It's Been 7 Years Since My Semi-Viral Post on Social Media. What's Changed?

In November 2014, I wrote a scathing analysis on social media, particularly its growth within the communications industry and its powerful influence on human relationships and young people.

Two years before the election of Donald Trump, three years before Facebook achieved two billion users, and four years before Jaron Lanier’s Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, I claimed that social media would prove to be a net-bad for society and that its efficacy in business would remain questionable.

It’s a post that, I know for a fact, has cost me more than one job and the respect of at least a few colleagues and fellow communications professionals.

Was I wrong?

Social media has negative effects on the self-esteem and well-being of young people. Social media increases the likelihood of depression and anxiety. Social media, as Jaron Lanier argues in his aforementioned book, exacerbates the worst in people and sells the attention of users to the highest bidder. Social media, as it exists now, eliminates democratization (rather than enhances, as some argue) by commercializing and commodifying humans and solidifying the hegemony of American capitalism. Mental health experts are more regularly using language pertaining to social media addiction, arguing the only reason that no such diagnosis exists in the DSM-5 is because the book’s fifth iteration was published in 2013 (long before social media platforms held market caps that dwarfed some countries’ GDPs). Tech leaders themselves often claim that social media, as it currently exists, is broken.

So again I ask, was I wrong?

Of course not, at least regarding the way in which social media has effected relationships and mental health. Social media has proven itself to be a necessary and effective marketing tool, despite a source I cited in 2014 claiming that there is very little value in marketing in social media. Nowadays, a brand’s presence on social media affects their search engine optimization, their advertising effectiveness and their ability to build trust and rapport with potential and existing customers. In fact, perhaps this only further proves my former point regarding social media’s effect on relationships and mental health.

Let’s be honest, Facebook has gotten huge. Too huge. Facebook allows advertisers to target advertisements (or news, real or fake) to, for example, men in a single zip code that align with a certain political party and drink a certain kind of beer on weekdays. This is hilariously and horrifyingly portrayed in the political satire The Good Fight, CBS’s sequel to its hit show The Good Wife, in season two’s “Day 457.” During this episode, legendary Chicago lawyer Solomon Waltzer, played by Alan Alda, portrays himself as a harmless Luddite defending the city of Chicago against a lawsuit by a former police officer shot in the line of duty; this Luddite turns out to be leveraging Facebook’s algorithm to target fake news articles at jury members, fake news written to sway the members’ opinions. It’s no far-fetched idea, given the influence that social media played on the 2016, 2018 and 2020 elections.

So yes, social media has proven itself to be a worthy investment for marketers and public relations professionals alike. And that’s not a good thing. Leveraging an incalculable amount of data, brands can hijack the attention spans of every user. Every push notification, even notification badge counter, every phone ding, every beep and flash and whistle is designed to keep you engaged. It’s similar to a slot machine. And so long as you continue to engage, social media and tech companies learn more about what keeps your attention; this attention is then sold, and not always to good-faith actors. If you haven’t watched The Social Dilemma on Netflix yet, you probably should.

So what’s the fix? As I said in my post in 2014, “Let the social media ‘experts’ promote themselves endlessly…We should be promoting others.” I stand by that, with one addition: don’t do it on any social media platform. Jaron Lanier argues that everyone needs to get off social media and delete their accounts right now. I agree. The number of social media accounts on the footer of this website has twindled down into insigfnicance, and yet there will remain a social media share bar at the bottom of this, and every other, blog post. It’s a difficult paradox to live within as a communications professional, but we leverage it as we have to.

Abandoning social media platforms is not intended to wreck an entire industry that, admittedly, does provide a little good. It’s to exercise our influence as consumers. So long as social media exists in its current form, as a tool that sells its users to advertisers and bad-faith actors, it cannot be trusted and should not be used.