Social media: The good, the bad and the ugly

How does social media shape us? Amrita Tripathi offers an overview of a social media vs real-world narrative and its impact on one’s physical, emotional and mental health

By now, it’s no longer news that frequent social media use can spike anxiety, that doom-scrolling and cognitive dissonance are a price we pay for the genius innovation that was infinite scroll, and that there is no putting the social genie back in the bottle. And that’s despite the literature that delves into the dopamine kick and addictive nature of social media scrolling.

We don’t really want to change our behaviour even though it’s no surprise to anyone that our preferences and likes, online quizzes and personality quirks, photos and videos (shared freely and openly as status updates for instant gratification) have allowed for some massive data scraping, parcelling and selling to advertisers, and of course fuelled Machine Learning efforts that will transform the era we live in.
Our social media use has also changed us and how we interact, whether or not we choose to acknowledge it. The bubbles have gone way beyond the echo chambers of yore, with algorithms filtering out much of the reality we don’t have time for or interest in, and keeping track of what we do (beauty reels, K-Pop, plastic surgery videos, to name a few).

We’re likely to be more snippy with people who disagree, ‘cancelling’ those who are problematic, and doing a lot of Insta-pop psychology to diagnose each other on the fly. We each have an opinion and a take, but rarely stop to think how we got here. Is that hot take really our own, or did we see an influencer video (or 20) and then repeat what they said?

The messy bits of life outside the bubble make way daily for a carefully curated anodyne sameness. Aesthetics, opinions…groupthink.

Social, anti-social

Social media has changed how we communicate and connect, sometimes for the better, by easing hierarchies of access, for example. Whether those are superficial or deep enough connections, we’ll each have to evaluate. Not to mention how we use it and process peer pressure. We now all curate our personas and images — we filter out unflattering looks and images and try to look better, and sound smarter, at the expense of our own originality and, dare I say, authenticity. But it goes even beyond that. We’re always on, and often looking to social media influencers to curate
our own opinions and even reactions.

We allow AI assistants to craft our emails, messages, social media copy and LinkedIn profiles without raising an eyebrow, all in the name of convenience. (And I wonder how many people would be surprised at snippets of news discussing cognitive decline as a result of all this AI dependence.)

We talk about not having attention spans to justify not reading, not thinking too hard, not challenging ourselves, and we allow social media consensus to determine our opinions and attitudes. We outsource thinking to GenAI tools and ‘assistants’ and pat ourselves on the back for saving so much time. (What we’re doing with all this extra time usually involves 2-3 screens that are also a great buffer against any human connections!)

Real-life harm

As adults, we can, of course, choose to change our behaviour or patterns that prove detrimental. But what about minors? What would be some reasonable, potential safeguards to gate-keep and protect younger users? And why is this important?
It’s not just about the addiction and anxiety mentioned above; there are also very real threats posed by cyber-bullying and harassment, online ‘normalisation’ and enabling of eating disorders and self-harm, sextortion and more that have been documented, not to mention increasingly sophisticated AI-enabled deepfakes and scams.

While there should be more well-thought-out moves to regulate access to social media (eg, schools in the US saying they will not allow cell phones in class during the school day), there is also considerable scepticism on whether banning social media for young people outright would even work. Some countries are looking to Google and Apple to restrict app access below 18 years.

Other countries are looking to the Australian model of banning social media access to all those under 16 and debating their own use cases… Even anecdotally, it’s unlikely that an outright ban would even get support or make sense for a country like India, where so much of our digital infrastructure and even fintech access is predicated on digital literacy, and so many families rely on their young digital natives to provide that.

And on that note, let’s look beyond the youth and behavioural change. We need to look at some of the ramifications across demographics. Senior citizens are so vulnerable to scamsters.

There are significant privacy and security challenges with bad-faith actors using AI-enhanced profiles and other tools to perpetrate fraud. Phishing, AI-voice cloning, deepfakes, including video and video call scams, are only exponentially increasing. (The World Economic Forum estimates global cybercrime will cost “$10.5 trillion annually by 2025”).

This issue isn’t going to resolve itself, and although solutions might be outside the scope of this article, it’s clear that even more than digital literacy, digital savvy is essential. We also need to ensure that accessible tools and resources are available for people from all demographics in the languages they speak and think. And that includes emojis.

(Amrita Tripathi is the founder-editor of The Health Collective and the author of The Other Sister, published recently by Westland Books; she formerly worked in the tech sector.)