There’s nothing social about social media

Lucy Beney

 “Many of our children are growing up bereft of the universal culture that produced the timeless creations of humankind… They know only what is current and popular, appreciate only what they can share with their friends” 

From Hold on To Your Kids by Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Maté, 2024.

I think we can safely assume that when Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook in 2004, at the age of twenty, he did not foresee the way in which, two decades later, social media would have infiltrated almost all aspects of our lives.

How could anyone have predicted that an imaginative technological tool, originally designed to connect people and their work within a university environment, would spawn multiple similar platforms, which twenty years later, would be blamed collectively for everything from the proliferation of pornography to the outcome of elections?

Social media is changing the way we live our lives.  It can encourage us; it can frighten us; it can play with our emotions; it can dictate what we think about; and it can manipulate our spending.  It is worth taking a more detailed look at what this means for us all – especially for children and young people – and the effect that this is having on mental health and emotional wellbeing.

Sharing is Caring – or Not

Let us begin with the initially stated purpose of these platforms – and the reason this phenomenon was given the name ‘social media’.  Having moved beyond the rarified walls of academia, the general public was invited to stay in touch in real time with friends, family and contacts, sharing information and photos, at the click of a cursor.  Depending on ‘privacy settings’ people could also make new ‘friends’, perhaps with shared interests.  In a highly mobile world, social media would do away with the need for constantly updating addresses and contact details.  It all sounded so simple – and appealing.

However, things quickly became more complicated.  It was not long before people felt a compulsive urge to see if ‘friends’ had ‘liked’ or commented on their ‘posts’ or ‘status updates’.  ‘Friends’ felt compelled to react to what they were seeing.  Judgement inevitably crept in.  Admiration and joy for friends became tainted with envy, discontent and disparagement.  Social media quickly become a stage on which to exhibit a curated and edited version of our lives.  Numbers of ‘friends’ mattered.  Suddenly ordinary people were in competition with other ordinary people, to prove that their lives were extraordinary.  The sharing of images and information was no longer a neutral act – it became a subtle weapon in a revolutionary war.

With Friends Like These

Many people will attest to wonderful friendships which began online; others are grateful for the way in which social media has enabled them to maintain contact across the years and across continents; and now research suggests that around two-thirds of people in the United States meet their partner online.[1]  Social media does something else too, though. 

It has solidified and compartmentalised friendship groups.  Now, you are publicly either ‘in’ or ‘out’.  In the past, friendship groups tended to be more fluid and flexible.  People had a core group of good friends – perhaps even a best friend – and there were always others who came and went, depending on the circumstances or the occasion.  Now there are no half measures, there is no hanging around on the periphery.

During adolescence, at a time of enormous change and growth, friendships have always fluctuated.  This is now a potent weapon on social media.  Some of the greatest distress I have witnessed among teenagers revolves around being ‘blocked’ from someone else’s social media account or removed from a ‘group chat’.  Often teenagers will agree to almost anything, however demeaning – even sexual acts – to stay in the group and avoid the public humiliation of being cast out.  This is where the messaging platform WhatsApp comes into its own.  Subgroups emerge within group chats, a message is then posted accidentally-on-purpose in the main chat, alerting other members of the group to the fact that there is an inner circle – and they are excluded from it.

This has changed friendship out of all recognition for a lot of young people.  Long gone are the traditional roots – genuine care for one another, shared interests and values, fun and a delight in each other’s company.  Too often, now, friendship is transactional and fundamentally about survival – and now, when friend groups have often replaced the family as a primary attachment network, the threat of expulsion is existential.  As Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Maté explain in Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More than Peers, “when youngsters can no longer look to parents to orient by, they are reduced to instinct and impulse”.[2]  The results of this can be devastating to peace-of-mind and wellbeing, with anxiety and depression always lurking hand-in-hand in the shadows.

Over to the Dark Side

Just as the salacious and the shocking have always sold newspapers, the same has now become true in the social media realm.  The more unlikely or extreme the posted content is, the more likely it is to be shared and receive comments and ‘likes’.  As a result, competition between users has taken an unwholesome turn – whose situation is the worst and the most painful?  This has been particularly destructive among the young and impressionable and feeds an unhealthy ‘victim mentality’ which is already being nurtured more widely within society.

This brings with it the added burden of responsibility.  Many of the kind, sensitive and caring young people with whom I have worked speak of the huge weight they feel, when their phone flickers in the middle of the night, and they open an image of fresh self-inflicted wound, or tears running down a distraught face.  The sender has often explicitly warned recipients against telling anyone, often citing family difficulties or the fact that nobody other than the recipients will ‘understand’.  In this way, children of thirteen and fourteen (sometimes younger) find themselves unwittingly caught up, alone, in the psychodrama of one of their own. 

