“On any given day, American teenagers average about nine hours of entertainment media use, excluding time spent at school or for homework.” [1] Even without this confirmation from West Virginia Education Association, parents often find themselves asking what black magic could be hidden behind the dark screens that kids hunch over every day. This black magic is often called “the vortex” or “blackhole.” The black magic behind the dark screen is social media.

 2.85 billion people use Facebook, 1.39 billion people post on Instagram, 0.73 billion people scroll through Tik Tok, and 2.29 billion people watch YouTube. [2] In the past, social media has been hailed as the main venue of human love to make connections, share interests, and raise awareness. However, people have found that social media also has downsides: addiction. Becoming addicted to social media is not just a matter of the individual—the platform itself plays a much larger role than many think. In fact, Sean Parker, the first president of Facebook, recently discussed the main purpose of Facebook: “…how do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?” [3]

The relationship between social media networks and users is like that of slot machines and gamblers. When a social media app user gets a notification, he is pulling the lever, taking a gamble at whether the notification is truly worth his time. According to Tristan Harris former design ethicist for Google and Co-Founder of the Center for Humane Technology, “When we pull out our phone out of our pocket, we’re playing a slot machine to see what notifications we got.” Every single time the user is rewarded with a notification, dopamine, the pleasure neurotransmitter, is released. Constant dopamine causes people to crave more pleasure which leads to addiction, just like how gamblers are addicted to slot machines.

But the dark side of social media is not limited to addiction. Companies have come to a point where they can predict every action a user will take. By monitoring what a user does every single time he opens the app, companies accumulate vast amounts of data to predict and ultimately control the future actions of the user. Companies measure how long one views a post or clicks on a notification, which posts are liked, and even whether one views an entire video or just a portion of it. [3]

All this information is used to custom-render the platform to the user to make it more addictive and to predict the future actions of the user. It is also used to affect these future actions by showing advertisements, changing what order content is shown, when one gets a notification, and more. The competition among Facebook’s $86 billion worth, YouTube’s $19.8 billion worth, Instagram’s $6.8 billion worthy, Tik Tok’s $35 billion worth, and Snapchat’s $911 million worth, and other social media companies is essentially a race to see who can gather the most amount of data and build the most accurate algorithm that can predict and control future actions of the users. [4]

Around six years ago Facebook proved this motive when they conducted a human experiment on nearly 700,000 people. Facebook scientists filtered users’ news feeds for a week. For half the users, only positive posts, comments, videos, pictures, and web links were shown including posts of babies and restoring humanity.  For the other half, only negative emotional content like dead dogs and missing children were shown. Scientists carefully monitored the users results: those who were shown the “positive emotional content” posted more of their own “positive emotional content.” Those who were shown the “negative emotional content” did the opposite. The scientists concluded that emotions expressed by acquaintances through social media influence our own moods. [8] Shoshana Zuboff, Harvard Business School Professor, interpreted these results: “Facebook discovered that they were able to affect real-world behavior and emotions, without ever triggering the users’ awareness. They are completely clueless.” says. [3]

But what’s even scarier is that the algorithms that control the behind-the-scenes for these platforms constantly grow and learn by themselves through machine learning. Every single time someone opens and uses the app, the algorithm gets slightly better, more accurate, more mind controlling, and more manipulative. “There’s only a handful of people at these companies…who understand how those systems work, and even they don’t fully understand what’s going to happen with a particular piece of content.” says Sandy Parakilas, former Facebook operations manager and former Uber product manager. [3] In this sense, humans have altogether lost control of these algorithms and their vast impact on society.

The 2020 presidential election illustrates how powerful and mind-controlling social media can be. There have been concerns over the constant decline in United States voter turnout. Suddenly, during the 2020 election, voter turnout spiked to 158.4 million voters, marking the highest voter turnout in over a century. Soon after most of the ballots were tallied, Facebook said that it helped 4.4 million people register to vote this year through its flagship platform, Instagram and Messenger. When looked at in a positive light, it seems rather promising to see the increase in voter turnout. However, it is equally possible to view it as mass human experimenting where Facebook is using users as test subjects—the consent of the user being the simple clicking of the “I accept these terms and conditions” button. [9]

This may seem like a pessimistic view on social media, the black magic for kids that brings society so much joy, but it must be recognized that social media is a machine that now has a mind of its own, is uncontrollable, yet controls us. Fortunately, society has recently come to recognize ethical social media marketing and having companies open up more about the type of data they collect from users. Social media has been made for the good of society and it is time to remind social media platforms of their original intent.

1.     wvea.org/content/teens-spend-astounding-nine-hours-day-front-screens-researchers#:~:text=%22On%20any%20given%20day%2C%20American,daily%2C%22%20the%20report%20reads.

2.     statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-networks-ranked-by-number-of-users/

3.     netflix.com/watch/81254224?trackId=14170287&tctx=2%2C2%2Cfc04d9c9-dda6-454b-ba2e-509822ff063d-86540373%2Cfe401e31-df0e-42fb-b7eb-8be922ee8e65_5481082X3XX1633785792268%2C%2C

4.     searchenginejournal.com/social-media/biggest-social-media-sites/#close

5.     askwonder.com/research/average-social-networking-company-worth-aafj9ktyk

6.     brandastic.com/blog/what-is-tiktok-and-why-is-it-so-popular/

7.     businessofapps.com/data/snapchat-statistics/

8.     theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/29/facebook-users-emotions-news-feeds

9.     cnbc.com/2020/10/26/facebook-helped-4point4-million-people-register-to-vote-in-the-us-this-year.html