📡 Social Media: What/Who is the Problem?

Intersection #1 — the intersection of social media & [mental] health

Jun 24, 2021

Hi friends 👋

We’re finally here. This is one of the bigger pieces of that change I’ve been talking about for a while. Meet Intersection.

So, I’ve been sending you emails [almost] every Sunday for more than three years, and during this time, things have changed. Hell, I have changed, and so did my newsletter.

During the past few months, I was getting the feeling that the content creation side of the newsletter, which by the way is now called Pulse again, needs a different type of attention and ends up building this pressure for me to write, which sometimes doesn’t happen, as this is not my fulltime job, and that can hold the curation side of it back. It does causes anxiety as well, but that’s for another day.

So, I decided to spin off the creation side of Pulse under the name Intersection, exploring the intersections of media, technology, and business with longer and more in-depth pieces.

Now, let’s get to today’s intersection: social media and our [mental] health

There is a widespread belief that social media is unhealthy and can have adverse side effects on our mental health, which I totally understand and sometimes agree with. However, there’s another argument against that, which can be pretty difficult to ignore: what if the problem isn’t social media? What if we are the problem, and social media is merely a tool or a reflection of our reality?

To be fair, both sides have compelling arguments, and here I’d like to look at a few examples of them.

On the one hand, there are people like Mark Miller, a philosopher of cognition, and Ben White, a neuroscience researcher, who believe that the unrealistic world presented on social media can give us a distorted sense of our environment and ourselves — and that’s quite unhealthy.

On the other end of the spectrum, many people, such as Mark Manson, the American writer and blogger, believe that social media has not corrupted us. In fact, it’s only revealing who we always were.

So, let’s have a look at the different sides of the argument.

Social media, anxiety, self-image — and the illusion

In an article, Mark Miller and Ben White explain how social media causes anxiety and distress using a new theory known as predictive processing. In this theory, the brain is considered a ‘prediction engine.’ This engine constantly attempts to predict the sensory signals it receives from the world to minimise the ‘prediction error’ between those predictions and the incoming signal (the reality). Over time, this creates a ‘generative model’ of our understanding of the statistical regularities in our environment that’s used to generate those predictions.

This mental model works to minimise the prediction errors in two ways:

updating the generative model, or
behaving in a way that brings the world more in line with the prediction it’s had.

Either way, the plan is to move from uncertainty to certainty to keep well and safe.

An example would be this: to be considered healthy, the body temperature is expected to be 37℃. A shift from that to either side is an error in our brain’s prediction of being healthy. This triggers a response to avoid that discomfort by getting a blanket, opening a window, or seeing a doctor. These are all ways our brain tries to bring ourselves back to the acceptable bounds of uncertainty. So we don’t just “update our generative models” and be okay with the change in the temperature.

Not being able to manage uncertainty, in predictive processing terms, means a decrease in the quality of life we’re living. Moreover, if the gap between our generative model predictions and the outside world widens, the result is a negative feedback loop that leads to an increase in bad predictions, and therefore, bad decisions.

On social media, with a few taps and swipes, with filters and edits, you can easily create a huge space between reality and appearance. For example, we can take a photo 50 times until it’s the perfect projection of ourselves we want to present — and then click the share button.

This world of inauthenticity effectively overloads our generative models with bad evidence about the world around us and who we are. This flooding of our predictive systems with inaccurate information found on social media tells us [almost] everyone in this world is impossibly beautiful and happy, and they’re living these wonderful and luxurious lives.

The truth is, often in the offline world, our generative model and expectations come from an immediate and unfiltered environment, which often means they reflect the real world more accurately. However, when coming from heavy and constant consumption of content on social media, the information we receive is often carefully selected, curated and altered. Basically, it’s like engaging with a fantasy. And this constant dissatisfaction, caused by the predictions not being right, can lead to mental health issues such as addiction and depression.

