Social Media and Its Exploitation of the Human Mind
Source: Getty Images
By: Adi Kumar
Social media is now ubiquitous in our lives. We spend hours of our precious time on it, despite it often leaving us unfulfilled. Why is social media so addictive? Who benefits from it? And can anything be done about it?
The Monetization of Search Engines and Social Media
In the mid-2000s, social media burst into the mainstream. Google, MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube rose to widespread popularity. Google, a search engine, was highly effective at organizing information on the internet for people to access. Platforms like Facebook and MySpace allowed people to create their own content, share ideas, and form communities without having to step out of the comfort of their homes. The world was more connected than ever before. But as with all businesses, where would the profits come from?
“If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.”
This is a quote popularized by the 2020 documentary “The Social Dilemma,” which aptly summarizes the monetization model of social media. The internet and social media was built upon the consumer expectation of free content and services, but in the 1990s, the pay-per-click model emerged from the search engine GoTo.com. It proved that the internet had the potential to become a medium for advertising. This laid the groundwork for Google’s more advanced ad platform. The introduction of targeted advertising and user profiles was where Big Tech (think companies like Google, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter) truly struck gold. Big Tech tracked user engagement data like search queries, clicks, location, and demographics, and synthesized this vast amount of raw data into user profiles ready to be sold for targeting advertising. While this made companies like Google—and later social media companies like Facebook—an insane amount of money, propelling them to tech giant status, this led to a fundamental shift in incentives. To increase revenues from ads and data, engagement was prioritized above all else.
Exploitation of Psychology
How can companies keep people engaged? Quite simply by making their platforms addictive, by hijacking built-in mental processes that allowed humans to thrive as a species. A desire for connection with others, the mechanisms of dopamine and instant gratification, social proof, and other characteristics of the human mind are systemically used to monopolize your time and your attention — largely to your detriment.
What is addiction?
Addiction is a term that is difficult to define, but there are many characteristics that define it. (Note that this is a simplified description, and that factors including genetics, life circumstances, social factors, and even other neurotransmitters are involved). One component is compulsive use. Even if a person knows that the action or substance is harmful, they continue to use it or engage in that activity. Another is a loss of self-control and self-restraint. It is also largely characterized by negative consequences to the individual and a tolerance to the behavior, meaning more of the action is needed to produce the same high. So can social media cause addiction? I would argue that it can be, since it largely fits these criteria, although it largely varies depending on the person, their susceptibility, and their circumstances. Certainly, social media can be addictive. Still, it must be noted that components of addiction, like impaired control, can exist even in the absence of a bonafide addiction. Social media use can range from controlled use, to a bad habit, and potentially addiction.
To understand how social media can be addictive, one must understand dopamine in relation to addiction. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter related to reward and, because of this, is involved in reinforcement learning. Crucially, it is also involved in motivation. It signals that something rewarding is on its way and motivates a person to seek out behaviors, which can reinforce behaviors in a dopamine loop. Actions like exercise, eating tasty food, and social connections release dopamine. Like many addictive behaviors, social media plays on dopamine reward pathways. Dopamine is released in response to the immense amount of stimuli present — especially novel or unexpected stimuli. This release of dopamine reinforces behaviors, contributing to a dopamine loop, which is a form of a habit loop. A habit loop, as defined by Charles Duhigg in the Power of a Habit, involves a cue, routine, and reward. The cue is the stimulus that tells your brain what habit to use, an example being a notification. The routine is the action itself, like opening a message after the notification rings. The reward is what the brain gets out of it. This makes habits sticky making them hard to break. This is not unique to social media, as other apps, video games, and smartphones themselves play on this process.
Social media platforms follow an intermittent reinforcement mechanism through their user interfaces and design. Intermittent reinforcement is the force at play with gambling. Put simply, intermittent reinforcement involves a reward being provided at random intervals. This unpredictability strengthens the behavior and simultaneously makes the habit harder to break. Social media platforms use this through design choices such as the infinite scroll, likes, comments, and notifications. You do not know when you will see a witty comment, an interesting video, or a friend pop up in your feed. But the anticipation of the reward motivates scrolling, sucking you in like a black hole.
Algorithms are another aspect of social media designed to capture your attention. These non-transparent algorithms personally tailor what you see to your preferences. Again, your data comes into play. Every interaction, every click, every share, every like and comment, every second you spend, is analyzed to create a personalized feed that shows content you are most likely to engage with. In a way, these companies know you more than you know about yourself. Algorithms tend to amplify negative content in addition to emotionally charged content because this fosters engagement. Algorithms could foster unhealthy social comparisons, especially in adolescents, although this is difficult to determine whether the effect is from algorithms themselves or from the digital medium.
Social media also plays on the human desire for social connection. Humans are social animals with an innate desire to connect, to belong, and to be approved of. For those who actively consume and interact with social media, likes and comments provide validation. It can provide a sense of belonging, to the point where you seek out more validation. In addition, seeing other people with shared beliefs getting a large number of likes can also be validating. However, in its current form, social media fulfills this need for connection with a superficial substitute. One does not and can not share a personal relationship with the anonymous amalgam of people on social media. You cannot see the person’s body language, you do not know their values, and you don’t even know if they are real.
From my own experience with social media, the problem is with passive consumption of content. While passively consuming content, social media is something that happens to you, not something you are actively engaging with. Social media can be used in a constructive manner, like keeping up with friends, if one is able to maintain control of their impulses. However the design of social media makes it hard to do so.
What can be done?
To be clear, social media is not all bad. It can facilitate meaningful connections. People can form communities that support each other that may not be possible in the physical world. People can be exposed to new ideas, be entertained, and learn of aspects of the world previously unimaginable. The problem seems to lie more in how social media is used. Using social media as a medium to communicate with people you know is bound to be a more constructive experience than scrolling through endless waves of short-form content. But while these platforms promised to foster greater human connection, they now operate on incentives that contradict that very ideal.
The question arises, should something with addictive properties like social media be regulated? Some propose age verification as a solution to keeping the developing minds of children offline, but this opens up an array of privacy risks. Instead, a solution that targets the incentives to create an engagement based model appears more attractive. This could look like strengthening data privacy laws and preventing the creation of user profiles that allow for highly targeting advertising and highly personalized feeds. Removal of the most addictive mechanisms, like the infinite scroll, could also make social media less harmful to the individual. On a pessimistic note, any attempts to change social media in a way that would reduce profits would certainly face opposition.
But beyond the implications to mental health, the developing mind, and attention spans, I believe the greater problem lies in how social media has changed the way people interact with information, how it can alter perceptions of reality, and shape beliefs. What is truly worrying is the broader trends involving media made to engage—media where truth takes the back seat.
Sources used:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/266249/advertising-revenue-of-google
https://med.stanford.edu/news/insights/2021/10/addictive-potential-of-social-media-explained.html
https://americanaddictioncenters.org/behavioral-addictions
https://gdt.stanford.edu/the-habit-loop
https://library.queens.edu/misinformation-on-social-media/algorithms
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5861725
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/17456916231185057