Pretty Fed Up With Social Media

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Are you pretty fed up with social media these days and the harm it causes to society? You are not alone.

Virtually everyone who uses social media is well aware it has a dark side, since virtually everyone who uses social media has experienced that dark side. That makes it pretty easy to rag on social media and such ragging has become a growth sport here recently.

In fact, 80% of US states have just sued Meta, claiming that its social media products, Facebook and Instagram, were designed to be deliberately addictive and fuel the youth mental health crisis.

And yet – not enough people are fed up enough with social media. Apparently, there are 3.6 billion social media users globally. That’s almost half of the people in the world. Although, think of the half of the population who doesn’t have to worry about social media at all! That’s a nice thought. Maybe you and I could join them one day. Maybe.

So what are the dark sides of social media?

Well, social media came to dominate thanks to Mark Zuckerburg, and that’s pretty dark in and of itself. It’s good to rag on Zuck, because he has too much money and too much power. Too much money and too much power are bad things that need to be alleviated. So let’s rag on social media and do our part for the cause.

So here are 7 things that answer the question – what is the dark side of social media?

Dark Side of Social Media #1: Addictivity.

This is maybe the primary reason people end up getting fed up with social media.

And much is made of the addictive nature of social media and everyone’s new favorite neurotransmitter, dopamine.

People misunderstand the nature of dopamine and addiction though, so let’s clear things up.

What makes social media addictive is that it causes anxiety. Putting yourself out there in a social context involves risk. People can be horrible. Every human brain has evolved to know this. The horribleness of other people becomes obvious to the brain very early, and people have been horrible before they were even people. Even our primate relatives are horrible in a social context. A brain that couldn’t figure out that social interaction means risk of encountering horribleness wouldn’t survive long in a social species like humans.

Normal people experience a certain amount of anxiety in social situations. Public speaking, for example, is said to be more frightening to many people than the prospect of death. This anxiety goes way down in familiar situations with familiar and trusted people.

Social media, however, allows a person to put themselves on display in front of people who are neither familiar nor trusted. Social media allows people to interact with strangers. Users also reveal themselves to people they know, but can’t or shouldn’t necessarily trust in a social media context.

Hence – anxiety. You could be rejected, criticized, ignored. The human brain hates those things. And they could well happen.

So a normal human brain will want to check for rejection, criticism, and being ignored.

Your brain will get anxiously aroused when it’s doing that. Another part of your brain will compensate for this spike in anxiety by bringing the anxiety way down once you’ve checked. This is a natural physiological response brains engage in to regulate human bodies and maintain what’s cleverly called ‘homeostasis.’

When you experience that sudden drop in anxiety, that’s when dopamine kicks in. Dopamine keeps track of how things turn out. If things turn out well (such as a sudden drop in anxiety) it tells your brain ‘do that again’. Dopamine is not a pleasure or reward hormone; it is a motivation hormone. It is involved in addiction because it tells your brain to do things that provoke the anxiety-dropping response again (and again).

This cycle probably came in super-handy when humans relied on hunting for their protein. Hunting should be an anxiety-provoking, suspense-filled activity, but once you’ve done it, the anxiety goes way down and you can eat! Dopamine would have been a pretty lame neurotransmitter if it encouraged people to not hunt since it is filled with danger, nervousness, and the prospect of failure. Nope – dopamine instead encouraged people to do it again and again no matter how nerve-wracking it was at the time. Good job dopamine!

These days, however, we are not staring down the tusks of a woolly mammoth; nope we are looking at the prospect of social death via nonexistent likes, mean comments, or being totally left out of something you want to be let in to.

You will not get addicted to social media unless it causes you enough anxiety to flood you with relief and gratitude and exhilaration when you discover you have not been subjected to social death.

So how you use social media makes a big difference in how addictive it will be. If you get a flood of exhilaration from ‘likes’ because you were secretly dreading a flood of criticism, it will get its hooks into you.

If you post anodyne content for 6 people who already know you and are obliged to tell you that your photos are so beautiful it will not have as much effect on you.

In other words, social media is addictive precisely for those people for whom it is a bad, anxiety-stimulating activity.

That’s not to say you can’t get caught up in scrolling the endless feed of social media trivia just because it’s there and it’s oddly fascinating. But you won’t get addicted to such scrolling unless you experience some anxiety or bad feelings (that your body will compensate for) when you see what’s on your feed.

Doesn’t cause you anxiety – harmless waste of time. Kind of, unless it’s making you go blind and giving you a hunchback.

