Why social media bosses don’t use social media

Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t use Facebook like you or me. The 33-year-oldchief executive has a team of 12 moderators dedicated to deletingcomments and spam from his page, according to Bloomberg. He has a“handful” of employees who help him write his posts and speeches and anumber of professional photographers who take perfectly stage-managedpictures of him meeting veterans in Kentucky, small-business owners inMissouri or cheesesteak vendors in Philadelphia.Facebook’s locked-down nature means mere mortals can’t see the privateposts on Zuckerberg’s timeline, but it is hard to imagine him gettinginto arguments about a racist relative’s post of an anti-immigrationmeme. And it is not just Zuckerberg. None of the company’s keyexecutives has a “normal” Facebook presence. You can’t add them asfriends, they rarely post publicly and they keep private someinformation that the platform suggests be made public by default, suchas the number of friends they have.Over at Twitter, the story is the same. Of the company’s nine mostsenior executives, only four tweet more than once a day on average. NedSegal, its chief financial officer, has been on the site for more thansix years and has sent fewer than two tweets a month. Co-founder JackDorsey, a relatively prolific tweeter, has sent about 23,000 since thesite was launched, but that is a lot less than even halfway engagedusers have sent over the same period. Dorsey rarely replies to strangersand avoids discussions or arguments on the site. He doesn’t live-tweetTV 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 theindustry’s focus on “eating your own dog food”, the most diehard usersof social media are rarely those sitting in a position of power.I am a compulsive social media user. I have sent about 140,000 tweetssince I joined Twitter in April 2007 – six Jacks’ worth. I useInstagram, Snapchat and Reddit daily. I have accounts on Ello, Peach andMastodon (remember them? No? Don’t worry). Three years ago, I managedto quit Facebook. I went cold turkey, deleting my account in a moment oflucidity 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 thatthey didn’t understand their own sites. Regular users encounter bugs,abuse or bad design decisions that the executives could never understandwithout using the sites themselves. How, I would wonder, could theybuild the best service possible if they didn’t use their networks likenormal people?Now, I wonder something else: what do they know that we don’t?Sean Parker, the founding president of Facebook, broke the omertà inOctober 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 asmuch of your time and conscious attention as possible?’ That means thatwe 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 goingto get you … more likes and comments,” he said.“It’s a social-validation feedback loop … exactly the kind of thing thata hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting avulnerability 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, formervice-president for user growth Chamath Palihapitiya. “The short-term,dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying howsociety 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 erodingthe core foundations of how people behave by and between each other. Ican control my decision, which is that I don’t use it. I can control mykids’ decisions, which is that they’re not allowed to use it.”Palihapitiya’s statements rattled Facebook so much that the companyissued a response acknowledging its past failings – a rare move for abusiness that, despite its mission to “connect people”, is notoriouslytaciturn about its shortcomings. “When Chamath was at Facebook, we werefocused on building new social media experiences and growing Facebookaround the world,” a company spokeswoman said. “Facebook was a verydifferent company back then ... as we have grown, we have realised howour responsibilities have grown, too. We take our role very seriouslyand we are working hard to improve.”A few days later, the site pulled a more interesting move, releasing theresults of research that suggested that Facebook did make users feelbad – but only if they didn’t post enough. “In general, when peoplespend a lot of time passively consuming information – reading, but notinteracting with people – they report feeling worse afterward,” twoFacebook researchers said in a review of the existing literature. On theother hand, “actively interacting with people – especiallysharingmessages, posts and comments with close friends and reminiscing aboutpast interactions – is linked to improvements in well-being”. Howconvenient.For Adam Alter, a psychologist and the author of Irresistible, anexamination of technology addiction, it is almost beside the pointwhether social media makes you happy or sad in the short term. Thedeeper issue is that your usage is compulsive – or even addictive.“The addiction concept applies much more broadly and to many morebehaviours than we perhaps thought and also therefore applies to manymore people in the population,” Alter says. “Roughly half the adultpopulation has at least one behavioural addiction. Not many of us havesubstance 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 developself-undermining attachments to those behaviours that border on orbecome addictions.”These addictions haven’t happened accidentally, Alter argues. Instead,they are a direct result of the intention of companies such as Facebookand Twitter to build “sticky” products, ones that we want to come backto over and over again. “The companies that are producing theseproducts, the very large tech companies in particular, are producingthem with the intent to hook. They’re doing their very best to ensurenot that our well-being is preserved, but that we spend as much time ontheir products and on their programmes and apps as possible. That’stheir key goal: it’s not to make a product that people enjoy andtherefore becomes profitable, but rather to make a product that peoplecan’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 fromvery early on, have been founded on these principles – that we should doeverything we possibly can to hack human psychology, to understand whatit is that keeps humans engaged and to use those techniques not tomaximise well-being, but to maximise engagement. And that’s explicitlywhat they do.”Parker and Palihapitiya aren’t the only Silicon Valley residents to openup about their unease with the habit-forming nature of moderntechnology. As the Guardian reported in October, a growing number ofcoders and designers are quitting their jobs in disillusionment at whattheir work entails. From Chris Marcellino – one of the inventors ofApple’s system for push notifications, who quit the industry to train asa neurosurgeon – to Loren Britcher – who created the pull-to-refreshmotion that turns so many apps into miniature one-armed-bandits and isnow devoting his time to building a house in New Jersey – many of theworkers at the coalface of interface design have had second thoughts.Others have had the same realisation, but have decided to embrace theawkwardness – such as LA-based retention consultants Dopamine Labs. Thecompany offers a plugin service that personalises “moments of joy” inapps that use it. It promises customers: “Your users will crave it. Andthey’ll crave you.”If this is the case, then social media executives are simply followingthe rule of pushers and dealers everywhere, the fourth of the NotoriousBIG’s Ten Crack Commandments: “Never get high on your own supply.”“Many tech titans are very, very careful about how they privately usetech and how they allow their kids to use it and the extent to whichthey allow their kids access to screens and various apps andprogrammes,” says Alter. “They will get up on stage, some of them, andsay things like: ‘This is the greatest product of all time,’ but thenwhen you delve you see they don’t allow their kids access to that sameproduct.”Apple’s chief executive, Tim Cook, told the Guardian: “I don’t have akid, but I have a nephew that I put some boundaries on. There are somethings 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’twant to be bad either. It takes humans to make sure that the things thatyou do with it are good. And it takes humans in the development processto make sure the creation of the product is a good thing.”Alter says that the classic example of this approach is Cook’spredecessor, Steve Jobs, “who spoke about all the virtues of the iPadand then wouldn’t let his kids near it”. (“They haven’t used it,” Jobstold 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,” Altersays. “Jack Dorsey, the way he uses Twitter, it seems he’s very carefulabout how much time he spends. He’s obviously a very busy guy and a veryhigh-functioning guy, but as a result he’s probably distracted by a lotof 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 themreport being, using the colloquial term, addicted. Whether or not that’sclinical addiction, it feels to them like they would like to be doingless; it’s undermining their well-being. And I think that’s absolutelyright: for many Twitter users, it’s sort of a black hole that sucks youin 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 scrollingfeed of aphorisms ranging from mildly amusing to vaguely traumatic. Ideleted 133,000 tweets, in an effort to reduce the feeling that Icouldn’t give up on something into which I had sunk so much time. Iremoved the apps from my phone and my computer, forcing any interactionthrough the web browser. I have taken repeated breaks. But I keep comingback.Alter says willpower can help to a certain extent, while leaving thingsout 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 tryfollowing 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 isprobably easier to stick to. – Guardian News & Media