According to Miller and White,

Depression, for instance, has been described as a form of ‘cognitive rigidity’ where the system fails to adjust how sensitive it is to corrective feedback from the world.
For people in good mental health, emotional feedback allows them to flexibly tune their expectations: sometimes it makes sense to ‘write off’ a prediction error as just noise, rather than see it as something that demands a change in their generative model of the world; other times, it makes sense to change our model because of the error. In depression, researchers hypothesise that we lose this ability to move back and forth between more or less ‘sensitive’ states, which results in rising and unmanageable prediction error.
Eventually, we come to predict the inefficacy and failure of our own actions – which in turn becomes a self-reinforcing prediction, which we achieve some minimal satisfaction from confirming. At the level of the person who is depressed, this manifests in feelings such as helplessness, isolation, lack of motivation and an inability to find pleasure in the world.

That being said, the fact that many companies actually make a lot of money from users spending time and attention on these platforms create the incentive for them not to change. Even the positive steps they seemingly are taking, such as hiding the number of ‘Likes’ or showing that a photo is created using a filter, are too small to fight the inaccurate information the users are bombarded with.

Now, on the other side of the spectrum...

Social media is good; we’re the problem

This is not a new phenomenon. Something new comes along, and suddenly everyone’s against it. Whether it’s because they didn’t know any better or that change is almost always uncomfortable, and we think that we can resist it, mainly because we’re comfortable with the status quo (talk about our inertia). We also get used to stuff pretty fast.

Social media is almost the same but also a bit different. For starters, it’s not new anymore, although quite young compared to other types of media, especially broadcast and gated media. But we’re used to it now and have stopped looking at how it has changed our communication paradigms.

Causality or Correlation

Another issue argued regarding the negative effects of social media is that many of the studies that tell us about the depression and anxiety caused by social media aren’t actually examining the casual relationship. When you dig deeper, their data is often correlational. And correlation isn’t equal to causality. It can be argued that it’s not the use of social media that causes depression, but depression causes an increase in the use of social media. Several longitudinal studies are supporting this argument, like this, this, and this.

Attention and Extremes

One other issue with social media is extremism and fake news, which can be explained from an attention economy perspective to help us understand one underlying issue. Back in the days, media companies and content creators (they weren’t called content creators back then!) had to optimise their content production for consensus — for the majority, for the masses. Otherwise, creating content (that movie or newspaper) wouldn’t be feasible. Why? Because if it weren’t for everyone, the advertisers wouldn’t pay for it, so it wouldn’t make money, so it wasn’t worth anyone’s time. If it was for a niche audience, reaching them pre-internet was virtually impossible.

Now, with the internet and its easy/almost free distribution, content doesn’t have to be for everyone. Actually, due to the fierce competition, it can’t be for everyone. Mediocrity doesn’t work because mediocre can’t get the attention it needs.

To get the attention, it needs to be extreme: extremely good, extremely bad, extremely specific... the keyword is extreme here; and with extreme [almost always] comes controversy.

See how we moved from something the majority wanted to something only a few want. That change, from consensus to controversy, isn’t caused by social media, but it has been accelerated by it. You can even say it was enabled by it — more accurately, it was enabled by the internet. But social media, in itself, wasn’t the reason we went after extremes (not necessarily in a negative sense).

The only issue is that the fight for attention, especially on social media, doesn’t seem to be coming to an end. And I think that’s the main negative issue with social media.

We go on social media seeking attention, whether by creating content or reacting to others’ content and interacting with them. To get that attention, we’re pushed toward one end of the spectrum because the ordinary doesn’t get that attention we crave, from being extremely good at teaching math to 12 year-olds on Zoom to an extremely high-quality photographer or blogger to an extremely racist podcaster with extreme views on humanity.

The thing is, if it’s not extreme, regardless of being good or bad, it [most likely] won’t get the attention we crave, and it won’t be satisfying. And social media does this really well by making it super easy to get that feedback and attention we’re looking for and act as positive reinforcement for that extreme.

Conclusion

Personally, I think our relationship with social media doesn’t fit on one end of the spectrum. I believe overusing or abusing social media can definitely harm our [mental] health, but that doesn’t mean it’s the platforms’ fault. To be clear, I’m not saying that they bear no responsibility, but I believe that the education users don’t have is the missing link.

I think both the platforms and the users with more experience and understanding of the mechanics of social media should do better in educating the masses.

And that’s what I’m trying to do. Thoughts?

Pulse