In the context of human history, we have never been better connected to each other. Thanks to the advent of the World Wide Web, many online communities and social media platforms emerged, radically changing the way we perceive this world and communicate with each other. We can know what our friends and families are up to without having to text or call them; we can follow our favorite celebrities on their latest activities and stay up-to-date on the current news; and we can even get a glimpse into some of the most intimate moments of strangers’ lives. Everything is so readily available at the touch of a screen, and social media has become an integral part of our lives. Though the technology behind all this must be complicated, to say the least, we embraced it for its seemingly simple and good benefits of greater knowledge and deeper human engagement without thinking twice. 

More than two decades later since the birth of this technology, however, it has become evident to us that social media is a double-edged sword. Rather than utilizing social media as a resourceful tool of interconnection, we have become the suffering subjects of the technology. In bringing us together, it counterintuitively breaks down our norms, and in many ways, it divides us just as much as—if not more than—it connects us. More and more, we are brandishing this sword in our direction, and we are losing control. Through its stages of evolution, social media today has become not a helpful tool but rather a weapon aimed at ourselves to accelerate human folly, slowly driving us towards self-destruction.

Just look around us today undergoing the crisis of the COVID-19. Since the beginning of the pandemic, fake news has been tormenting people to act out in all the wrong ways. Unfamiliar with and ignorant of the nature and gravity of this unprecedented predicament, people made the easy mistake of believing the fake news. And at the center of every piece of misinformation was social media. In fact, social media is actively inciting confusion as people are inundated by different and wrong versions of the truth. Some ridiculous claims that go against common sense—specifically that wearing masks has no efficiency on preventing the virus and can make people suffocate—spread much faster than the truth, receiving more “likes”, “retweets”, and such by the public while real humans had to pay the price for the imprudence. 

In order to take a closer look at what is happening and why, it is helpful to examine the aims and goals of the social media industry, the single biggest player in spreading misinformation across the globe. The first and foremost goal of any social media company is “engagement.” Just like any other for-profit organizations, social media companies are not performing any charity service. Although we usually do not make any financial payment to use social media platforms as users, they do receive money from other parties. They “sell” the users—that is, our data—to other industries that advertise their product and service on these platforms. Naturally, more advertisements equal more profits, and thus, in order to expose users to as many advertisements as possible, social media companies encourage us to use their service as much as possible. Basically, their goal is to make us become addicted to their service—which is a problem we are all too familiar with. For example, many of the most popular services work just like the slot machines in a casino. They adopt a “refresh” system to engage and fascinate the user so that there is always something interesting available on a never-ending loop. Notification system, making people susceptible to their service 24/7, is another gimmick used to effectively achieve user addiction. Even if we break out of the loop, we are soon lured back in by the innocuous alerts that pop up constantly, tempting us until we give in. In addition, the algorithm of social media is perfected in its design to attract people’s attention in the most efficient ways. When we use social media services, the algorithm studies our activities and identifies our characteristics, analyzing and factoring in many variables from frequently visited physical locations to our past and current likes and dislikes. With powerful artificial intelligence behind the algorithm giving us feeds perfectly tailored to our taste, we are reduced to monkeys lured by bananas. 

Once this “engagement” goal is achieved with one user, social media companies need only to replicate the result and spread the service like a contagious disease to as many victims as possible. It is not an overstatement to say that social media has indeed infiltrated every realm of lives of those who have access to the technology. It is true that we are better connected to each other because of this. However, enabling people to take close peeks into others’ lives creates a new wave of problems. Juxtaposing superficial conditions and qualities for easy comparisons, social media fuels our vanity by stimulating one of our most primal senses—envy. It is only human to seek attention, approval, and belongingness, but social media quickly becomes a system that feeds on our dispositions to emphasize and amplify the false value of vanity to an unhealthy degree. On the platforms that are supposed to glorify our happiest memories, people instead show off their glamours at their best, inducing people to make unfair comparisons and futile aims at fake popularities. Using social media as a tool to promote vanity, users are bound to discover the vast gap between their fake lives on the platforms and their real lives, which can only lead to a great despondency and a dive in their self-esteem. Indeed, the number of ER visits to hospitals due to self-injury is on the rise at an alarming rate. Between 2001 and 2015, the overall rate of self-harm for people between the ages of 10 and 24 increased by 51%. This number by itself is sufficiently significant, but the problem is especially evident among teen girls. During the same period, the rate among teen girls aged 15 to 19 increased by 62% while that of younger girls aged 10 to 14 increased by 166%. The suicide rate also shows a similar pattern, and many experts point their fingers to social media in identifying the cause of this unnerving trend. 

With the majority of the world’s population under the influence of social media, the problem continues to extend its reach to other aspects of our lives. Even with millions or billions of users, social media companies do not generate any profit like other businesses because the platforms usually do not require any membership fees from users. Instead, they must attract interested advertisers to fill in the margins of the pages and the in-between time slots of our attention. Therefore, as far as social media companies are concerned, we—the users—are not the customers they keep in mind for their service. It is the advertisers who actually pay these companies. However, we are far from being innocent bystanders. Since the companies that advertise theirs goods and services are targeting us as their potential customers, it is the job of the social media companies to neatly serve us to them on a silver platter: We are the product being sold. 

When this is all said and done, there arises another significant systemic problem. Social media companies, in order to be most lucrative as all businesses strive, require nothing more—and nothing less—than our time and attention. As long as they have that, they are satisfied as a successful business. However, it has been proven on numerous occasions that the users, when left alone, cannot be the judge of the truth for all the overwhelming influx of information. We simply lack the power of discretion in winnowing the truths in the sea of misinformation. In fact, the majority among us are actually more interested in and more instigated by fake news than real ones because they tend to be more provocative. The potent engines of artificial intelligence that figure us out so easily know this. But as computational machines that lack any judgment of good and bad and regard for human values, algorithms lack any incentive to intervene in or deviate from this exemplary business model. Instead, they actually enable us in our tendencies to favor information detrimental to us without any regard to its truthfulness.

Without any guidance to know right from wrong and good from bad, both are free to spread based on the discretion of gullible users. We are certainly communicating a lot, staying well connected, and interacting but largely based on falsehood. Within the context of society, we become the fanatics of the misinformation about COVID-19, rendering ourselves vulnerable like the teen girls are to self-harm and suicide. We become the monkeys constantly searching for and feeding on bananas that are toxic to us.