On your smartphones, tablets, and computers, there is a war going on, as we speak. The war isn’t violent, at least not in the literal sense, but is rather a war for your attention — for what feeds the modern maw of Silicon Valley is your eyeballs.
The business path that the internet has carved is a model whereby the viewers of videos and readers of information are the product, rather than the consumer. This is how social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube are able to provide their services for free: they observe your viewing habits and then sell your data to advertisers. The side effect of that business model is that it behooves these companies to keep you staring at their sites for as long as humanly possible. And in doing so, they’ve turned to industrial psychology to keep you hooked. We often throw around words like “addiction” to describe how people are affected by social media, but the truth is that this is these companies’ intent. (Multiple former social media executives have actually admitted this.)
Using our own manipulable psychological traits against us seems unfair, but it’s even worse when you consider what it’s doing to the kids. Kids who are raised with smartphones and social media perceive it as normalized from a young age; and while the anxiety of being doxxed or trolled is something older millennials like myself didn’t have to experience until we were well into our twenties, it is a latent fear from childhood for many children nowadays. Which leads one to wonder: is this brave new world messing us up for good?
I spoke to Dr. Erin Vogel, a postdoc in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, who broadly studies social media and well-being. “I started by studying social comparison on social media and different forms of social influence,” Vogel told Salon, “so a lot of my research is based on this idea that people present selectively positive versions of themselves in social media — they’re talking more about the better aspect of their lives and making themselves seem like they’re having this great life, which can then lead other people to feel worse about themselves as a result.” Much of Vogel’s research has been done with young adults.
Our interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Salon: Tell me about this idea that people project a facade of themselves on social media. Why is that so normalized? Why does everybody do this? Is that something that is built into social media in how it’s designed?
Erin Vogel: I think so. A lot of the research shows that people do know that other people are selectively presenting themselves positively. When you ask them something like, “Do you think everything on, say, Facebook is accurate?” They say, “No, of course, people are selectively presenting the best versions of themselves,” but they’re still affected by it. It seems people do recognize the opportunities to present themselves positively on social media, but they seem to be hurt by it more than helped by it, because they’re looking at unrealistic versions of other people.
That reminds me of this study a few years ago where Facebook was experimenting on its own users —
Yes, I remember that.
If I recall right, they found that they could induce moods in users, based on what kinds of emotive posts they showed them, right?
Yes, that’s right. The results were statistically significant, but maybe not very meaningful. The effect sizes were very small, meaning that people probably didn’t notice an actual difference in their moods. People were very upset about this [research] — and understandably so, as they didn’t consent to be involved, which is important. But from what I know of those results, most people probably weren’t strongly affected by Facebook’s experiment.
However, [Our] moods can be affected by the content that [we] view on Facebook. Research has shown that Facebook use can worsen our well-being and mood temporarily. Actually some of my own research has shown that as well. We have evidence that using social media affects how people view themselves and their mood, in the short term.
Long-term, some of my research and others’ have found that people who use social media more frequently and/or intensely tend to have lower self-esteem or depressive symptoms. It’s not entirely clear what the direction of causality there is. Maybe using social media causes lower self-esteem and depressive symptoms, or maybe people with those characteristics tend to use social media more. There’s some evidence that it works in both directions.
Can you tell me more about your own findings in this regard?
Sure. A lot of my research, like I said, focuses on social comparison. My first study on this topic involved simply surveying college students about their self-esteem, their Facebook use, and the comparisons that they were aware of making on Facebook. We just asked people things like, “do you compare yourself to people who appear to be better than you (or worse than you) on Facebook?” People do mostly report that they know that they’re comparing themselves to people who seem to be better than them. Our analyses showed that those comparisons account for a lot of the difference in self-esteem between people who use Facebook a lot and people who don’t.
Right. I’ve read that about on people who use it more are more depressed or something like that generally.
Yes. There’s quite a bit of evidence for that. The people who use Facebook and other social media more in general do tend to be more likely to have depressive symptoms, or low self-esteem, or other negative experiences. My own research has found that as well. I mentioned that from survey research, it’s not clear whether social media use causes low self-esteem, depressive symptoms, etc. To address that question, my colleagues and I ran an experiment in which we made our own social media profiles that were supposedly real college students’ profiles. We varied things like, how attractive and fit the person was in the pictures, and how many likes and comments they got on their posts. We found that what the [fictional] person was portraying and the social feedback that they got from other users affected how our participants saw themselves temporarily. People temporarily had lower self-esteem and felt worse about themselves after coming into our lab and looking at just one or two of these profiles.
