As consumers most of us are pretty astute. We know that if it sounds too good to be true it probably is. “No money down.” “Zero interest.” “Massive rebates.” “Sign up and save.” We all know that while there might be some benefits to us in these marketing offers, at the end of the day the real winner will be strings attached, unexpected costs, and at the end of the day the real winner will be the company.
But there is one big blind spot that I believe we have developed as consumers that is costing us greatly, and I believe the reason we have developed it is that we have mistakenly assumed we are the consumer.
What I am talking about is social media. In order to have a more fruitful discussion I want to define social media. It is a difficult term to define but for this discussion I want to define it as any app or website designed to entertain us or connect us with others at little or no financial cost. So think of all the apps you would think of typically as social media(Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok) as well as YouTube, games, and streaming platforms.
When you look at these platforms there is one glaring similarity. We pay little to nothing to use them yet they are multi-billion dollar companies. How is this possible? The simple answer is a combination of investors and ad-revenue. So investors and advertisers are paying these companies for something meaning they are the consumer. What they are buying is your attention meaning you are the product.
Let that sink in. You are a product being sold around to the highest bidder. This is a concept we will re-visit many times in blogs videos and podcasts, but for now I want to cover 3 main things that I hope will start you on a journey that will cause you to re-visit how you view your relationship with social media, the conversations you have about it in your home, and whether you and those in your home should have a relationship with social media at all.
First, a social media company’s goal is not to bring us joy, fulfillment, or to connect us. Their goal is to make money. These companies have zero motivation to care about our mental, physical, emotional, or social well-being. In fact they know(as most advertisers do) that anger, loneliness, and fear drive us to more engagement in their platforms. Increased engagement equals increased revenue. So what type of content and reaction do you think social media companies will prioritize? “But Buck, there are good things and I stay connected with family, (fill in the blank with the good thing you associate with social media)”. True. But part of this is due to the fact that they are pulling emotional levers to keep you hooked. So they feed you a little happiness, then a little anger, then some sadness, then something else that you’ll get intrigued by, etc. But overall, they know it is the anger, sadness, and loneliness that will keep you hooked.
Second, these companies and algorithms are heavily invested in accomplishing their goal of keeping you addicted. They hire behavior scientists that follow the behavior concepts from the Pavlov’s dogs expirement and apply that to how their platforms behave. Their algorithms consume data about every click, scroll, and pause to develop an almost perfect understanding of you that they can then use to manipulate your outlook and behavior. Those algorithms are so smart and doing this that often the companies will acknowledge the algorithm has grown to a point that they do not fully know what it is doing, but they can just tell that it is working and working better than before. I share this because I know many of us have used will power, community, and personal discipline to overcome many challenges in life. But this time we are fighting an enemy that is waymore powerful than we have previously seen and I believe that we might not have been designed to handle.
Finally, fear the right thing. When it comes to social media the biggest thing I often hear is people afraid that their data is being sold. Think for a second though. Facebook has a data-set that lets them have such a clear picture of you that they cannot only know exactly what ad to feed to you, but also know when and how to get you to engage with it. Why would they sell that to someone else? Yes, we should always protect our personal data and think about privacy and security online. And, side note, if you really care about privacy, probably stop posting and spending time on social media. But we cannot allow social media companies to play a sleight of hand game, and distract us from the real issue. Because they are real quick to respond to concerns about data and privacy and update policies. But they do not adress rising addictions and its effects on society, the political process, and our social-emotional health. These effects are what we should be fearful of, discussing, and responding to.
I am a big believer in the concept that the love of money is the root of all sorts of evil. Because when you look at much of the immorality and evil in history and the unwillingness of those in power to fix it, you will see that those in charge were fearful of giving up their economic power and influence in order to do the right thing. Basically, they saw no benefit to doing good. It is the same thing with social media. I encourage you to watch the documentary “The Social Dilema” on Netflix as it illustrates this better than I ever could and features interviews with peopole from inside the industry. But I want to share a couple of specific examples. One is that if you are a mother you would think that social media would feed you links to mommy blogs, or other parenting groups. But actually what it is more likely to do is send you information about anti-vaccination groups. I am not here to debate your views on vaccination. I am here to point out what social media does and why. They do this because those groups are more likely to enrage you to one side of the other and also to contain links to posts and comment threads that will send you down a social media rabbit hole, regardless of your beliefs. Because they do not care about your beliefs, they care about your eyes on the screen. Another example is a leader of a political campaign visiting the offices of a social media company to try to gain understanding of how to better use it for their campaign. During the meeting the political adviser stated, “You changed your algorithm. Why?” The social media company wanted to know how they knew because they had not publicized any changes. The political adviser stated, “Because we noticed we used to get traction when we posted things about policy but now we have noticed that it no longer works and we only get traction and engagement when we post things that incite others or are polarizing.”
I encourage you to have discussions about this with your family, but I also encourage you to start to look at your time on social media differently. Take time to think about whether that post in our feed is really entertaining, informing, selling, or encouraging or is it actually serving a purpose of making you feel worse so you keep scrolling. Then maybe start to decide if social media is really worth the cost it is having on your life.