You need a Break from Social Media
Lessons from watching “The Social Dilemma”
With interviews from employees who were a part of the early days of today’s largest social media companies (Twitter, Facebook, Google, and Pinterest), Netflix’s The Social Dilemma paints a bleak picture of our relationship to social media. The former employees outlined how the social media companies were designed to keep users on its platform for longer to make profits by selling digital advertisements. Further, they are tracking all your activity on the platform to provide their advertising partners with better ways to reach you, thus, increasing their revenue.
It was noted several times throughout the film that the creators of the social media platforms intentionally made design choices to make their platforms more addictive to keep users checking them frequently and engaged for longer periods. For instance, Facebook will send you an email saying a friend tagged you in a photo, but you must go to Facebook to see the picture. They could’ve sent you the image directly, but their goal is to get you onto the platform as much as possible. Perhaps, I was naïve to think that society’s addiction to social media was just an accident that companies profited off, not a premeditated business strategy.
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I don’t think I’m alone in resonating with the film’s emphasis on addiction to social media. I aimlessly cycle through Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok for hours. This has most definitely affected my productivity, sleep, and mental health. My social media usage increased throughout the pandemic after I downloaded TikTok. Like many others, I would endlessly scroll at night, and before I knew it, I would look at the clock, and hours had gone by. I feel like I constantly need to be distracted; I watch TikToks while I watch TV. Also, I think it’s easy to blame yourself for wasting time on social media, but as shown in The Social Dilemma, that is what they were designed to do to you, and the creators of these apps fall into the same traps you do.
The Social Dilemma also highlights how social media distorts our view of ourselves. For example, according to Facebook’s own report, “thirty-two percent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse.” (Callahan, 2021) On Instagram, it’s hard not to compare your life to others. Someone is always skinnier, prettier, and richer than you. Everyone lives their best life on Instagram which distorts your reality. Often, you only see the best moments of someone’s life on their Instagram, and you compare it to your everyday life. Personally, when I scroll through Instagram, it seems like everyone has their life together more than me and has it all figured out. While constantly bombarded with idyllic images of people’s lives, it’s hard to convince yourself that this perfect world isn’t reality. You believe the photos on Instagram, even though you’ve shared photos from your “perfect world” while at home eating Doritos for dinner.
To develop a healthy relationship with social media, you must set realistic boundaries for yourself and understand that shutting it out completely may not be feasible. Over the last couple of weeks, I deleted and reinstalled TikTok multiple times, and after watching The Social Dilemma, I deleted it again. Almost everyone interviewed for The Social Dilemma mentioned that turning off all or most notifications will help break the link between you and the social media apps. I did this right after I got done watching the film, and I hope that it will help reduce my screen time.
After you have been on social media apps for years and have been reliant on your smartphone, human willpower can only go so far as to resist the pull of social media. I could last over 24 hours without my phone and maybe longer by sheer force of will. However, a call from my parents or wanting to see photos of my nephew on Facebook would bring me back. Overall, being aware of the power of social media and how it may affect you helps to create a healthier relationship with it.