Many feel that they are the only person who stands between someone they care about, and suicide.  This explains some of the fierce protectiveness over mobile phones.  I have lost count of the number of times a young person has asserted that they ‘must’ have their phone with them at all times, because a friend might need them, and they would never forgive themselves if they weren’t there and the worst happened.  Attempts to explain that they can never be responsible for their friend in these circumstances, and that involving adults at this point is always the right thing to do, frequently fall on deaf ears.  The power of the tribe is at work – nobody wants to be ostracised because they let their friend down and called the grown-ups into the room.

The same can be true with regard to world events.  Social media has become the premier platform for the peddlers of catastrophe, perceived injustice in the world and highly contested ideology.  Children are drip-fed disaster on an industrial scale.  The siren call to solve climate change, to end conflict and to embrace self-destructive ideology is ever-present.  Young people increasingly feel that they will be judged if they fail to act, which also induces a huge amount of anxiety, as well as depression about the unmitigated misery unfolding in the palm of their hands.

Algorithms

We have all heard the horror stories about algorithms. Simply put, social media platforms note what users look at and for how long, they record what grabs their attention and then serve them a diet of more of the same.  This may be largely harmless, when the content in question is funny pet videos.  It presents an entirely different problem when that content concerns self-harm in all its forms, sexual activity, political extremism or even simply a relentlessly nihilistic view of the world.

Last year, the EU launched a formal investigation into TikTok, currently the most popular video sharing platform among young people, to examine whether or not its algorithms “led users down damaging content ‘rabbit holes’”.[3]   These ‘rabbit holes’ have a concentrating effect on impressionable minds, so that what is being viewed takes on a disproportionate importance. Young people can cocoon themselves among the like-minded, overlooking the extreme nature and niche appeal of what they are viewing.  They can insulate themselves from the vital dilution that real-world interaction can provide. This leads to a very warped and one-sided world view. 

In 2022, Andrew Walker, the coroner at the inquest into the death of 14-year-old Molly Russell vividly described a process whereby social media sites had “normalised her condition, focusing on a limited and irrational view, without any counterbalance of normality”.[4]  The coroner concluded that Molly had died from an act of self-harm while “suffering depression and the negative effects of online content”.  He described a “binge period” of social media exposure, which “romanticised acts of self-harm by young people on themselves.  Other content sought to isolate and discourage discussion with those who may have been able to help”.  Tragically, Molly also had a Twitter (now X) account, in which she documented her distress, sometimes messaging celebrities about her state-of-mind, but receiving no replies.[5]  Immersed in this virtual world, where complete strangers feel that they know each other, it seems that she didn’t realise that such people often have millions of followers and are very unlikely to respond to unsolicited messages.

Scrolling, Scrolling, Scrolling

Harmful content on social media is an obvious danger.  One aspect which has been regularly overlooked, however, is the cumulative effect of scrolling through thousands of images day after day.  These images can be entertaining or funny; others are designed to elicit envy, incite alarm or even encourage self-diagnosis.  All are designed to ensure that the viewer stays engaged.  Constant scrolling destroys young people’s attention span. Johann Hari vividly describes the motivation for writing his book, Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention, saying, “it felt like our civilisation had been covered with itching powder, and we spent our time twitching and twerking our minds, unable to simply give attention to things that matter”.[6] 

In his recent, acclaimed book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing and Epidemic of Mental Illness,[7] Jonathan Haidt expands on this theme, and pulls no punches about the devastating effects that this ephemeral way of living is having on young people. In the wake of the vigorous debate which followed the book’s publication, in November 2024, Australia approved a ban on social media use for under-16s.  While enforcing this is likely to be very difficult, other countries and states are likely to follow suit, such is the clear and present danger to the capacity for young people to live a satisfying and productive life in the real world, while spending hours every day in a fleeting fantasy land.

Poles Apart

According to Ofcom’s report, News Consumption in the UK 2024 [8],  while the public values trusted and accurate news – and this is more closely associated with traditional platforms – currently 52% of UK adults use social media as a news source.  While many ‘legacy media’ organisations worldwide have embraced social media platforms, “to survive, media companies lost track of their values”, writes US journalist Franklin Foer, in his book, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech. He continues, “in pursuit of clicks, some of our nation’s most important purveyors of news have embraced sensationalism”.[9]  Any sense of nuance, of issues being complex and free debate being desirable is lost in a binary world of extremes – good or bad, loved or loathed, being for me or against me.  This is neither helpful, nor reasonable and paints an entirely false picture of important issues for young people, leaving them ill-equipped, naive and vulnerable as they enter the adult world.

