Fear and Loathing in Social Media

An interesting article has recently caught my attention. Alex Hern’s article, “‘Never get high on your own supply’ – why social media bosses don’t use social media” discusses how employees in the social media field do not use social media and many negative impacts social media can have on lives. Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter and several other employees are absent from social media platforms. This article raised a lot of good questions and, as always, I have some thoughts on the topic.

 Illustration: Jason Ford for the Guardian

Alex Hern asked, “What do they know that we don’t?”. This is an important question to consider when debating whether we should be using social media at all. Hern listed several drawbacks to using social media such as limitless time consumption, the spread of misinformation, general bad feelings and internet addiction. Looking at these effects leads me to believe there is a good reason for us to limit our use of social media. Based on these findings, the evidence suggests we all pull our phones out and deactivate every platform we are using. But really thinking about it, I believe social media has many positive abilities when used correctly and in the correct hands.

First and foremost, I do not believe teens 14 years old and younger should have access to social media. Those surrounding years are tough enough and the addition of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram would not be a positive influence in their lives. That being said, I understand my opinion is not the ultimate law and means very little to others who must make the decision to have their children on social media. I wish I had not joined Facebook as early as I had. I became concerned with how many friends I had on my profile and how many likes I was getting on my status updates. These things were very important to me but were never making me as happy as I wanted. It never occurred to me that I never got many likes because I had a small group of real-life friends. They would like and comment on my statuses, but those friends were such a small portion of my friends list on Facebook. I only saw the number of people who weren’t liking my statuses. I also failed to realize I posted so infrequently that my profile was not as prominent as others. Young teens do not think about these things. I think they are not mentally developed enough to be using social media in a positive way.

Teens are not the only ones who need to be cautious when using social media. Click-bait articles have been a large source of interest lately. Those who read such postings should become wearier of what they’re clicking on. They need to consider what the article is about, who posted it, and where their information is coming from. Common sense should be used when finding news stories on the internet. This could help with the spread of misinformation across social media platforms.

While these are good pieces of information to think about, I believe the biggest concern raised by this article is that the founders do not even regularly use their social media sites. How are they able to push people to join while consciously staying away? How are they able to make the site better if they don’t interact with it? How are they able to run a business they themselves refuse to be apart? I can see why they would stay away from social media, but I cannot fathom being so against it while still allowing others to use it. I don’t have a definitive answer either way of what I believe they should do and maybe that’s the most shocking thing of all.