The Mentally Taxing Effects and Realities of Social Media-Part 2-
Last week we talked about the Facebook contractors who review and delete ban-able content from your feed and about the PTSD they suffer on the regular. We also discussed screen engagement, aka, what social media companies do to keep you glued to the screen. If you haven't already, we very much encourage you to go back and check out that episode because, on today's episode, we'll talk about what that screen engagement is costing you emotionally. How much damage does it do to the psyche being connected to social media, 145 minutes a day? That is the average we spend checking our feed, according to Statista. And we'll talk about the personal cost of engagement by busting a few myths.
Myth 1: Alright, so social media kills a few hours per day. Big deal. It's not like Facebook is killing people, right?
Joe: Last week, we hypothetically got a job and a place called Cognizant. Todd and I were dream employed by a Facebook contractor, and we were expecting $140,000 a year jobs and lust offices. We wanted to look like we were in an architecture magazine for an office. However, what we found was a place that didn't quite have the perks. We are not getting 140K a year. So how does it look for us at Cognizant, Todd?
Todd: Well, these contractor jobs are garbage. It is a stark contrast to the perks that are lavished on Facebook on their main campus. This place is absolute hell on Earth. Now, the average Facebook employee pay all with benefits is 240K a year. The contract moderators that dig and through the gutters of Facebook make just 28K a year. And it drives them to nearly to suicide. They do have counselors there, but they don't really care about employee mental health; All they care about is getting them back to work.
Joe: So, these poor people are having to moderate horrible, brutal things, making them basically like human sorters. And then there are these psychologists going around and repairing them just enough to get them back to doing that job. That is wild.
Todd: Now, talking about the supervisors who would have to manage five to ten of these people who are on the brink of collapse and quitting make a whopping $1 more an hour.
Joe: That sounds exactly like America. I was going to say it sounds like Amazon, but it just sounds like America.
Todd: Now the problem with these contractor jobs is they're held to an impossible standard. They're supposed to be 95% correct. They aim for 98%, but 95% is acceptable.
Joe: It's like they are playing a terrible video game all day long and are not expected to make any mistakes. Now, that accuracy isn't based on objective measures. It's not like they look at a violent video and then banning it; it's not that simple. They look at something vile, and they must decide if it's ban-able or do they keep it. There isn't a hard rule for that day by day. Their rule book changes depending on what the social atmosphere is at Facebook. So that 98% accuracy they're trying to get sways with the tides.
Todd: It sounds almost impossible to be able to keep up that pace.
Joe: The people there are under ridiculous pressure, and it's for flexible things, which is the worst combination of things you'd want from a job.
One of the worst things for these moderators is that they become very paranoid because they've been surrounded by violence. Their brain has been soaking in this toxic environment, and they start fearing for their safety, so much that they begin bringing guns and concealed weapons to work – even firing/threatening other employees. They start to believe they're in a comeback because they have been watching this violence over and over. For reference, if you watch enough videos of coworkers coming back with a gun, you start to expect that to happen to you too. As an example, Randy was a long-time employee and started bringing a concealed weapon to work. A former coworker said that she was very aware that he had a gun at work, and she was all about it. It is common for people to bring their own weapons to protect themselves if someone pulled a matrix to get past the security guards. Another example was a woman named Sarah who saw a man standing out smoking on top of another building. They had been watching suicides for so long that it got the moderators thinking about suicide themselves. They had been so trained by this violence that they expected to see it in their real lives.
Myth 2: Okay, so maybe a few foreign nations are using social media to organize killings, but that's in other countries. It's not like social media is spiking death and depression rates here in the US…is it?
So, a lot of our listeners probably heard about the Facebook genocides. And again, we're not strictly targeting Facebook with this; we are using Facebook as an example. But social media is going to run the risk of all these things. The one thing I do agree with Zuckerberg about is that if his platform wasn't in the slot, somebody else's is. We're not letting Facebook off the hook. We're just saying that they happen to be number one back in 2018 because of the Myanmar genocide. If you want to prove that this platform can be used for evil, this is a good example.
I heard that other countries had used Facebook for things like genocide. But in 2018, Myanmar military personnel started posting on Facebook as fans of pop stars and national heroes. They were posting like fanboys and fangirls because they wanted to not look like the freaking military. They wanted to talk about Islam, saying that Islam was a threat to Buddhism. If you're unaware, Buddhism is the major religion in Myanmar, and the Rohingya teens who are Muslim are the minority. This was their way to radicalize people at different angles and use Facebook to drum up approval and get the backing of citizens to stoke hate. In the end, they got people to rally against the Muslim Rohingya, and they used Facebook's hugely influential reach to do so. BBC reported that thousands died, and more than 700,000 Rohingyas were forced to flee to neighboring countries because of a Facebook troll campaign.
