What’s Wrong with Social Media

I don’t like social media platforms. There are plenty of reasons; they exploit user data, violate user (and non-user) privacy, enable genocide, enable trolls, addict users, lower user well-being, and more (1, 2, 3). Still, I love the promise of social media. It’s supposed to seamlessly connect you to the people and information you care about. In reality, the existing platforms fail to live up to this promise while actually managing to harm their users. There isn’t an obvious solution to this problem. The social media business model naturally incentivizes them to neglect user interests in order to make more money.

When the leaders of these platforms are asked about the problems above, they respond with fluffy statements about “protecting user privacy”, “ensuring user trust”, and “connecting users”. These are token responses. The truth is that these platforms care about users only because those users can view ads. Let’s look at why.

Incentive Effect

The core issue with social media platforms is that they are funded by advertisements. The platforms are strongly incentivized to sell more ads because that is how they make money. A platform designed to sell as many ads as possible is not one that “connects users and information effectively”. As a result, these companies put a lot of effort into making their product better for advertisers while users are neglected and even exploited. This effect alone explains the violations of user privacy/data as well as the weakness of moderation on many of the platforms.

Zero-Sum Effect

The zero-sum nature of human attention combined with the incentive effect pushes social media companies to try to addict users to their products. Have you ever realized you just spent several hours on Facebook and wanted your time back? Have you ever closed an app, only to mindlessly re-open it and start scrolling the feed? This isn’t your fault, social media companies are competing for your time and they are doing whatever they can to get it, including using insights from psychology to addict users to their products. For example, there’s an entire book that explains how to “build habits into your users” (or an article, if you’d like a shorter read). A minute spent on Facebook is a minute not spent on Twitter which pushes social media companies to do anything they can to capture users’ time.

Network Effects

Finally, network effects protect social media companies from a backlash to the problems with their products. Network Effects make it hard to leave the dominant social media platforms. Everyone is on Facebook, therefore, I am on Facebook. I struggle to leave because I have a vague sense that I’ll be missing something if I completely stop using the platform. Thanks to this powerful draw, platforms are able to neglect their users’ interests without risk of those users staging a mass exodus.

Putting It All Together, An Example

Do you remember when Facebook switched the news-feed from reverse chronological to a custom algorithm? At the time, there was a huge backlash of complaints but Facebook’s growth was unaffected. This is the network effect in action, people can’t leave because the platform is too big. Facebook made this change because it causes users to spend more time on the site. An algorithmic feed can make it feel like there’s always something new happening and the variability in the feed makes you crave it. This is an intentional attempt to addict you to get more of your limited time, the zero-sum effect. Facebook wants you to spend more time on their platform because that’s how they make money, they show you ads. The incentive effect that initiated the change.

In reverse, Facebook is incentivized to make money by showing ads so they came up with a change that addicts users, bringing them back to the site more frequently. They are then protected from backlash by the fact that everyone is already on Facebook.

A Lack of Power

Unfortunately, we are stuck in a world where these platforms are massive and play a role in all of our lives, whether we want them to or not. I don’t see an easy way out of the predicament. As users, we can demand better but we have little power individually and there are powerful incentives that made these platforms become what they are. Unless someone solves the collective action problem, that isn’t about to change. I get some value from the platforms I use but I doubt that is worth the costs they impose. Maybe I’ll delete my Facebook account, just after I post this on Facebook…

Links

https://gizmodo.com/how-facebook-figures-out-everyone-youve-ever-met-1819822691
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebook-genocide.html
https://slate.com/technology/2018/07/twitter-cant-win-its-war-on-trolls-why-not.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/08/06/its-no-accident-that-facebook-is-so-addictive/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.0fa0110c9198
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28093386
http://www.cits.ucsb.edu/fake-news/spread
https://www.nirandfar.com/2012/03/want-to-hook-your-users-drive-them-crazy.html
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/3/21/17144748/case-against-facebook
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2916158