Negative Impacts of Social Media on Society

Written between May and August 2022.

By Daniel Farrell

Introduction

Social media has several negative impacts on society including the impacts on teenagers’ self-images, polarization, and addiction. This paper identifies different types of impacts and effects that social media companies have made upon our society. Furthermore, from the following findings, we can re-engineer the effectiveness of social media and turn it into a positive platform that impacts the world.

Impact on Users

According to a 2019 Internal Instagram slide presentation called ‘Teen Mental Health Deep Dive’ published by the Wall Street Journal, “One in five teens say that Instagram makes them feel worse about themselves” (Wells, Horwitz, Seetharaman, 2021 ). The initial intent of social media was to share, connect, and communicate with friends and family.?However, recent congressional hearings and insider reports have revealed that social media has turned into a hostile environment.?

Social media has countless flaws.?Big companies, such as Facebook and TikTok, are endangering their consumers by pushing for retention rates. Extreme content has been shown to keep more users engaged, which, from an algorithmic point of view, is giving the user what they want. But exposure to extreme content can send users down negative rabbit holes. Due to these companies being for profit, they have been shown to promote extreme content to make users remain longer on their sites to increase revenue through avenues such as advertisement. Now coming to light is what harm these companies impose on children and their other users by pushing for longer usage.

The negative effects of social media can be broken down into two categories that affect users: design and the implementation of algorithms. Many of the social media founders that have attended Stanford, took the Persuasive Technology Lab courses, which taught engineers how to hack human psychology to increase retention rates. Two Stanford case studies are Even Spegal, the founder of Snapchat, and Kevin Systrom, who started Instagram. These companies have incorporated methods taught at Stanford’s Persuasive Lab, such as the slot machine-like method which has been incorporated into features such as push notifications and other addicting features such as the Like Button and Snapstreaks. These features not only bring users back to their apps but also lengthen use time.?In addition, social media giants use algorithms to further optimize, monopolizing their user’s time. Due to most social media companies having an advertisement business model that increases profit, the companies continue to promote and create more attention-grabbing design features.

Impacts from comparison looks, and behavior

There is substantial evidence from internal Meta (Facebook) reports and studies, as well as outside research, that shows social media curates a toxic environment that increases anxiety, insecurity, and lowers self-esteem. While lowered self-esteem can be attributed to various causes, two main factors that should be met with more regulation are design and algorithm. One way social media companies were able to keep users coming back to their platforms was by introducing “Followers” and “Likes.”?While at first Followers and Likes were not intended to do social harm, it has quickly morphed into this reality. Many “users tie Likes and Followers to the perfect image, feeling attractive, and having enough money,” (Wells, Horwitz, Seetharaman ) according to a recent Facebook document that was leaked to the Wall Street Journal. This behavior shows that the Like feature and ability to have Followers have an intrinsic connection to self-worth and identity. Most social media companies manipulated these features to further pull users’ attention by enticing users with Likes, Comments, and Followers. For instance, Instagram has been rumored to withhold Likes from users and then release those Likes when user interaction is low with the platform. This brings the user back to the platform, leading to scrolling through the app and clicking on ads in the process.

To obtain more Likes and Followers, many users are stepping away from reality by applying different filters and overlays that make users' skin clearer, eyes much bluer, and other enhancements. Many teens feel these impacts from the pressure of looks and behaviors. Internal Facebook slides detailed that users felt pressure to always be happy, become a better self, make everything public, and have the need to post relevant content. By empowering users to show a highly sculpted version of themselves, these platforms curate a highlight reel that is distorted from reality.?

Most social media apps do not portray a realistic sense of reality, and many users feel disconnected from the real world. An internal Facebook document shows that “Facebook found that more than 40% of Instagram users…reported feeling “unattractive” said the feeling began on the app”. (THE FACEBOOK FILES EBOOK 29) To support their findings, Facebook included an example of a student, Eva Behrens, a 17-year-old student who grew up in Silicon Valley. In a statement, Eva estimates half of the grade struggle with body-image concerns tied to Instagram. She continued to say, “Every time I feel good about myself, I go over to Instagram, and then it all goes away” (THE FACEBOOK FILES EBOOK 30). Similarly, a teen from Reston, Virginia commented, “When I went on Instagram, all I saw were images of chiseled bodies, perfect abs, and women doing 100 burpees in 10 minutes”?(THE FACEBOOK FILES EBOOK 23). But these teens are not alone, with just in the U.S alone, there over, “22 million teens, that are 22 years and younger, that log into Instagram each day” (Wells, Horwitz, Seetharaman ).