For the second half of this myth, we want to talk about some of the statistics on teen depression rates and suicides. For starters, the second largest cause of death in children and teens right now between ages 10 to 24 is suicide. It's second to accidents. These stats have coincided with the rates of social media use. We're not going to say that social media is doing it, but we might do that if we were on an evening news program. There has been research where teens who reported using social media for more than two hours a day had poor mental health, distress, and rates of suicidal ideation were higher. This can be a cause of many things such as comparing, lack of sleep and more so cyberbullying.
According to Time, the rates of depression among kids ages 14 to 17 (between 2009 and 2017) have increased by more than 60%. Overall, over 1 in 8 Americans between ages 12 to 25 experience major depressive episodes. Now, there are a couple of people who argue that this isn't caused by social media. Lawrence Steinberg, a professor of psychology at Temple University, says he thinks every generation of adults tries to pin a negative trend. He believes it's a cumulative impact of a lot of things that are causing suicide rates to increase. So, that's one argument that says this isn't Facebook or social media – we just tend to blame technology. That is a legit argument, and I think depression and suicide rates are going up from a combination of social media and wealth inequality. Not only are kids spending more time online, but they are also living through one of the biggest wealth inequalities in decades, possibly centuries.
Myth 3: Death aside, what are the potential health risks of social media? And what can we do to disengage and put the screen down?
All the younger people I know in their early 20s had multiple panic attacks because of the high anxiety and pressures of social media. You're obligated to click ‘like’ because it's your friend and they look hot today, and if you don't, they won't do it for your picture later. But there is a way to break out of this mental tax social media has. One way is to start surrounding yourself with positive things, people, and habits. I have a list of podcasts and audiobooks that help me specifically. When I started doing this podcast, I reached out and got a mentor, and her name is Robyn Conley-Downs. I was in yoga class with her, and I knew she had a very successful podcast called The Feel-Good Effect and a book that's selling like crazy. So, I cornered her one time and talked her ear off and took notes down, and I'm proud to say that everything she told me we've done on this show.
Originally, this was going to be where the episode ended. When I first read the articles about Cognizant, it was all mind-blowing. But at that point, the worst that happened is a slow mental degradation of a building full of people who slowly started believing in flatter theories. But it got a little bit darker. There was an update on this article in 2019 that I hadn't seen. A man was working in this business and saw it as a cost to take child molesters off the internet and stomp out racism. He just wanted to help people. There is a nobility to this, the idea that these people are willing to take sponges and go scrub the internet. Well, he was working and ended up having a heart attack at age 42 due to the stress of his job. They didn't even have an AED in the building, which is a little electric shock kit.
So, if that isn't a good reason to turn away from the screen, we don’t know what is. This whole episode is about screening anxiety. Because of that, let's try to leave the anxiety through the science of quitting. According to a Forbes article, there is no significant change in a person's mood after they quit social media, especially if they go back. There may be a temporary boost, but it does not last. Business Insider also had a segment that said you might be happier, but you'll feel out of the loop. Studies have shown that overuse of Facebook leads to depressive symptoms but keeping away from the platform itself can make you feel cut off.
Now, there is something called the welfare effect of social media. People who quit Facebook for a month brag about it. It also starts teaching you how to entertain yourself differently. People sought out real word interactions rather than logging into chat rooms or getting on a Twitter war. It also found that these same people who quit and stayed off it for more than 30 days spent at least an hour a day doing free time or doing free activities. The American Psychological Association estimated that trying to multitask with social media in the background was also an issue, as it could hinder your productivity as much as 40% a day. They said deactivation caused small but significant improvements in self-reported happiness, life satisfaction, depression, and anxiety. So, we started this half of this episode talking about how other psychologists are arguing that maybe it's not tied. But it sure seems like when people quit Facebook, they report less depression and anxiety. That’s a pretty big correlation if you ask us.
Final Thoughts
Whether it's online or gathered around the fire in a cave, humans are pretty predictable. We pay the most attention when we're being told about danger, and we believe attractive people. Radicalize us or try to charm us, and you'll have our engagement. And even if we know the messages are bullshit, we can still be turned slowly by repeated, rational-sounding arguments.
Telling big lies on social media is easy, to the point where it can win you an election. In debating politics, lying fast enough and believably can already win you people’s opinions well before you’ve been debunked. That's called a gish gallop, and lies that sound novel and feel like shocking glimpses into a hidden truth spread faster than truth itself on Twitter.
The lesson here is that liars win, and it's up to us not to just filter out the lies but filter out our social media consumption. The things we absorb on social media take a toll on us, and we do not even see the worst of it - that's someone else's job. What we get exposed to are political bubbles, economic divisions, and profiles from friends that make their lives look ideal. The jury's still out, but our best minds are studying the effects of social media, and the early research isn't looking good for us.
So, if you ever feel like disconnecting, do it. Quit for 10 minutes, 10 years, or forever. Take however long of a break you feel you need but keep yourself informed and socially connected in other ways. Self-regulated engagement is how to walk away. That's our methadone to Facebook's heroin.