Social media has, in fact, played the role of useful idiot in the increasing polarisation seen in societies across the western world.  In his book, Foer remarks on attempts to “generate hysteria” in order to generate “traffic” and ultimately advertising revenue.  Content becomes more extreme to garner attention.  This then produces an equal-and-opposite reaction.  Young people frequently swing between a sense of helpless dread on one hand, and nihilistic outrage on the other.  An agitators’ myth has regularly been pushed, declaring that ’silence is violence’. Inaction is seen to indicate indifference.  At the very least, some performative gesture is required to demonstrate solidarity with those perceived to be oppressed or suffering.  This shows the tribe that you are a good person and worthy of inclusion, regardless of the legitimacy of the cause or how you live your life offline. 

Inevitably, the pressures of picking the ‘right’ cause, and exhibiting the ‘right’ opinions are enormous.  Getting it wrong – or remaining standing when the music stops – can result in instant ostracisation, cancellation, and expulsion from the group.  This is the ‘social death’ which many teenagers fear more than death itself.

The Commodification of Everyone – and Everything

Even people who have – some might say wisely – stayed away from social media, are affected by the ‘influencer’ phenomenon, as it interacts evermore seamlessly with the real world.  The expression ‘influencer’ itself illustrates the power certain individuals now have over the cultural narrative, and over the advertising and marketing industries. 

Gone are the traditional aspirations of young children to be astronauts or nurses, ballet dancers or train drivers.  No longer do many young people seek to make a real difference in the world, find their passion and hone the creative and intellectual skills which will benefit humanity and lead to their own fulfilment. Currently, over half of children and young people in the English-speaking world aspire to become an ‘influencer’ – to spend their lives making mindless ‘reels’ in exchange for ‘followers’, ‘likes’ and ‘shares’.  Their chances of success are infinitesimally small.

According to HypeAuditor, an ‘influencer’ analytics company, an individual needs a million followers on social media channels to make ‘influencing’ a full-time career.  While some people have managed to build hugely profitable livelihoods from social media, less than 1% ever achieve that.[10]  It is, however, regarded as a quick route to celebrity and wealth – anyone is only one viral post away from their fifteen minutes of fame.

Far too often, what is on sale is the child’s body and mind, and ultimately, their soul. This is enormously destructive, as self-worth becomes entirely dependent on uncontrollable external factors.  Despite supposed safeguards on the social media platforms, almost nothing is off-limits. People’s most intimate thoughts, struggles and difficulties are paraded daily.  Wilder and more extreme stunts are performed, all to keep the scrollers engaged.   Even where the focus is on something beyond the ‘influencer’, all that matters is that they are front and centre at all times.  Having to face the camera, events inevitably unfold behind the person, merely as a backdrop.

Conclusion

Young people are spending increasing amounts of time caught in an intricate web, part reality part fantasy, which is dominating their daily lives, their thoughts, beliefs and preferences.  This is happening too often without the moderating limits of the real world, their families and friends.  Instead of living their own lives and following their own dreams, children increasingly appear as sad, isolated figures standing anxiously on the outside of a well-lit window, while all the action is happening inside without them.  The vital ability to be present in the moment, to think for themselves, to use all their senses to appreciate the world without distraction or dissatisfaction, has largely been lost.  As parents, therapists and adults, we need to direct our efforts to drawing our children back into real life, before the ‘mental health crisis’ turns into something a great deal worse and more dystopian.

“Over time, the long merger of man and machine has worked out pretty well for man.  But we’re pulling into a new era, when that merger threatens the individual”.

From World Without Mind, by Franklin Foer, 2017.

[1] Rosenfeld, Michael J., Reuben J. Thomas, and Sonia Hausen. 2023. How Couples Meet and Stay Together 2017-2020-2022 combined dataset. [Computer files]. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Libraries. https://data.stanford.edu/hcmst2017

[2] Neufeld, G and Maté, G, (2024), Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More than Peers, Penguin Random House.

[3] Milmo, D, The Guardian , EU opens investigation into TikTok over online content and child safeguarding, 19 February 2024.

[4] BBC News, Molly Russell Inquest: Father makes social media plea, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-63073489, 30 September 2022.

[5] BBC News, In her own words - Molly Russell’s secret Twitter account, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-62892636, 30 September 2022.

[6] Hari, J, (2022), Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention, Bloomsbury.

[7] Haidt, J, (2024), The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, Allen Lane.

[8] Ofcom, News Consumption in the UK 2024, https://www.ofcom.org.uk

[9] Foer, F, (2017), World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech, Jonathan Cape.

[10] Kelly, G, Nasdaq, https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/so-you-want-to-be-an-influencer, 8 October 2023.