The True Virus of Today: Social Media

The True Virus of Today: Social Media

The Social Dilemma is a Netflix original documentary detailing the strategies and algorithms that various social media companies use to keep users addicted, drawn, and to spend more time using the software. This, by itself, however, doesn’t sound too bad. Well, this quote may change your perspective on the matter. “We’re the product. Our attention is the product being sold to the advertisers.” This quote, from the Social Dilemma, highlights the main reason for big social media companies working in the very addicting way that it functions. This quote reveals the real intent of social media, why the software creators create the program in this way. Later, someone says, “There are three things that the big companies want from you. They want you to stay on for longer, they want you to come on more often, and they want you to watch a lot of ads.” These programmers know what they are doing, and they do it very well. The ultimate goal is to extort your time, your interest, and your money.

   But this may not be the only concern. A graph from the United States Department of Health shows that the number of young girls, 10-14 admitted to hospitals, skyrocketed by 189% since 2009, around the same time, the internet grew much of its followers. Even more worrying than this, however, is the graph for rates of suicide in girls of the same age. A graph from the same department shows us that the rates of suicide for girls 10-14 have risen by a saddening 151%. Social psychologist Johnathan Haidt tells us that because the GEN Z generation is spending the majority of their free time on social media, they find themselves comparing themselves to other people on social media, often more pretty than them, and they begin to build self-doubt. And this isn’t all. Due to an unnamed psychological phenomenon regarding anonymity, people behind a screen are more likely to give mean, selfish, and otherwise offensive comments because they know that they can get away with it due to their “veil” of anonymity. When humans were still in the prototype phase, we evolved a section of our brain to care more about the opinions of others. This, paired with the veil of anonymity provided by the Internet, causes many people everywhere to set their life in an often terrible path.