The last few days have not been very good for social media giant Facebook. Firstly, twice within a week, Facebook and its other platforms Instagram and WhatsApp had an outage that was experienced by millions of users around the world. This led to a loss of $7 billion from the net worth of Mark Zuckerberg.
Along with this, if you read the newspaper daily or follow any foreign media broadcaster, you would know that Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee, came out to the public about an internal research that was done by Facebook. This showed the world how Facebook values its astronomical profit over the well-being of its users. It knows how Instagram is toxic to teenage girls; it makes them hate themselves. It also makes some kids from not-so-well-to-do backgrounds believe that being rich is the only way to happiness; one should be riding in a Porsche, travelling to Europe on vacations and spend your weekends in the Maldives. You know can add yourself to the list of people who have come to believe this.
You should also keep in mind that Facebook has a pretty bad reputation for keeping the privacy and data of users confidential. The famous Cambridge Analytical case is one such case that revealed how Facebook data is used to manipulate voters in a democracy. It is also being alleged that the name, phone number, address, photos and other personal data of around 1.5 billion was seen being sold on Dark Web. So, as we are reading this, someone could be accessing our data, and it is very much possible.
What makes Facebook so dangerous is that it knows possibly everything about us; more than our parents can, and I am not joking. Whenever you scroll through your feed, the Facebook algorithm keeps a track of how much time you spend on each post, which posts you liked, which posts you shared with your friends. If both you and your friend liked the same post, then Facebook registers that it can show similar posts to both of you.
Facebook gathers information about you after passing through various carefully made checklists. It is commonly said that to know a person, look how their home page looks like as it is the place where the algorithm will show you posts from millions of creators on the basis of the checklist it has made for you while you were interacting with the app. On the basis of this, Facebook shows you advertisements that companies pay Facebook for.
This is why when you search for a product on Amazon, after some time, you will see it on your Facebook and Instagram. And if you think after reading, this you can outmaneuver the algorithm, sorry, you can’t. Because the content thrown at you is not some random Facebook employee but a supercomputer with mindboggling computational powers. Facebook capitalises on the most hidden fault lines and creates a divide between communities around the world.
Once, when asked why hateful posts are allowed to exist on Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg said: “It gives equal opportunity for free expression.”
Is there any way out of it? To answer that, we need to know what China has been doing. And before doing so, I need to make it clear that I don’t support China in its action, but what it did to deal with the social media crisis needs to be done within democratic frameworks.
Recently, China cracked down on its tech giants was big news around the world. Investors lost billions of dollars.
The reason was social media addiction as the communist regime came heavily on these companies. The country has restricted the time spent on social media by minors. It has forced companies to monitor the excessive money spent on the game. Also, China doesn’t think influencers and digital marketers are of any worth to the country. The reason for it is the large untapped reserves of rare earth elements including lithium and lanthanides.
In the future, when the current reserves of natural elements in the Earth near their end, China wants to utilise the manpower of China to tap into this untapped reserve and get strategic leverage. The Covid pandemic has shown why medical and economically important sectors like chip-manufacturing units should be protected at all costs. And social media addiction was coming in the way, so they decided to force the companies to stop damaging China’s future asset, their citizens. It is funny how Tik Tok, a Chinese social media product, is being used the least in China itself.
We must control the urge of using social media. There is a digital well-being feature in your phone setting where you can restrict app usage and see how much time you spend daily on an app. I’d also like to mention an interesting competition held in Ahmedabad wherein the Jain community did digital fasting for 21 days. The participants had to give up their phones and laptops, even calculators.
However, if you find this step extreme, you can use the digital well-being feature that is not being promoted with the specifications of the phones.