Image Credit: Medium
By Rashika Fazali
One of the most dangerous places in the world is in every country. It’s at home, at work, on the road, at a cafe – everywhere. It’s easily accessible which makes it alluring and harmful at the same time. We call this, Social Media.
I remember a time when social media was merely a communication tool that helped us connect with people especially those living abroad. If you were born before 1994, you know how different life was. We are the last generation to have had an outdoorsy childhood which included a lot of physical activity and games from batta to cycling to playing Joker. At that point in life, computers, tablets, and smartphones were a thing of the future. Access to the internet was equivalent to homework. Each day, we had designated homework hours to finish our school work. We couldn’t access the internet whenever we wanted to because 1) life was a lot more disciplined back then than it is today and 2) connecting to the internet meant that no one in the house could use the landline.
Our first brush with social media was with social networking sites like Myspace and Hi5. It was created for the purpose of connecting with people. These networks created simple, yet interesting ways to keep us engaged through the beautification of our social profile using backgrounds and glowing letters. Gradually, social networking sites became a source of information. You gained knowledge, ideas, learned about current stories, and atrocities. Personal stories and injustices that the mainstream media would not report were posted on social media. It was liberating to see and hear more than what governments and news media reported.
Social media to the rescue!
We know today that social media has been instrumental in addressing unknown and prevailing issues and injustices faced by the public. It became another way – a powerful way to inform leaders, change-makers, activists, and even the public on the current happenings in Sri Lanka. Social media as a broadcaster of information created platforms of inclusivity providing real-time information to every user of social media. Take communist China, the world leader in censorship having banned Facebook, YouTube, etc. couldn’t stop their citizens from addressing issues like sexual harassment which was not a legal offense in China until a few months ago. Activists who helped create China’s #MeToo movement found new and effective ways to continue their fight on sexual harassment even though China’s stringent cyber laws. Moments like this, you understand the power of social media.
But with pros come cons. Social media is slowly turning into a monster, and as we go ahead with it, we realize that the whole application contains more toxicity than positivity. We have more warriors, racists, and abusers online because social media, unfortunately, gave them a voice too. People are attacked for their opinions – doesn’t matter if what you’re saying is right or the truth, backed with scientific research, the creation of social media enabled a lot of bad amongst the good.
Are we addicted to social media?
Sri Lanka boasts 6.2 million active social media users with 5.7 million mobile social media users. We are more on our phones than ever, scrolling and scrolling aimlessly, almost as if we are addicted to it. But are we?
Social media companies use tricks to keep us hooked. For example, the ‘pull-to-refresh’ feature which is in almost every social media app is designed to work as a positive reinforcement just like the rat in B. F. Skinner’s experiment, where pressing the lever released food into a box. When you notice you receive a reward, you will keep pressing the lever hoping to get more rewards. Just like the ‘pull-to-refresh’ feature which is no different to the slot machines in casinos.
As much as we use social media to connect and find information, we also use it when we are bored. When boredom strikes, we look for activities to engage in from reading to listening to music, and even partaking in rigorous outdoor activities. But today, the easiest way to get rid of boredom is to get onto social media on your phone. You scroll and scroll, hoping to find something of interest, hoping that this video will give you a pleasurable sensation. After all, author Yuval Noah Harari stated in his book, ‘Home Deus’ that humans are always chasing something or the other in the pursuit of happiness. We want more.
Social media developers understand our wants and desires too well, and using this knowledge and psychology, they find different ways to captivate us, hoping to keep us a little longer on their sites. They use a three-step factor based on the Fogg behavioral model to modify our behavior; motivation, action, and trigger. When we receive a notification or our screen lights up, that trigger may motivate us to find out the cause of that ping. If we click on it, social media wins. Keeping us hooked on to social media is incredibly beneficial to sites and apps because what’s sold to advertisers is our attention. The longer we spend on their site, the more chances they have to show us ads which in turn generates a lot of money for sites such as Facebook.
When it comes to news, we simply do not want to be the last person to find out about the latest developments in the world. This ‘fear of missing out’ (FOMO) culture increases our chance of checking our social media a lot more than we think and is one of the drivers of social media addiction. Did you know that millennials check their phone an average of 150 times a day? 79% sleep with their phones by their side while 60% check their phones first thing in the morning. Millennials also use their phones most for social media, viewing videos, and movies.
What else is designed to tap into our social impulses? Notifications. The minute your phone pings, you want to see who sent that WhatsApp message, the contents of an email you received, the comment on your picture. We forget what we are doing at the moment and engross ourselves in social media for the next 30 minutes, and then ask ourselves, “where did all that time go?”.
Another feature is the ‘like’ button that shouldn’t give us anxiety, but it does anyway especially when we don’t receive many likes. One study revealed that a particular area in the brain that activates the pleasure of eating chocolate and winning money is the same area that activates when teenagers see a lot of likes in their photos or in their peer’s photos. We want to be liked. We crave social validation and positive feedback, and ‘likes’ are how we measure our success on social media. According to another study, 52% of people born in the 90s click the like button several times a day. Our dependency on technology and social media is largely governing our life and making us become anxious, depressed, and anti-social people in a social world.
Informational or just toxic?
