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Your Brain on Social Media

Are online communities as dangerous as tobacco?

When leading developers of social media are carefully restricting their children's access to popular sites, we can suspect that something is very wrong. Is this simply an example case of the paranoia that greets all new technologies, or is there genuine cause for concern?

The Instagram Scandal as One Red Flag for Parents

New technologies are often feared simply because they are unknown. This is understandable but it is generally groundless. For example, a great deal of ink was spilled on the association between televised violence and real-world aggression but these fears mostly came to naught.

Social media may be different. A red flag was raised when the Silicon Valley engineers involved in building out social media were careful to steer their own children away from using them. This is comparable to a tobacco company executive steering their children away from smoking. The deleterious effects of social media were highlighted in the documentary, The Social Network (seen on Netflix).

Recently, a scandal blew up over the link between Instagram use and suicidal thoughts. Indeed, 6 percent of teens with suicidal thoughts linked this ideation with Instagram. Following this disclosure of internal research by Facebook, which owns the social media site, it was announced that the company was shutting down a version targeted at younger children.

Psychologists have long been aware that young people are becoming both more anxious, and more narcissistic. Initially, these trends were attributed to living in a society that is highly competitive where young people are constantly being evaluated, whether as students, as athletes, or as potential dates.

The Narcissism and Anxiety Nexus

These trends are intertwined with social media in some rather alarming ways. In addition to increasing suicidal thoughts, Facebook's internal research found that Instagram content promoted eating disorders among users.

Eating disorders often involve an unrealistically slender ideal of bodily attractiveness that gets disseminated in social media images that are deliberately altered to exaggerate the subject's thinness.

Even before the Instagram scandals, use of Facebook was found to be correlated with disordered eating behavior, such as extreme dieting and bulimia. Such practices are related to both anxiety and narcissism as reflected in the goal of achieving a “perfect” figure.

In that sense, one might argue that the technology of social media presents a perfect storm for intensifying preexisting trends towards increasing anxiety, and increasing narcissism among young people.

Clinical psychologists have noted alarming trends of increasing anxiety and depression among young people. There is frequently a strange mismatch between private misery and the perfect life experiences that clutter social media posts.

Apart from the individual clinical problems associated with social media, some of the most alarming outcomes relate to the health of communities.

The Hateful Algorithm of Facebook

In a business model based on ad revenue, social media compete to provide content that increases user engagement. While user engagement may be secured by innocuous cat pictures and videos that go viral, the most effective content may be material that lets users know about threats whether real or imaginary.

This could be information about crime, political scandals, or false information disseminated by conspiracy theories like Qanon, or the false narrative about a stolen election, both of which proved particularly popular among political conservatives.

In a test account created by a Facebook researcher, a fictitious person, “Carol,” identified as conservative received a barrage of hate and disinformation sites, including Qanon, despite that these violated Facebook's own policy.

Recent whistle-blower accounts show that Facebook was well aware that their content was causing social harm. Yet, it continued to spread falsehoods that captured users and boosted profits.

Another alarming feature of social media is that they are addictive, although not formally recognized as such by psychiatrists.

The Compulsiveness of Social Media and Need for Legal Restrictions

The compulsiveness of Facebook and other social apps is supported by plenty of evidence. People spend a lot of time on social media to the inevitable detriment of other areas of their lives. Interestingly, users underestimate the amount of time spent online by a factor of two.

Neuroscience suggests that social media tap into the same dopaminergic reward systems as addictive drugs. The brain response is somewhat different, lacking signs of the disinhibiting effect of drugs. This means that users have the capacity to limit their own social media use.

If something is harmful as well as compulsive, it often invites government regulation in the public interest as occurred with tobacco, cocaine, and opiate medicines. Social media clearly pass both tests and are in urgent need of government regulation due to the great social harm they are causing, from loss of faith in the electoral system to families divided by baseless conspiracy theories, and the notion that individual liberty trumps public health.

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