Baskadia

One thing that is important to understand, especially for

someone with phone addiction, is that the internet and social

media have been designed to be addictive. This is hard to

swallow for some at first because there are many positive

aspects to social media.

Connecting with friends and distant family members, keeping

up to date with societal and current life events, finding

entertaining content, discovering communities for people who

share similar interests - these are all wonderful benefits to

using social media. However, the drawbacks are very serious

and in the worst-case scenarios and to the most extreme

extent, they can even be deadly.

Regular, compulsive usage of social media has been proven to

be detrimental to a person’s mental health. This can sadly be

observed in the suicide trend among adolescent girls, which

drastically and exponentially increased during the time social

media became a regularly utilized platform. Social scientists

and other experts agree that this rise in suicidal behavior can

be attributed to the need to be validated by people online, as well as many other factors regarding the presentation of self￾image and the over-exposure of people’s personal lives.

Consider the fact that most of the innovative minds who

participated in the creation of many social media applications

do not even allow their children to use social media. You read

that correctly. The people who invented these platforms, who

know the most about the systems, understand that they would

cause their own children harm.

This sole fact alone should be enough to convince a person of

the dangers of social media, if not make a parent wary of

allowing their child unlimited access to a smartphone. Many of

these people who were involved with famous social media apps

will speak frankly about the intentions of the platforms.

At the end of the day, even if these apps are useful for keeping

people connected, an app is still a product that a company

wants you to use. These companies are paid through the ads

that you see while you are using the apps, which are

personalized because they are also selling your data.

The social media giants are incentivized to get you to use their

apps as frequently as possible, and it is even better for them

when you provide as much information about yourself as possible too. It is imperative that a social media user begins to

consider these apps not only as services provided but as

products to be consumed.

Just like how dessert companies want children to buy more

candy bars and so they put excessive amounts of sugar in their

products, these social media companies use a bunch of tricks

and design features to keep their audience coming back again

and again.

Regardless of what happens to your mental health, these social

media companies make more money the more frequently you

use them. They even encourage people to spend as much time

as possible on their apps, so that they can harvest more data to

sell to a third-party source.

Social media engineers have explained that there are many

subconscious psychological tricks designed to keep people

addicted to their devices. One way designers engage younger

generations on their apps is by using bright colors, simplistic

shapes, and animations (such as stickers.)

Content-based media apps have developed something experts

refer to as “the endless scroll.” This means that the user does

not have to put essentially any effort into discovering new content. New material is constantly being presented to the

social media user, so they are encouraged to remain on the site

for as long as possible.

Many people using social media will have to admit this has

happened to them at least once in their life - they may have

been intending to check their social media, just to keep on top

of new events, and somehow through endlessly scrolling then

the sun is setting and they have magically “lost” a few hours

out of their day.

One more popular tactic many social media apps have

employed to keep people addicted to their product is the

humble “like” button. People want to be liked, and on social

media, there was a point where likes and shares meant

everything to a person. People find themselves obsessively

checking the likes on their posts, driven by a desire to be

validated by others. This has made the internet more of a

popularity contest than a communal educational endeavor.

The well-being of the consumer is not considered holistically at

all, which is truly the most detrimental aspect of social media.