Misinformation

During the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic not only was the virus spreading but misinformation was too. According to Avaaz, an online activist network:

4x more views were generated by the 10 most popular Facebook COVID misinformation sites compared to content from the leading international health institution…major Facebook networks spread misinformation across at least 5 countries and generated an estimated 3.8 billion views in just the first 8 months of 2020. (Avaaz, 2021 )

This does not only apply to 2020, Meta and other social media companies have been infiltrated with misinformation for years. Much of this misinformation can be used to radicalize many normal users. An example of someone being radicalized on social media is the Buffalo shooter Payton Gendron. In the 180-page manifesto, he explains how social media radicalized him. According to Bloomberg:?

[the shooter] arranged his attack on Discord Inc., published his manifesto on Alphabet Inc.’s Google Docs, and then live-streamed the shooting on Amazon Inc.’s Twitch. A community of supporters then spread clips from his video across Meta Platforms Inc.’s Facebook, Twitter Inc., Instagram, and other platforms.” (Olson )

While this is an extreme case it still is happening to everyday citizens.?For instance, according to MIT Technology Review, “Troll farms reached 140 million Americans a month on Facebook before the 2020 election” (MIT Technology Review, 2021 ) which was sourced from another internal Facebook report. Utilizing bots and social media algorithms accounts are able to spread misinformation on a macro scale of users. Misinformation can be rapidly produced and sent across the interweb. During the pandemic, “45% of tweets about coronavirus were from bots spreading fake information”, (Bobby Allyn ) according to Carnegie Mellon University. The greatest danger of misinformation is spreading fake news that not only harms users but also the national security of countries. Through troll farms, countries, businesses, and candidates are able to interfere in opinions and decision-making, which can drastically affect billions of people.

How candidates would campaign in the 1800s presidential election, would be by their name. Because traveling was time-consuming, candidates would send flyers, information, and people to represent them. Its marketing 101, name recognition affected who won and who lost. Politicians, Generals, and Leaders are great at storytelling. Just as generals would sit around a fire and tell war stories to fellow men, politicians have to captivate the people. Now with the use of social media, spreading a story or a narrative is easier than ever. Social media's algorithm is optimized to keep users on the platform for the longest. One way to keep users' retention is by pushing conversational content. This is a perfect incentive for keeping conversations going online, from your senator to your local senior. A great case study of how to control the attention economy is the 45th President of the United States. Love him or hate him, he was elected President by the American people. Donald Trump is a marketer at heart, having little to no political experience. He understands how to pull attention and bring the press to himself and his issues. One of his reasons for running was to launch a news/media platform, for his Presidential Campaign. What no one saw coming is that he would win. While both Democrats and Republicans have great marketing teams, Trump utilized empty space in the market with the help of social media.

Duncan Watts, a reacher at Microsoft theorized his notion of the big-seed-marketing. According to Duncan J Watts; “big seed marketing combines the best of– viral marketing and mass marketing to yield more predictable results than traditional viral marketing alone…”?The Trump Presidential Campaign implemented many aspects of Watts’s notion. The Harvard Business stated that “Traditional media would not have been so complicit if Trump’s tweets hadn’t been so provocative as to be irresistible. His tweets call out specific individuals and demand a response. What is remarkable is that he engages in these personal confrontations in front of a mass audience” (Bickart, Fournier, Nisenholtz ) This perfect combination of controversy and mass reach helped play so well into Trump's marketing awareness. This strategy of using social media to access the mass market and controversy may be one of the largest factors that were one reason Trump was elected in 2016.

The Implication of the Algorithm?

Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, was inspired by the New York Taxi Cab Dispatch System. This system was used in New York to send a message to all the Taxi Cabs across the city. This fascinated Dorsey, and he started working on a prototype of the messaging system, but for the world. Twitter was created with the idea of sending short messages to a group of people. It provided a service to customers for nothing in return. In 2008, Twitter had roughly 300,000 users.?By 2009 it had 2,500,000 users and by 2010 it had 35,000,000 users according to Internet Live Stats (internetlivestats.com ). Four years after its launch in 2006, it had the metro population of Shanghai. By 2024, Twitter is projected to have over 340 million users, which is more than the population of the United States. So why might these statistics of Twitter users be so relevant? Twitter is sitting on an oil field of users that are monetizable. Even so, with the number of users, Twitter has been able to have a net loss of revenue every year, excluding 2018 and 2019, according to Barron’s (Hoffman 2022 ). Even with a maintaining loss of net profits, Twitter understands that by maintaining these users, they will be able to one day use them as leverage. While Twitter for the most part is not profitable yet, many of the competitors are fighting for the attention that Twitter is taking away from their platforms. A light bulb moment for these Silicon Valley companies is that they were not just offering a service but also discovering how to keep users engaged with their platforms.?

