In December 2017, Facebook did something very few might expect from a silicon valley environment
that constantly claims to be changing the world for the better. They posted an article
on their official blog, titled, Hard Questions: Is Spending Time on Social Media Bad For Us?
In the eyes of New York times writer, Farhad Manjoo, “[This] should be regarded as a
big deal. The post stands as a direct affront to the company’s reason for being; it’s
as if Nike asked whether just doing it may not be the wisest life goal after all, or
if Snapple conceded it wasn’t quite positive that it really was the best stuff on earth.”
And though I don’t think they featured the article prominently enough, I do commend them
for openly discussing this topic, and in this video, I’d like to do the same.
Now if we go through the research, it’s fairly easy to find scientific, peer-reviewed
evidence that Facebook negatively impacts mental health. The least flattering paper
presented in the blog post [maybe zoom in through link and dissolve into the next paper
coming in] is a 2017 study that surveyed more than five thousand people over three years,
measuring self-reported mental health, physical health, and life satisfaction. The results
showed a clear association between Facebook use, measured by likes clicked, links clicked,
and status updates, and decreases in self-reported mental health. [I see all this flashing on
screen, with facebook use coming down, and the three things coming out of it, and then
the decreases coming on next to it]
But I don’t want to linger too long on the many studies that have linked social media
use to decreases in well-being, dissatisfaction, and even depression. Looking all these studies
at once, the trend is clear. Scrolling through your newsfeed all day is bound to bring you
down.
For me, the real question is, if all these studies have shown that facebook can negatively
impact our mental health, why do we keep using it as much as any other site on the planet?
[graphic https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/04/most-popular-websites-google-youtube-baidu/] To me, an even more important than the question,
does facebook make us sad, is, How does facebook make us sad, and why we keep coming back for
more over and over again?
For the answer to this more fundamental question, we’ll have to turn to perhaps the most intriguing
recent wave of dissent against facebook. In the past year, a number of people who actually
worked for the company in its early stages have publicly turned against the product they
helped create.
The most famous of this group is Sean Parker, who was played by Justin Timberlake in the
film, The Social Network, and joined facebook in its infancy.
Interestingly enough, these former employees, in their rhetoric, often focus more on words
like “addiction” or “exploitation,” rather than “depression” or “mental
health.” Rather than discussing what feelings social media produces, they instead identify
the mechanisms that keep you coming back. Having helped create and promote the site,
they’re painfully aware of the ways in which it was designed to exploit basic human psychology.
Now
these concepts are absolutely essential to understanding how Facebook subtly manipulates
us, so I’d like to take a moment to flesh them out.
For those who don’t know, dopamine is the chemical reward your brain releases for certain
activities, like exercising or completing a task at work. This is why we feel actual
pleasure after going for a run or getting a good grade on a test. But these reward centers
in our brains have countless applications far beyond exercise and hard work. This same
chemical can be released by eating a slice of pizza—again, your brain is rewarding
you for finding sustenance—and the same goes for social stimuli. According to Mauricio
Delgado, psychologist at Rutgers University, “The same brain areas [that are activated
for food and water] are activated for social stimuli,” he says. “This can be a smile,
someone telling you you’re doing a great job…or you’re a nice person, or even merely
cooperating with somebody. All of these social ‘reinforcers’…show similar activity
in the reward centers of the brain.”
Essentially, our thousand-year-old animal brains can’t distinguish between the social
reward of getting a like on facebook and of having someone compliment you directly to
your face.
So if you’ve ever wondered why facebook, within the first week you started using it,
became the first thing you typed into your search bar every time you opened your computer,
it’s these dopamine hits, these social feedback rewards. The site provided you unprecedented
spikes in these pleasurable chemicals, so when you haven’t used it in the last few
hours, your hand is subconsciously guided to steer back to facebook and create more
content, in order to seek out more dopamine. That’s the chemical feedback loop these
former facebook employees are referring to.
And like with any drug, over time the pleasure from it wanes, and while some people decide
to back out and quit right there, the vast majority engage with it more, and more and
more and more in order to up their dosage.
Perhaps you’ve noticed that over the years, Facebook has been expanding the categories
of notifications, and alerting of things that you might not actually care about, like about
a random friend’s status update, or a live video stream, or a post in some group you
joined years ago.
Facebook has ramped up these types of notifications over time to ensure their users get consistent
dopamine hits from the site every day whether they’re using it or not. And researchers
have found that merely hearing your phone buzz or seeing that red notification produces
a dopamine rush before you even click to see what the notification is. So what happens,
in my experience, is that I’ll see the notification, feel the satisfaction of the dopamine hit,
and then click, only to find that someone I barely know “was Live” a few hours ago,
or something equally unimportant to my actual social life. And though the feeling I get
when this happens isn’t full on depression, it’s still a profoundly new and alienating
experience. Your brain is telling you, chemically, that you’ve just received a smile from a
guy across the room, or had a meaningful conversation with a close friend, while, in reality, you
really just learned that some jerk you went to high school with is celebrating his birthday
today.
Now I’m no psychologist but this disconnect between the chemical reward system in your
brain and the reality of the situation seems central to the deflating feeling Facebook
can produce. [flash on screen]
But I will admit, this is all just one side of the conversation. And though I do get more
uncomfortable with facebook the more I research its effects, I personally don’t find these
calls for us to completely stop using social media very practical.
Instead, I’d like to explore one final question, Can Facebook Make Us Happy? Can it positively
impact mental health if used in a conscious and mindful manner?
Well, that’s exactly what Robert Kraut’s 2016 study was all about. Taking a more complex
approach, they broke facebook use down into separate categories instead of taking the
site as one uniform experience. The first was “targeted, composed communication consisting
of original text written for a specific person, like a wall post or comment.” The second
was ““one-click” communication, such as a “like” or reaction, and the third
was “composed, broadcasted communication, like a status update, aimed at a wide audience.”
Beyond this, they also differentiated between communication with stronger and weaker friendships.
Their results may not be all that surprising, but in my opinion, this study is overwhelmingly
important to consider for those who are tired of these dopamine-driven feedback loops.
Essentially, they found that targeted, composed communication like direct messages, comments,
or wall posts that actually engage someone in conversation with people they have close
ties to has a positive affect on well-being. People engaged in this type of interaction
felt they were doing a better job maintaining their existing relationships, showing their
investment in those relationships, and generally feeling they had social support.
On the other hand, more passive, “one-click communication” such as likes or reactions
were not associated with any increasing strength of social ties. And the same goes for the
“broadcasted communication”, like status updates. These two categories didn’t give
people any sense of maintaining or strengthening relationships.
In other words, the parts of facebook that produce these quick dopamine hits and nothing
else are ultimately unsatisfying, while more direct communication can be truly meaningful.
Now facebook has made a few changes to their interface to encourage these more meaningful
interactions, namely, the new comment button under every post, and an algorithmic preference
for close friends and family over news sources. But we as consumers need to understand that
the underlying system which has us coming back for more and more and more, the notifications
and their chemical associations, will never be fully removed from the site. So if we don’t
want facebook or any social media site, for that matter, to bring us down, it’s gonna
be on us to maybe turn off these unnecessary notifications, and try to recognize the difference
between these brief, fleeting dopamine hits, and genuine, meaningful connection.