Do you know if companies like Facebook are aware of these findings?
Yes, they are. [Facebook] wrote an article recently where they’re acknowledging this, but also implying that people are using Facebook incorrectly if they have a negative experience. They do make some good points in the article. There is some evidence that actively using Facebook-- using it to communicate with people, to keep in touch with people — actually has positive effects. What Facebook was saying is you should use Facebook more, as long as it’s active use and not just browsing through people’s photos and posts, which we call passive use.
That’s interesting that they actually said that, because they profit when you spend time on their site. The more time you spend staring at Facebook, the more they profit.
Exactly. Their response to that was pretty interesting and it was interesting, like you said, that they did that at all, that this has kind of reached the point where they felt the need to acknowledge it.
I had an discussion with an editor once about how appropriate it was to use the word “addiction” when talking about social media. I think that clinically that can mean something very specific. You mentioned the word before, so I want to ask you: can humans get addicted to social media? Is that the right term to use?
Yeah, it is a controversial term, like you said. There are a lot of different terms that people use to measure Facebook use and social media use in general. There actually is something called the “Facebook Addiction Scale.” It was developed in Norway. It is based on diagnostic criteria for actual addictions, for substance use disorders. It’s a six-item measurement that asks people to rate their agreement with statements like “I use Facebook to forget my problems,” “I use Facebook more and more even though I don’t intend to.” So it’s really similar to something like drug abuse metrics.
Sometimes we talk about “Facebook intensity” — so, not just how frequently somebody uses it, but also how connected they feel to the Facebook community and how important it is to them. But there’s no real gold standard measure for Facebook use, and people do have different opinions about something like addiction.
I wanted to ask about smartphone addiction, too. I guess presumably, it’s related — in terms of design, you access social media apps through one’s phone. But last year on “60 Minutes” there was this segment with an employee who worked on smartphones, and he was talking about what in the industry they call “brain hacking” — using little design techniques to make people check their phone as much as possible, stare at it as long as possible. I was just wondering if you’re aware of studies on smartphones, or smartphone dependency?
Yeah, I have seen a little on it. I think a lot of problem with smartphones is that they are just so accessible. We have them on us all the time, and a lot of times we don’t even realize that we’re using them.
Is this a generational thing? You and I probably didn’t grow up with (obviously) Facebook. But nowadays, kids are growing up with smartphones and social media when they’re young. Is this changing how people interact or behave?
Yeah, I know there’s been a lot of concern about that especially about whether social media is making kids more narcissistic. As far as I know, there haven’t been any longitudinal studies on it.
I know one problem with smartphones and social media is that it’s really hard for parents to supervise. It’s hard for parents to know what are kids are doing, especially on something like a phone. And changes in social interaction are definitely a concern. I just haven’t seen any really compelling evidence that these changes are happening on a generational level. I haven’t seen anything that makes me think that kids are becoming more narcissistic, or that they don’t know how to talk to others or anything like that. If anything, there’s evidence that social media could cause self-esteem issues, but probably not widespread personality changes.
That said, some really dangerous things can happen, like you mentioned with Logan Paul and YouTube. [Editor’s note: A few weeks ago, a famous young YouTube vlogger filmed himself next to a man who had committed suicide in a Japanese forest and posted it on YouTube, sparking outrage.] In many cases, kids just don’t have the impulse control yet to think things through, to think that maybe what they’re doing is dangerous, or not a good idea. Social media is a really easy way to get attention and validation. [Social media] can definitely lead to kids doing dangerous things, in search of attention, of validation.
Let’s talk about validation from social media. The Facebook likes, the Twitter retweets, the YouTube “thumbs up,” those are all forms of social validation, right? It’s the idea behind their design? So if you’re young, insecure kid, it must seem one of the fastest ways to get validation, right?
Especially because social approval to that age group is really important.
You mean like adolescents or children?
Yes, adolescents more so than younger children... mostly adolescents but also pre-teens, really anything from 11 to late teens range. Social approval is really important for them.
So are sites like Facebook and YouTube enabling this behavior in teens and kids?