So how has a simple idea of connecting the world together turned into a mental health crisis? With the implementation of design emphasis with the use of algorithms. When users log onto any social media platform such as, “A quick check on Instagram has your brain pointed at a supercomputer, trying to elongate your stay on the platform” (Tedx, Harris ). Many have found themselves clicking on a notification to check who commented on their Instagram post; which ends up scrolling through social for hours. Small design features, such as auto-playing videos have been meticulously thought out with design emphasis to keep users online. While this was first implemented by Youtube it has quickly spread to Netflix, then Facebook, and other platforms. This is all because of the race to grab your attention. If one platform takes attention from another platform, they tend to implement the same features. For example, Snapchat introduced stories, which is a feature that shares a message or video with other users. This feature was more quickly adopted by Instagram than Facebook, but now it can be seen on every social platform including a variation on Netflix.

By flipping the cards, these big tech companies have gone from making products to using the user as the product. By keeping the user engaged, these companies are able to collect more data and target users with tailored ads for them. An in-depth study conducted by the Wall Street Journal used bot accounts with different specific interests to track the implementation and accuracy of Tiktok’s Algorithm. Wanting to understand how their algorithm differs from other competition and how it suggests content to users:

We found that TikTok draws users in at first by serving a wide variety of videos. Many with millions of views [(6.31 Million Average Views)]. Then as the algorithm sees what you respond to, the selection of video and the view counts can get lower and lower [(0.78 Million average views)] with fewer of them vetted by moderators to see if they violate TikTok’s terms of service. We reviewed our experiment and its results with a data scientist, an algorithm expert, Guillaume Chalsot, a former Google Engineer who worked on YouTube’s algorithm…He says TikTok is different from other social media platforms. The algorithm on Tiktok can get much more powerful and it can be able to learn your vulnerabilities much faster. In fact, TikTok fully learned many of our accounts interest in less than two hours, some it figured out in less than 40 minutes…On Youtube, more than 70% of the views come from the recommendation engine. So it’s already huge. But on TikTok, it's even worse. It’s probably like 90-95% of the content that is seen that comes from the recommendation engine. (How TikTok's Algorithm Figures You Out | WSJ )

The algorithm modifies users for many social media apps by taking in data from likes, shares, whom you follow, and the videos you watch. The Wall Street Journal reported that ByteDance, Tiktok's Chinese parent company algorithm only needs to watch the time videos to start tracking users. Through watch time, TikTok is able to uncover users' most hidden interests and emotions. While at first Tiktok serves a wide range of content to its users, within minutes it starts narrowing down what type of content users like. The WSJ brings on a data scientist, Guillaume Chaslot who goes on to explain how Tiktoks's algorithm is much more powerful than any other social media company. Chaslot goes on to say “Because of this it is able to learn your vulnerabilities much faster.” (WSJ ) This way it is able to learn.?

Social media has used addicting methods which are used in Vegas slot machines. This is all to keep user retention high. While there are laws preventing people from using slot machines under 21 years old in Vegas. But for social media, this is not the case. These slot machine designs can be found in design features such as Snapchat streaks, ‘read’ messages, infinite scroll feature, notifications, and the like button are just some examples. While many may think that Likes and Comments are the only social reward this is false. According to Trevor Haynes a researcher at Harvard “When you first join Facebook, your notification center revolves around the initial set of connections you make, creating that crucial link between notification and social reward.” (Haynes ) Big tech has hacked our way of thinking, with a simple notification being linked to a social reward.

Data, privacy, and censorship are key items needing to be addressed in our global economy. Many people believe that these are the evils of big tech, but in actuality, these are small issues in the bigger picture. Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, Tiktok, and Youtube are not just providing a service to you the users but they are manufacturing ways to keep you hooked. Twitter was the first company to introduce followers as a feature. A simple stat would drive a user to come back to their app and check on their status. This brought users back, driving engagement rates. This simple feature brought Twitter from being speculative about if users would return the next day to understanding and manipulating the user's predictability. It's often said that many social media companies in the Valley compete with each other. While this is partly true, they solely compete for attention. It's often said that Netflix's biggest competitor is sleep. Not Disney, Amazon, or Youtube, but sleep. With there only 24 hours in a day, each of these platforms is fighting for every last minute of time. These companies, whether it be Amazon Prime or Snapchat, are all fighting for each other's time slots on people's day. One paper, while some of these technologies companies are not direct competitors, in an attention economy, this is all thrown out the window.?

