Social Media Addiction

It has long been known that an addiction is easy to start but can feel almost impossible to break. This story is widely told about smoking and drug use. But rarely is it told about social media. As a nineteen year old in college I can say from first hand experience that very close to 100 percent of my pears use social media in some form. In many of my classes, social media is taught to be used as a tool that you must master if you are to be successful. The popular story is that social media is the future, and you either need to join it, or be left behind.

Despite this there  is a growing movement online that encourages people to reject the idea that social media is the future and instead prioritize in person connection and doing things that are “real” and productive. Common examples given are reading a book, or going for a walk. The confusing part however is, that I’ve learned about this movement and participated in it, through YouTube. I did all the things I was told to, I deleted Instagram, stopped using snap chat for anything expect important communication, I never was on TikTok. I quit all of these things that I had been spending hours a day on, and I found it kinda easy. After about a week I had no temptation to reinstall Instagram, I felt relieved to not have to maintain my snap streaks. All of this felt like progress, and I started to feel better, I started to feel like I was taking my life back, and was beating my addiction. However over time I noticed that I wasn't getting as much time back I was expecting to. I realized I had replaced the time I was spending scrolling on Instagram with time spent watching YouTube. YouTube, the platform through which I learned about the benefits of getting rid of social media, was its self a social media platform. It is easy to rationalize time spent on YouTube. You tell yourself that it is educational, or “productive”. But when I took the time to look back on what I was watching it didn’t take long to come to the conclusion that I was watching entertainment, and not getting an education. There are real benefits to YouTube, where else can you learn how to fix your washing machine, or tie a tie? But it would be disingenuous to ignore the downsides. YouTube like every other social media platform, runs on a algorithm. And what the algorithm shows you are not videos that will teach you something useful, but instead videos that will keep you on the platform, keep you wanting more. It is no accident that “going down a YouTube rabbit hole” is such a common shared experience. 

It took only a matter of weeks for me to break my addiction with every single social media platform, except for YouTube. And it was only after my many failed attempts to forgo YouTube that I came to really understand the power that social media companies have over our society. According to Pew Research 60 percent of Americans get their news online. That stat can mean very different things depending on who is the one reading it. To someone 60 percent online can be a good thing, because free access to information is easier on the internet, and having access to more information is a good thing. But when I read that statistic I see more of a grim picture. I see the 60 percent number and see that as big tech having the ability to control what the news feeds look like for 60 percent of Americans. Big tech companies like google and Meta have more of an effect on the journalism that you see than you might imagine. I think that most people scrolling Instagram or TikTok have some basic understanding of what the algorithm is and how what they see is tailored to them by big companies. But what lots of people may not know is that it goes deeper than just your social media. Google has roughly 89 percent of worldwide search traffic. That means every single time you search for something on the web, or navigate to a website google controls in some way what you see. Google decides what web pages will be shown first through their SEO program. The main decider on what journalism gets read, and doesn't, is not whether it is good journalism, but whether it makes financial sense for Google.

You may be thinking that this doesn’t relate to you. You may not search anything, you may not watch YouTube, or scroll social media. Instead you may just read the local paper, and watch movies at the local movie theater. The problem is that Big Tech companies still influence the news you read and the movies you see, even if you don’t engage with them directly. In recent decades print paper subscriptions have gone down significantly, and local papers have been forced to downsize or close all together. The advent of google, and in recent years AI chat bots, has taken away readers from local news stations and papers. Instead sending more traffic to big names like the New York Times or the BBC. AI has made it to where even those big names are not seeing as much web traffic as they used to.

Big Tech companies having given us a free product that promised to make our lives so much easier, and instead gave us a product that entraps us in their ecosystems and makes us relent on them, rather than the other way around. Big tech companies spend billions of dollars every year to offer us a free product. It can serve us well as consumers and members of a society to recognize that our attention is valuable, and that we are the value that is sold to shareholders. If enough people come to this understanding, things can change, our digital world does not have to be like this.