I think so. I think things like that have always happened — kids have always done things to impress their friends — but now it’s on a much larger scale. Now, you can get all this attention on the internet. I don’t know of any longitudinal studies, or experimental studies looking at whether social media causes poor decision-making, but I know there are a lot of reports of it happening. It’s definitely concerning, and it makes sense just from what we know about how much adolescents crave social approval and how quickly you can get it on social media.
To return to social media and mental health, I know you mentioned before how people who spend more time on Facebook are generally more depressed. Conversely, sometimes I hear stories about people reaching out for help on Facebook, looking for therapy or catharsis. Can both be true, that Facebook can make us depressed but can also help us heal?
Yeah. I’ve actually done a little bit research on social support on Facebook.
What did you find?
We were interested in what kinds of posts would get the most social support. We showed college student participants different Facebook posts in which fictional people were either saying positive things or negative things about themselves. We also varied how much context the post gives — to be specific, we did this in the context of health and fitness and weight. I don’t know if you’ve seen people do what’s called “Transformation Tuesday” photos.
Where they show a before and after of their body or something?
Yes, so we were looking at that idea, and we were interested in whether people would give other social media users validation and support for doing something like that.
In some of our posts, we didn’t do the before-and-after. We just did a positive photo where somebody was talking about having a good workout or feeling good about their body, or a negative photo where somebody was saying something like, that they are really out of shape and they’re feeling bad about it. Then we showed some participants posts with what we called “temporal context” — so, whether they were improving over time or getting worse over time on those before and after pictures.
We found that posts that were positive and had a lot of context were more meaningful. So somebody saying, “I used to not be in good shape but then I worked really hard and now here I am.”, that those got a lot of validation and social support. More so than either of the negative posts — whether they had context or not.
People in our study provided the most support for posts that were positive, and also that felt meaningful to them, and that’s largely consistent with what other research has found too. People who have lower self-esteem are people who are more negative in general, they tend to post more negative things and those people interestingly get more support when they do post something positive, whereas people with higher self-esteem who normally post positive things get more support when they post something negative.
It’s like people have a sense of their friends’ identity and personality and esteem as viewed through social media instead of reality, like a homunculus in their head. Maybe keep a record of their friends’ posts.
Yeah, probably not consciously, but that’s what we see what happens overall. And then if a post seems unusual for the person, then a friend is more likely to comment on it and say something about it. As for the kinds of post that get social support — there’s a lot of mixed evidence on that and some of it does seem to depend on these individual differences and the people that are posting them.
You briefly mentioned cyberbullying earlier. Can social media enable that behavior?
Yes, definitely. There have been a lot of single case reports making the news where teenagers or young adults are bullied on social media and they end up committing suicide, so things like that do happen and probably more than we even hear about on the news. Some of the problem with that is that the internet in general gives people a sense of anonymity.
Is that the “online disinhibition effect”?
Yes, I think that probably would fall under that. There are things that we would never say to somebody’s face, but when it’s mediated through the computer, people just say what’s on their mind.
That sounds like devastating to somebody who is insecure, especially a teen or child. I mean, you and I didn’t grow up with internet people saying really cruel things to us, because we didn’t have Facebook or Twitter as kids. But I imagine it would be so hard to read harsh comments at a young age. Maybe you get used to it … but being a child and experiencing that seems devastating.
It’s true that all generations have dealt with bullying, but now it’s so easy to bully others, and there’s this record of it that other people can see. I think that would have an even stronger impact on victims. There is a lot of research on cyberbullying on social media and I don’t think there’s a clear consensus on what to do about it, but there is consensus that it’s a big problem.
I’m curious how studying social media has affected you. Has it changed how you interact with social media or your smartphone or your relationship to them?
I wish it did! I do a lot of things that I know are probably not good for me, like spending a lot of time just browsing through other people’s feeds, and things like that. I do see the mood effects — there have been some studies showing that people who spend a lot of time just browsing on Facebook have a more negative mood immediately after. They feel a sense of emptiness. The theory behind that is that they have felt like they wasted time. That is something that I definitely see for myself. I wish I could say but it’s changed how I approach social media but it really honestly hasn’t for me!
Do you feel more analytic when you’re posting and scrolling, though?
Yes, sometimes I’m careful not to present an idealized version of myself. I’m very happy with my life right now, but I don’t want to make it seem like everything is perfect. I think I do go out of my way to not idealize my own life on social media, because I don’t want to be part of having that negative effect on others.
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