we become, the harder that will end up being.
• It gets people to adopt other people’s behavior without them even realizing it. This causes people to lose touch with who they are. Their realness which I believe is the most important value that people can and should hold in order to create happy individuals and a healthy functioning society
• People are psychologically wired to be able to cognitively handle being in a tribe of no more than about 150 people. And for the most part early tribes didn’t consist of the 150 best looking, strongest, smartest people on the planet. Maybe a small handful of them would have been very beautiful or smart, the rest would have been more average looking. Others would have been good at other things but nothing like the lives portrayed on modern social media platforms.
• The internet really does contain a ridiculously huge amount of information. Just about everything that one could ever possibly hope to learn is there and freely accessible. But it turns out that when people are given the “choice” to consume whatever content they want they just stick to their little “bubble”. Their political ideology or whatever. One one hand it is the companies recognizing what their users like and feeding more of that to them and on the other hand it is the users only wanting to view what they like, intentionally staying in their little bubble. This is a cycle that is only going deeper and dividing people.
• At least people (students) should be aware of what data the social media companies are taking from us. Basically it is everything that you do when you are on the app/site. Down to the length of time you spend looking at each photo, where and when you pause when you scroll and for how long.

The good with social media

• It can easily connect you to nearly anyone in the world instantly
• It can be used to learn a lot of amazing skills (from Youtube and the like largely)
• The rapid spread of information. Especially good for emergencies.
• Can reconnect you with people you haven’t connected with in a long time
• Can spread information to a group of people easily (like I used with my a cappella groups)
• Social activism
• Artistic expression

Start the article with something like: It is very important for young people to understand everything about social media, the pros and the cons. And this has to be taught at a very deep level. This is because the psychology that keeps people hooked on social media goes very deep, and if you don’t understand it at a deeper level then you will end up being a slave to it like so many people are.

Observations:

• This is something very interesting. Social media platforms are NOT first and foremost optimized for politically polarizing content. They are optimized for time on site and retaining your attention as long as possible. It is very interesting from a psychology standpoint that what has ensued from that is politically polarizing content. (Of course other things have stemmed from it as well but the political stuff seems to be the most prominent and civilization changing result). In theory anything could have resulted from the algorithms doing their thing, but the fact that it is political polarization is very interesting.