Causes you anxiety – addictive. Causes you major anxiety and exhilaration – has you in its clutches and will throw you to the ground and stomp on you like an MMA champ.

Dark Side of Social Media #2: Scammers and Crypto

I put scammers and crypto in the same category because crypto is a scam! One of the single most annoying things in the world (one of, not the most annoying) is the existence of crypto bros.

They may be dying off, but they’re not dying off fast enough, and they are all over social media. They promote their dystopian brand of libertarianism and fantasy freedom with an aggressiveness that is actually appropriate for a group whose worldview is based on complete fallacies and disregard for both reality and other people.

Crypto bros are big picture scammers selling an alternate reality that will never come to fruition. But there are plenty of small picture scammers on social media hunting down their victims on platforms as unlikely as TikTok.

Honestly, who goes on TikTok to be scammed? Hopefully no one.

But every type of scammer plus their brother-in-law and pet husky are on TikTok hustling their bogus claims for miracle weight loss, miracle cures for blindness and body hair, and their miracle investments in scams, crypto and otherwise.

Now, honestly, if you fall for anyone or anything promising miracle results on any platform, you bear some responsibility for your greed or your desperation or your gullibility. But everyone gets desperate from time to time, so preying on human vulnerability makes scammers especially odious.

Scammers frequently do work really hard at their scams, with their fake ads, fake platforms, and running the long con. I give them credit for their industriousness. But their hard work just makes it worse – if you’re gonna work that hard, why use your talents to screw someone else over?!

That’s not the point though. You and I aren’t getting scammed by scammers because we’re naturally too grumpy and fed up with social media to trust anything on it or fall for scams. But we still have to wade through them. They still clog our feeds. The scammers may be going a after grandma and grandpa and their overly trusting Gen Z descendants – but they make the experience worse for all of us.

And Mark Zuckerberg isn’t doing anything about it!

Listen up, tech companies, you are making positively immoral amounts of money off your platforms, so there is no fucking excuse for you not cleaning up the scam-infested corners of your personal fiefdoms.

And by the way, Elon Musk, I’m not buying a single ounce of your bullshit about reducing bots on Twitter/X. Among the scams on Twitter were about 8 gazillion bots hyping you and your Tesla stock and you wouldn’t be a billionaire without that kind of scam, and you’re not doing a damn thing about stopping bots; your stupid policies are making them worse.

You yourself, Mr. Musk, are a scam. So clean up your mess!

Ok, well that little outburst felt kind of good. Now on to yet another reason to be pretty fed up with social media.

Dark Side of Social Media #3: Makes People Feel Like Crap

Feeling like crap after wading through Facebook and Instagram is a pretty common reason for getting pretty fed up with social media. Common emotions are annoyance, despair, envy, the ever-popular anxiety, loneliness, and just plain feeling bad about yourself. To wit:

Annoyance

Annoyance because god people are annoying! and there are 3.6 billion of them on social media. That’s a recipe for a queasy overload I-need-to-detox feeling right there.

Despair

Despair – because if social media reflects what people are actually like – then we’re all doomed! They have stupid thoughts, stupid opinions, stupid comments, stupid ideas, and narcissistic grandiosity, and also their facts are wrong! Who wouldn’t be despairing in the face of all this wrongness – which I must point out – is going to be abundant when you’re drawing from a pool of 3.6 billion people.

You and I can cough up some wrongness on a regular basis, accidentally and without even trying. Multiply that by 3.6 billion. That’s too much wrongness for anyone to be exposed to and come away with a chipper attitude toward anything.

Envy

Envy – because platforms like Instagram make it seem like everyone you know as well as everyone you don’t know is having a great time living a great life, while you are stuck having a mediocre time living a normal life. The inherent fakeness of social media apparently sucks social media users into believing that it is not at all fake but incredibly real.

It’s not. The person I am on social media or on a blog or at a party or when visiting my family or playing with my pets is just a small part of whom I am. I cannot help but be fake on a social media because it presents such a tiny portion of life as I (or anyone else) lives it. I have to present this tiny portion of myself to be a social media user at all, and that presenting inevitably distorts reality.

This distortion is not the end of the world; people are almost always presenting themselves to some degree, even in their own private thoughts. But the ease with which so many people seem to believe the presentation reflects the whole reality is alarming.

Loneliness

Loneliness – because apparently there is a big party going on in the world and yet the social media users are not really part of it. Social media by its nature is superficial, and superficial interactions often make people feel lonely. They especially make young social media users feel lonely because young people have an age-appropriate need for deep interactions.

