Around the world there is a spiralling epidemic of mental illness. Suicide, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, bipolar and the list goes on, and nowhere is the rise more pronounced than in younger people, the same people who are coincidentally the heaviest users of social media. Depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety, etc. feed your mind the wrong messages. They tell you to be afraid of things you know you shouldn’t be afraid of. They tell you that you aren’t good enough and don’t deserve to be alive and that things won’t get better. They tell you that everyone is out to get you, that everyone is looking at you, that everyone is judging you.
Last week a group of UK MPs launched an inquiry into how to tackle the potential negative effects of social media on the mental health of young people. The All-Party Parliamentary Group on Social Media and Young People’s Mental Health and Wellbeing said it wants to establish the impact of social media on mental health and how the UK Government and social media giants should respond to any issues uncovered.
The group said it aims to build on a 2017 report by the Royal Society for Public Health, which found that while social media had positive effects such as providing emotional support and helping maintain friendships it also fuelled feelings of anxiety and depression among the young.
MPs said the inquiry had four main questions it wanted to answer, including understanding what the latest evidence says about the impact of social media on young people, what constitutes a healthy relationship with such platforms and what should be done by Government and technology giants to address the issues.
Facebook’s former vice president for user growth Chamath Palihapitiya’s talk at the Stanford Graduate School of Business will probably make you think twice about your social media use. The talk recently resurfaced and was published by The Verge.
The entire talk is worth watching but some of his most prominent remarks included: That he feels “tremendous guilt” about Facebook.
“I think we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works.The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we’ve created, including the hearts, likes, and thumbs up of various social media channels are destroying how society works.”
He added,
“There’s no civil discourse, no cooperation; only misinformation, mistruth. And it’s not an American problem–this is not about Russians ads. This is a global problem.”
Regarding an incident in which seven innocent men in India were lynched after a hoax about kidnappings spread through WhatsApp:
“That’s what we’re dealing with. And imagine taking that to the extreme, where bad actors can now manipulate large swathes of people to do anything you want. It’s just a really, really bad state of affairs.”
‘It is eroding the core foundations of how people behave by and between each other,’ said the former Facebook executive .
Chamath Palihapitiya, who was vice-president for user growth at Facebook before he left the company in 2011, said:
“The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works. No civil discourse, no cooperation, misinformation, mistruth.”
Facebook’s founding president, Sean Parker also previously criticised the way that the company exploits a vulnerability in human psychology by creating a “social-validation feedback loop”.
Parker had said that he was “something of a conscientious objector” to using social media, a stance echoed by Palihapitiya who said that he was now hoping to use the money he made at Facebook to do good in the world.
He also called on his audience to “soul-search” about their own relationship to social media.
“Your behaviours, you don’t realise it, but you are being programmed,” he said. “It was unintentional, but now you gotta decide how much you’re going to give up, how much of your intellectual independence.”
Social media companies have faced increased scrutiny over the past year, what with the Facebook senate inquiry and Cambridge Analytics scandal.
