We know social media is bad for society but we use it anyway. As much as I love connecting with people, doing so in an environment that is actively harmful feels like too high a price.
How should a person exist online?
That is the question I put to my shareholders in April of 2022. In light of some of the awful impacts of social media (see below) I came up with five options:
- Option 1: Nuclear 🤯 Delete all accounts and stop using social media. No apps on my phone, no accounts on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter.
- Option 2: Broadcast 📡 Unfollow on all accounts. Do not use apps for consumption or interaction, but only for broadcasting of KmikeyM announcements.
- Option 3: Dark Mode 🌑 Make all accounts private. Use apps for small group interactions with a primary focus on shareholders.
- Option 4: A Break 📅 Less a solution and more a break to see how it feels. Take a six month break from interacting with social media. Use this to determine what is useful and provides value and where to go next.
- Option 5: Status Quo 🤷♂️ It’s fine. It’s all… fine. Just keep going.
With 54% approval they chose Dark Mode in an attempt to balance the needs for communication while limiting the impact of the algorithm. I’ve now gone private on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook and will be unfollowing a number of accounts to curate a more personal circle for communication.
Social Media is Bad For Humanity
A study that looked at over 8,700 direct messages to five high-profile women on Instagram finds the platform failed to act on 90 percent of the abuse.
Some women shared the messages they get on Instagram. It’s not pretty.
This, Jones explains, is how algorithms can suffocate human creativity. In order to deal with the chaos thrown at us by the CB radio of social media, many of us fall into binary thought traps. We sort people, events, issues and experiences into black or white files – good/evil, right/wrong, progressive/conservative – when in fact all these things are far more complicated
Can we take the hatred out of social media?
Social media reduces belief in science and medicine, weakens trust in longstanding institutions, drives acceptance of ridiculous conspiracy theories, and damages faith in democracy.
The problem with social media is not content but its distortion of reality
Facebook owner Meta Platforms has removed a network of social media accounts with ties to the Brazilian military that posed as fake non-profits to play down the dangers of deforestation.
Brazil military ‘posed as NGOs on social media’ to play down deforestation
A study by Mozilla researchers confirms that YouTube not only hosts but actively recommends videos that violate its own policies concerning political and medical misinformation, hate speech, and inappropriate content.
Algorithms, lies, and social media
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