Old people are like – we exchanged 3 sentences about the weather – super fun and rewarding interaction! Young people are like – I really need to talk to someone about what’s going on inside me – cuz there’s a lot going on inside me.

Young people who have grown up on social media have, through no fault of their own, been thrust into a world dominated by a form of social interaction that is exquisitely wrong for what they need. They can get a certain amount of validation for exactly the things they don’t need validation for (the superficial stuff) while simultaneously being hurled off a cliff into an abyss of isolation and agonizing loneliness because they’re getting no validation (or sometimes outright abuse) for things they really need validated.

It doesn’t always work out in such a dire way, but it often does, and that is sad.

Anxiety and Low Self-Esteem

Meanwhile, people who often compare themselves to others often feel unrealistically superior to people they are not superior to or feel unrealistically inferior to people they shouldn’t be comparing themselves to anyway. And people who are inclined to compare themselves to others are magnetically pulled toward Facebook and Instagram so they can compare themselves nonstop to a bunch of people who will end up making them feel competitive or well, like crap.

Research indicates, therefore, that heavy social media users have lower self-esteem and higher social anxiety.

In other words, Zuckerberg is peddling an addictive product that makes people feel like crap! That should be enough to get you pretty fed up with the whole current structure of social media.

Dark Side of Social Media #4: Other People’s Opinions Are So Wrong

Strange as it may seem, this may actually be an underreported reason people get fed up with social media. There’s a lot of talk in the not-so-social media about how people get trapped in their bubbles on Facebook or wherever, having their ignorant opinions constantly validated and being denied the kind of healthy exposure to differing views that should reduce polarization and make us all realize that the people on the other side of issues we care about are just people like ourselves.

Hah!

This is exactly what does not happen. On social media, whether it’s TikTok or Twitter/X or YouTube or Facebook, you will inevitably run into a post or comment from someone who not only disagrees with you, but disagrees with you in a way that convinces you of their stupidity and ignorance.

It’s as though social media was designed, evilly, to convince us all that everyone else is hopelessly ignorant, incompetent, bad, and disturbingly prevalent. Just the other day, I happened to see a post on a company I used to work for, wherein the poster used one of the catch phrases of the day to summarize the corporation. WRONG!

That’s what my inner voice screamed at me. Given that I had spent a certain amount of time learning about the company I worked for and knew how it worked (and didn’t work), what its problems and strengths were, being confronted with a dismissive catchphrase was not only jarring, but triggered my ‘you are so ignorant!’ response.

Things like this have happened to you. They burn you out.

Social media can be fun. You can find like-minded people on it. But inevitably someone is going to respond to all but the most bland posts with some shit that sticks with you, and not in a good way.

You think what you think because you think you’re right. You might not be, but you think you are. So when someone responds to your post on something important to you in what seems like an ignorant and arrogant way, some part of you wants to leap to your defense. Some part of a worldview that seems self-evident to you has been challenged or mocked or insulted and your brain really does not like that (for a number of reasons).

When your brain is confronted with such unpleasantness it naturally comes up with a list of things that are wrong with the person who expressed a clearly incorrect and uninformed opinion. Your brain does this so it can somehow incorporate the distressing information that people are malevolent idiots into its thinking without entirely disrupting the complex structure that is your point of view.

This is exhausting!

Social media consumption begins to feel like you are swimming in an ocean of trolls, bullies, and armchair critics who don’t know their butt from a hole in the ground. This is not fun. Instead of swimming in pleasantly pleasant-people-infested waters of good feeling and mutual camaraderie, you are surrounded by enemies in what you thought was your backyard pool!

Basically, social media invites all the people on earth who really disturb you to your house to yell at you. It’s no wonder talk of people’s ‘mental health’ is a gigantic trend and not because people are reporting absolutely stellar mental health. No, people are diagnosing themselves with anxiety and depression because – who wouldn’t be depressed and anxious if hordes of disturbing people were visiting their homes every day.

Just another reason to be fed up with social media.

Dark Side of Social Media #5: Disinformation, Misinformation, Etc.

I’ve already written about how to deal with fake news and its cousins on social media. I’ve also written about the rise in general of misinformation, etc.

But it’s only getting worse. As I write this, China, Russia, and Iran are flooding social networks with disinformation because a) the time is ripe for it, b) they can, and c) they want to. These countries are waging cyber warfare against the US and anyone else they see as acting against their interests.

And no, Elon Musk is not doing anything about it! Disinformation has gotten worse on Twitter/X under the Muskovite, and the most recent article I read said that approximately 1/3 of the accounts posting on Israel & Hamas were bots! That’s a lot of bots.

