Editor’s Note: Jill Filipovic is a journalist based in New York and author of the book “OK Boomer, Let’s Talk: How My Generation Got Left Behind.” Follow her on Twitter. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely her own. View more opinion articles on CNN.
As damning information about Facebook leaves the company increasingly besieged by accusations that it does far too little to prevent misinformation, radicalization, human trafficking, girls’ low self-esteem, hate speech and even physical violence, I’m asking myself the same question a lot of people are: Why am I still on this platform?
I joined Facebook in 2004, when it was open only to students at a handful of colleges. Its purpose was as straightforward as it was self-absorbed: to share cute photos of yourself, and see cute photos of your classmates.
Facebook rapidly became much more than that. People “friended” family members, old classmates, long-lost loves. I’m still “friends” with people I met years ago while traveling; I scroll through my list of Facebook friends and don’t recognize half of them, sometimes because our lives intersected only briefly, or because they are women with new married names, their old identities abandoned.
I don’t use Facebook much anymore (although, like many of my millennial peers, I scroll through Facebook-owned Instagram almost daily). Facebook is hemorrhaging younger users, according to an internal memo cited in a report in the Verge, one in a consortium of news organizations (including CNN) currently sifting through a trove of Facebook’s documents provided to Congress in redacted form by legal counsel for former Facebook employee Frances Haugen.
Young people are flocking to TikTok, and this loss of youthful users seems to be making company leaders nervous despite Facebook’s billions of dollars in profit every month.
No social media platform is without problems, but Facebook, the largest in the world, merits extra scrutiny. Some 2.8 billion people use it at least every month, according to the company.
A question we should be asking ourselves is why we feel the need to be connected with hundreds or even thousands of people we don’t know well or at all. There might be good reasons here: There’s a Facebook group for just about everything, which can create a sense of community and connection for people who live through rare life events or have esoteric interests. Kidney donors and young widows and parents of children who identify as “furries” and so on can share information and gain support.
People who share a particular affinity, identity or political view can connect in solidarity or for advocacy. Owners of vegan cats have a group home on Facebook, as do adherents of atheist dialectical materialist revolutionary Trotskyist communism.
But those seemingly limitless opportunities for connection and information come with troubling, sometimes disastrous side effects. If Facebook is where you get your news and information, for example, you are being led down an algorithmic path that rewards extremism and partisanship, not accuracy.
If Facebook is primarily how you socialize, connect and interact with other people, that can have real mental health effects, including loneliness, anxiety and depression; interacting from behind a screen can worsen social skills and decrease empathy, which weakens friendships instead of strengthening them, and too much time online can detract from relationship-building in the real world.
If Facebook is where you have political and other discussions, it may hurt more than it helps, given how the platform promotes moral outrage, as whistleblower Haugen has said, citing Facebook’s own research, and how people may be more inclined toward simplistic and dehumanizing interactions when those interactions are mediated through a screen.
If Facebook is how you peer into the lives of people you only tangentially know, you’re getting a distorted, manipulated-to-look-better view of them – and that could make you feel pretty low.
(In a statement during Monday’s quarterly earning’s call, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg addressed the current wave of criticism around the news reports: “Good faith criticism helps us get better, but my view is that we are seeing a coordinated effort to selectively use leaked documents to paint a false picture of our company,” he said. “The reality is that we have an open culture that encourages discussion and research on our work so we can make progress on many complex issues that are not specific just to us.”)
It’s not inherently bad to use social media. But each of us should understand the costs and the benefits and make decisions about how we spend our time with as much intention as possible– admittedly a difficult thing to do when the brightest minds of my generation have been hard at work trying to keep all of us on their platforms for as much time as possible.
The ills wrought by Facebook, and those we haven’t yet uncovered about so many other social media platforms, aren’t fixable by individual choices alone. These companies, Facebook in particular, have enormous power over what we see, what’s hidden from view, and how we communicate. All of that shapes how each of us views the world and what we believe – and even how we behave.
With stakes that high, the lack of transparency and oversight is unconscionable and dangerous. These companies need to face reasonable regulation to keep them from driving and magnifying some of our worst human impulses.
If one thing is clear, though, it’s that there is no silver bullet fix to the disasters social media companies have wrought – there’s no perfect set of individual decisions, and there’s not a potential regulatory policy that is without its own pitfalls.
Perhaps the scariest fact in all of this is that we still don’t know the scope of the harm caused by moving so much of our lives online, particularly to young people who have never known a world in which it was otherwise.
It is easy to convince ourselves that these extremely powerful companies are not actually shaping our opinions and experiences. It is easier still to be entertained into inertness. At the very least, the public deserves a clear understanding of how these products work – including how they work us.