Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t use Facebook like you or me. The 33-year-old
chief executive has a team of 12 moderators dedicated to deleting
comments and spam from his page, according to Bloomberg. He has a
“handful” of employees who help him write his posts and speeches and a
number of professional photographers who take perfectly stage-managed
pictures of him meeting veterans in Kentucky, small-business owners in
Missouri or cheesesteak vendors in Philadelphia.
Facebook’s locked-down nature means mere mortals can’t see the private
posts on Zuckerberg’s timeline, but it is hard to imagine him getting
into arguments about a racist relative’s post of an anti-immigration
meme. And it is not just Zuckerberg. None of the company’s key
executives has a “normal” Facebook presence. You can’t add them as
friends, they rarely post publicly and they keep private some
information that the platform suggests be made public by default, such
as the number of friends they have.
Over at Twitter, the story is the same. Of the company’s nine most
senior executives, only four tweet more than once a day on average. Ned
Segal, its chief financial officer, has been on the site for more than
six years and has sent fewer than two tweets a month. Co-founder Jack
Dorsey, a relatively prolific tweeter, has sent about 23,000 since the
site was launched, but that is a lot less than even halfway engaged
users have sent over the same period. Dorsey rarely replies to strangers
and avoids discussions or arguments on the site. He doesn’t live-tweet
TV shows or sporting fixtures. In fact, he doesn’t really “use” Twitter;
he just posts on it occasionally.
It is a pattern that holds true across the sector. For all the
industry’s focus on “eating your own dog food”, the most diehard users
of social media are rarely those sitting in a position of power.
I am a compulsive social media user. I have sent about 140,000 tweets
since I joined Twitter in April 2007 – six Jacks’ worth. I use
Instagram, Snapchat and Reddit daily. I have accounts on Ello, Peach and
Mastodon (remember them? No? Don’t worry). Three years ago, I managed
to quit Facebook. I went cold turkey, deleting my account in a moment of
lucidity about how it made me feel and act. I have never regretted it,
but I haven’t been able to pull the same stunt twice.
I used to look at the heads of the social networks and get annoyed that
they didn’t understand their own sites. Regular users encounter bugs,
abuse or bad design decisions that the executives could never understand
without using the sites themselves. How, I would wonder, could they
build the best service possible if they didn’t use their networks like
normal people?
Now, I wonder something else: what do they know that we don’t?
Sean Parker, the founding president of Facebook, broke the omertà in
October last year, telling a conference in Philadelphia that he was
“something of a conscientious objector” to social media.
“The thought process that went into building these applications,
Facebook being the first of them … was all about: ‘How do we consume as
much of your time and conscious attention as possible?’ That means that
we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while,
because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever.
And that’s going to get you to contribute more content and that’s going
to get you … more likes and comments,” he said.
“It’s a social-validation feedback loop … exactly the kind of thing that
a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a
vulnerability in human psychology. The inventors, creators – me, Mark
[Zuckerberg], Kevin Systrom on Instagram, all of these people –
understood this consciously. And we did it anyway.”
A month later, Parker was joined by another Facebook objector, former
vice-president for user growth Chamath Palihapitiya. “The short-term,
dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how
society works. No civil discourse, no co-operation; misinformation,
mistruth,” Palihapitiya said at a conference in Stanford, California.
“This is not about Russian ads. This is a global problem. It is eroding
the core foundations of how people behave by and between each other. I
can control my decision, which is that I don’t use it. I can control my
kids’ decisions, which is that they’re not allowed to use it.”
Palihapitiya’s statements rattled Facebook so much that the company
issued a response acknowledging its past failings – a rare move for a
business that, despite its mission to “connect people”, is notoriously
taciturn about its shortcomings. “When Chamath was at Facebook, we were
focused on building new social media experiences and growing Facebook
around the world,” a company spokeswoman said. “Facebook was a very
different company back then ... as we have grown, we have realised how
our responsibilities have grown, too. We take our role very seriously
and we are working hard to improve.”
A few days later, the site pulled a more interesting move, releasing the
results of research that suggested that Facebook did make users feel
bad – but only if they didn’t post enough. “In general, when people
spend a lot of time passively consuming information – reading, but not
interacting with people – they report feeling worse afterward,” two
Facebook researchers said in a review of the existing literature. On the
other hand, “actively interacting with people – especiallysharing
messages, posts and comments with close friends and reminiscing about
past interactions – is linked to improvements in well-being”. How
convenient.
For Adam Alter, a psychologist and the author of Irresistible, an
examination of technology addiction, it is almost beside the point
whether social media makes you happy or sad in the short term. The
deeper issue is that your usage is compulsive – or even addictive.