Mark Zuckerberg isn’t doing anything about it either. Neither is ByteDance, the company that owns TikTok.

These companies have essentially abandoned all social responsibility and are not willing to spend the money on solutions to the problems they enable if not cause. This is morally wrong and well, just another bonus side effect of unregulated capitalism.

In the US, there will be another presidential election in the coming year, and around the world, there are many elections. You might think, given the worldwide usage of social media, that these companies would have robust ways of ensuring that their users weren’t drowning in propaganda and lies.

Ha ha ha! Nope.

If ever there was a reason to be fed up with social media and the people who own the platforms, this would be it. Get pretty fed up!

Dark Side of Social Media #6: Cyberbullying

This dark side of social media is perhaps the most serious. The cyberbullied don’t so much get fed up with social media as get damaged by it. People, usually young people, have killed themselves after being inundated with the hostility that cyberbullying represents. Young people, particularly those in school, often have nowhere to hide, unlike adults, who are usually not being cyberbullied by their co-workers or neighbors.

About 16% of high school students in the US experience cyber bullying in a given year. What that means to the students being bullied is that 84% of their peers are not being picked on this way, which means the victims feel specifically targeted and excluded and shamed and humiliated. The relatively low percentage also means that the majority of students who are not participating can feel like it’s ‘not their problem.’

Cyberbullying, of course, can happen to anyone, and sometimes, surprisingly, it does. A seemingly random person does a seemingly random thing, and experiences torrents of abuse, doxxing, shaming, false accusations of crime, or other online horrors.

Bullying, of course, has been around for a long time. But cyberbullying can be a 24/7 experience, and the most common sites for cyberbullying are social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok.

The question cyberbullying raises, with its sometimes lethal consequences, is can we do anything about it? Can we get rid of social media altogether? Police it better? Change it so that it does not so easily facilitate cyberbullying? Restrict people from using it until they are of college age?

Due to the vast number of social media interactions and the relatively small, though alarming, percentage of them that involve cyberbullying, the onus is currently on individuals to attempt to protect themselves or deal with the cyberbullying when it occurs.

This puts a burden on people who are not in the majority in some way, via sexual orientation, transgender status, ethnic identity, political opinion, religious affiliation, disability status or in some other way part of a relatively small group. That’s because it is, of course, easier to bully someone who is out of the mainstream, unusual, or who seemingly has a small support network of potential defenders.

The danger, and perhaps the reality, is that people who are ‘different’ in some way become forced to muzzle themselves, as expressing themselves opens them up to potential abuse. They don’t get to participate in social media in the same way that the majority of people do. This is an aspect of social media that earnest discussions of its problems tend to devote relatively little attention to.

Which means, of course, that people in the majority who care about cyberbullying end up, once again, pretty fed up with social media and its often toxic atmosphere.

Dark Side of Social Media #7: Influencers, Influencers, Influencers

Ah capitalism. If it doesn’t produce money, it ain’t worth a thing. And if it’s worth anything at all, then it has to be overrun with money-grubbing.

That means it takes about 3 seconds for some sort of social media influencer content to show up in your Instagram feed. To put it another way, social media is really just one gigantic vehicle for delivering a relentless stream of ads to us.

And social media influencers, as young social media users well know, contribute to the fakeittude of social media in general. And when young people aren’t quite past the age of celebrity goggles (everyone goes through a celebrity worship phase if they’re normal), then they are essentially being used by the people they admire and relate to – as fodder for consumption.

This isn’t exactly the fault of the influencers – it can be expensive and time-consuming to build a following and most people can’t afford to do it without some sort of compensation eventually. It’s the fault of a system that requires almost everybody to be a shill for some gigantic corporation to survive.

Furthermore, the competition is so intense that a gigantic number of influencer followers are often fake. In other words, social media influencers are often a scam, and young people in particular realize this.

There is immense pressure on social media influencers to constantly create and post content. That’s not a good recipe for great content, but it is a recipe for influencer overload.

The upshot is that everyone gets tired. Social media users get tired of social media influencers. And social media influencers get tired of being social media influencers. It’s not good for anyone.

So what’s the bottom line for you, me, and all this negativity? Well, at the very least, if we cannot tear ourselves away from our feeds permanently (although some of us do, and lots of takes pauses or breaks), then at least we should support the lawsuits and attempts at regulation of these cash-spewing platforms.

Even teens, arguably the heaviest users of social media, agree that there should be limits.

Let’s support getting rid of the ‘unregulated’ part of unregulated capitalism and work to place limits on these platforms. We’ll all be a bit happier for it.

Tags: disinformation, government