Positive Impacts of Social Media - Twitter to BeReal

While social media has many flaws, the reason why it is still used by so many is the ability to connect with the greater world. A study done by Meta indicates that users like to utilize social media for the following reasons: connecting with friends & family, entertainment & humor, information & current events, wider world view & community, and pursuing passion & self-express. In addition, researchers have found that the statement, “make me laugh and communicate with close friends has the best fit with Instagram.” (Wells, Horwitz, Seetharaman ) This is evidence that shows the good within social media. Sadly what had been an idea of connecting millions in the digital space has divided many in the real world.?

One company that has come to the market to improve social media is a French photo-sharing app. BeReal was developed by Alexis Barreyat and has grown to a plus two-million users in a span of months. Although it has grown in popularity, all popular social media apps in the industry have moved away from photo sharing. Adam Mosseri the acting head of Instagram stated in a post to his account, “I want to start by saying we’re no longer a photo-sharing app.” He went on to state that Instagram's purpose is to entertain its users, and they would “lean into that trend” of TikTok's short video format. This is why there is significant speculation surrounding the potential success of the BeReal app in establishing itself as a mainstream platform, rather than just a passing fad. Even so, they have been able to access a part of the market that has little to none in competition.?

Call to Action

Since the market for social media is not declining anytime soon, many feel that it is time for a new social media app that utilizes the most popular feature of existing apps but retains the integrity of its users. In the words of Tristian Harris, an American technology ethicist, “If you’re not paying for the product, then you are the product.” (Tedx, Harris ) Algorithms are told to keep users on the platform for as long as they can, but if users start to pay for the service of social media it eliminates the need to retain users in an unethical way.?

For the research I conducted through this paper, I have concluded that the following features would positively impact our online community and boost overall morale: a collective experience, giving different perspectives, humanized reaction, chronological feed, mindfulness breaks, and positive reinforcement.?

To build a greater sense of community, having users feel an overall sense that they are participating in something bigger than themselves drives confidence. Having a collective experience in a social media app would help to bring together torn-apart communities. To bring a community together people must have a well-rounded perspective on other people and ideas. Social media can add to this need by its users by providing content to help bridge biases in communities. A humanized reaction was first notably seen in Beme , which was a Snapchat competitor. This app did away with likes and thumbs-ups and replaced them with selfies of users responding to a post. This feature brought a human touch to social media, elevating self-esteem and boosting morale. In the 2000s and 2010s, most social media companies had a chronological feed. This was quickly changed to optimize the most popular content on the platform through basic algorithms. Now with advanced algorithms such as TikToks, they can be further tailored to your specific needs. While this feature adds much entertainment value it takes away from the goal of social media which is to connect people together. In addition, data has shown that users want help and more support from social media companies. One example is time management, companies such as TikTok have had to implement time management features because their algorithm is so addicting. Even so, this feature allows you to bypass, sending users into spirals on their devices. Furthermore, adding positive reinforcement is also crucial to making a safe and encouraging environment on social media, which has been indicated in various studies including an internal report by Facebook (meta).

We are very far from a social positive social media that would leave a lasting positive impact on our planet, even so, we understand the main issues that we can resolve. Big Tech is the new Big Tobacco for this generation. While E.U. and U.S politicians have been introducing new regulations and legislation to stop the new addiction problem in their countries. But many would agree just as Big Tobacco has handled, any policies will take years and decades to introduce. This is why social media companies must start implementing measures today to stop adding our youth. Future social media companies should take advantage of the free market economy to give users what they want.

The information and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author, Daniel Farrell, and do not reflect the views or opinions of any organization, company, or individual mentioned or referenced. The content provided is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as professional or legal advice. The author wrote this article during his freshman year of high school, and readers should consider the author's age and experience level when interpreting the content. The author makes no representations or warranties regarding the accuracy, completeness, or validity of any information in this article. Readers are advised to conduct their own research and consult with relevant professionals before making any decisions or taking any actions based on the information provided. The author and the platform on which this article is published shall not be held responsible for any errors, omissions, or damages arising from the use or reliance on the information contained herein.