“The addiction concept applies much more broadly and to many more
behaviours than we perhaps thought and also therefore applies to many
more people in the population,” Alter says. “Roughly half the adult
population has at least one behavioural addiction. Not many of us have
substance addictions, but the way the world works today there are many,
many behaviours that are hard for us to resist and a lot of us develop
self-undermining attachments to those behaviours that border on or
become addictions.”
These addictions haven’t happened accidentally, Alter argues. Instead,
they are a direct result of the intention of companies such as Facebook
and Twitter to build “sticky” products, ones that we want to come back
to over and over again. “The companies that are producing these
products, the very large tech companies in particular, are producing
them with the intent to hook. They’re doing their very best to ensure
not that our well-being is preserved, but that we spend as much time on
their products and on their programmes and apps as possible. That’s
their key goal: it’s not to make a product that people enjoy and
therefore becomes profitable, but rather to make a product that people
can’t stop using and therefore becomes profitable.
“What Parker and Palihapitiya are saying is that these companies,
companies that they’ve been exposed to at the highest levels and from
very early on, have been founded on these principles – that we should do
everything we possibly can to hack human psychology, to understand what
it is that keeps humans engaged and to use those techniques not to
maximise well-being, but to maximise engagement. And that’s explicitly
what they do.”
Parker and Palihapitiya aren’t the only Silicon Valley residents to open
up about their unease with the habit-forming nature of modern
technology. As the Guardian reported in October, a growing number of
coders and designers are quitting their jobs in disillusionment at what
their work entails. From Chris Marcellino – one of the inventors of
Apple’s system for push notifications, who quit the industry to train as
a neurosurgeon – to Loren Britcher – who created the pull-to-refresh
motion that turns so many apps into miniature one-armed-bandits and is
now devoting his time to building a house in New Jersey – many of the
workers at the coalface of interface design have had second thoughts.
Others have had the same realisation, but have decided to embrace the
awkwardness – such as LA-based retention consultants Dopamine Labs. The
company offers a plugin service that personalises “moments of joy” in
apps that use it. It promises customers: “Your users will crave it. And
they’ll crave you.”
If this is the case, then social media executives are simply following
the rule of pushers and dealers everywhere, the fourth of the Notorious
BIG’s Ten Crack Commandments: “Never get high on your own supply.”
“Many tech titans are very, very careful about how they privately use
tech and how they allow their kids to use it and the extent to which
they allow their kids access to screens and various apps and
programmes,” says Alter. “They will get up on stage, some of them, and
say things like: ‘This is the greatest product of all time,’ but then
when you delve you see they don’t allow their kids access to that same
product.”
Apple’s chief executive, Tim Cook, told the Guardian: “I don’t have a
kid, but I have a nephew that I put some boundaries on. There are some
things that I won’t allow. I don’t want them on a social network.”
He added: “Technology by itself doesn’t want to be good and it doesn’t
want to be bad either. It takes humans to make sure that the things that
you do with it are good. And it takes humans in the development process
to make sure the creation of the product is a good thing.”
Alter says that the classic example of this approach is Cook’s
predecessor, Steve Jobs, “who spoke about all the virtues of the iPad
and then wouldn’t let his kids near it”. (“They haven’t used it,” Jobs
told a New York Times reporter a few months after the iPad was released.
“We limit how much technology our kids use at home.”)
It is not only children. “You can see it in their own behaviour,” Alter
says. “Jack Dorsey, the way he uses Twitter, it seems he’s very careful
about how much time he spends. He’s obviously a very busy guy and a very
high-functioning guy, but as a result he’s probably distracted by a lot
of other things and he’s able to tear himself away from the platform.
“But that’s not true for all of the users of Twitter – many of them
report being, using the colloquial term, addicted. Whether or not that’s
clinical addiction, it feels to them like they would like to be doing
less; it’s undermining their well-being. And I think that’s absolutely
right: for many Twitter users, it’s sort of a black hole that sucks you
in and it’s very hard to stop using the programme.”
That is certainly how I feel about Twitter. I have tried to cut back,
after realising how much of my time was spent staring at a scrolling
feed of aphorisms ranging from mildly amusing to vaguely traumatic. I
deleted 133,000 tweets, in an effort to reduce the feeling that I
couldn’t give up on something into which I had sunk so much time. I
removed the apps from my phone and my computer, forcing any interaction
through the web browser. I have taken repeated breaks. But I keep coming
back.
Alter says willpower can help to a certain extent, while leaving things
out of reach for casual, thoughtless use can help more. Ultimately,
however, addictions are hard to break alone.
If you can’t bring yourself to cut back on social media, you could try
following Zuckerberg’s example and hire a team of 12 to do it for you.
It might not be as cheap and easy as deleting Facebook, but it is
probably easier to stick to. – Guardian News & Media