But haven’t we learned so much through social media though? Doesn’t that balance it out? From the latest news to facts to stories to cute videos and life hacks, we are constantly learning and utilizing the information to create change in our lives and others, empowering and uplifting individuals and communities by speaking out and addressing pressing issues. But the more we get into it, the uglier it gets – most of the time.
While social media is a place for anyone to voice out a thought, concern, or report incidents, the reaction is not always favorable. Some users do cyber-bullying. Some are cyber-bullied and called out for believing or stating the truth. Others are called out for falsifying PHDs and siphoning money from fundraisers – calling out people here is the good part. But if you notice, no matter what your opinion or beliefs are, you will be subjected to some kind of hate on social media. My friend who’s a popular Muslim activist on Instagram gets a lot of hate as well as love. Why? Because she talks about local social issues that no one is willing to talk about. She believes that Muslim women are more than daughters, wives, and mothers, and they can be anything they aspire to be, but in our collectivist, patriarchal society, giving women any sort of place in Sri Lanka has always being a problematic, negative issue. So, the next best thing to do when you don’t agree with someone’s opinion is to berate and spew hate at the person. Most often, it’s not even through the use of valid, research-backed information, but it’s pure hate because she happened to voice out something that didn’t sit well with his/her beliefs. Why is it so hard for us to have intellectual conversations where we discuss and share our opinions as respectful individuals? We don’t have to agree on everything, but we can choose to respect someone’s opinion and let it be. Instead, we make virtual spaces also toxic places.
The most toxic platform on social media goes to…
In my opinion, and some of you may agree with me, Twitter is the number one toxic platform on social media. Amnesty Organization, a non-governmental organization that focuses on human rights revealed that Twitter was indeed a toxic place for women. A study conducted in 2016 by Inter-Parliamentary Union revealed that women parliamentarians endured the most psychological violence and abuse in the form of sexist comments, intimidation, and threats via social media platforms. Another study conducted by Amnesty Organization revealed that women are abused on Twitter every 30 seconds. The same study, this time concentrating on India revealed that 1 in 7 tweets that mentioned women politicians were abusive or problematic. Out of that, 1 in 5 were sexist tweets. Muslim women politicians received the most abusive – 94.1% were subjected to ethnic or religious slurs way more than women belonging to other religions.
The problem with Twitter is that it requires us to wear heavy armor because this is a war zone where anything and everything you say can be taken against you (yes, it sounds like a Miranda warning). We have vile people on Twitter, waiting for some controversy to brew so that they can add fuel to the fire. They thrive on it. I remember one incident where a girl found a stranger in her bed. He had got into her house through a window and she somehow managed to get this man out of her house. The next thing she did was call the cops. But, somewhere down the line, people took what she said happened to her, against her. It was quite upsetting to see how many women bashed her for this story; One called her a liar and said this incident which happened to her, never happened. How one came to that conclusion, no one will know. The point is we are so defensive and hostile on social media and often state that someone or something is wrong with no evidence to back us up.
Creation of fake news
Not only is social media toxic, but we also have to be vigilant about fake news. How did it start on social media? It originated in a small town in Macedonia. Buzzfeed Media Editor, Craig Silverman found a trail of bizarre news that led to a network of at least 140 fake news websites created for the purpose of earning lots of money. According to the owners of those sites, the best way to earn money was to create fake sensational political stories that guaranteed shares and traffic. And thus, fake news was born misleading millions of people and creating chains of amusement, and panic in some cases.
Fake news, hate speech, and concerns of inciting communal violence even forced the Sri Lankan government to block Facebook, WhatsApp, and Viber in 2018 for over a week due to a clash between Sinhalese Buddhists and Muslims in Kandy that killed at least two people. Last year in April after the Easter Sunday bombings, the government shut down all Facebook-owned sites and apps in an attempt to stop the spread of fake news. In recent times, we’ve also had to deal with Covid-19-related fake news. I received so many fake messages from people on how to deal with the coronavirus and its myths. Countless people just forward messages without checking their source. Some people see ‘WHO’ on pictures or links and assume that it’s valid information, only to find out much later that the information is doctored. Director-general of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus stated20 that “we’re not just fighting an epidemic; we’re fighting an infodemic” as well.
Social media heavily affecting our lives
It seems like it is getting worse. Social media is affecting our self-esteem and well-being as well. We see others going on great vacations and eating out a lot and that is causing us to disbelieve our abilities, create envy, and make us even more depressed. One study found out that users who stayed away from Facebook for a week reported high life satisfaction and overall well-being than those who stayed on. Users who reported being envious of their friends on Facebook were most likely to benefit from staying away. Another study found out that our want for more Facebook likes causes decrease life satisfaction.
There are also links between social media and mental health issues. One survey done in 2018 with over 1000 participants found out that 41% of Americans aged 18 to 24 are anxious, sad, or depressed because of social media. But 77% also stated that social media has a lot of benefits than disadvantages.
Anything must be used in moderation, but social media doesn’t come under that rule. The average daily social media usage in 2019 was 144 minutes per day, going up 2 minutes from the previous year. That’s more than 2 hours a day. This shows that we are constantly on our phones utilizing social media either as an informational tool or something that helps us waste time.
It’s time to go on a social media detox!