🔮Dark Side of Social Media

StudyWithDesign
4 min readMar 23, 2022

As per the report of Dec 2019, the total world population is 7.8 billion. Out of which 4.54 billion are internet users and 3.725 billion users are active on social media apps.

After a survey was conducted. Results came out to be very controversial because 81% of teenagers said that social media apps have a positive impact on them but after 2020 when the pandemic hit. This game has changed over the night.

Facebook, the social-media giants, now started hiring psychologists but why?

The answer is pretty simple, they want to serve addictive content to their users. But how?

For this, you have to understand Rabbit Hole.

⛳Rabbit Hole

Whenever you feel like watching videos or anything else like posts, you are out of your control. Your brain starters collecting information from social media platforms hilariously without even knowing the negative impacts of it.

🤔But social media also serves good content?

Did you ever saw, an educational video trending. Most of you would have never seen it. But why?

Because social media takes your data. They also know which video you saw before leaving the platform. When you leave a social media platform, AI gets to know that the video you watched was not good and it will make it down. But how?

If you watch educational content, most probably you would keep your phone aside, this gives AI a bad signal. This makes AI make the video less popular even if you have learned so many things from it.

But if you watch bad content, most probably your mind got a dopamine release (it’s the chemical released after you get pleasure). This makes you watch more videos that are suggested by the AI. This gives a positive signal to the AI and it makes the bad video trending.

❓But how do these companies make a profit out of it?

Simple, today’s economy is an attention economy. This means that your attention span (attention span is the time you spend on a particular thing) is very important for the companies.

10 years ago, Amazon found that every 100ms of latency cost them 1% in sales. Google found an extra .5 seconds in search page generation time dropped traffic by 20%. A broker could lose $4 million in revenues per millisecond if their electronic trading platform is 5 milliseconds behind the competition.

This was the situation of 10 years ago, think how much it would be today.

👁️Example

Suppose you are a drug company, but as per legal rules, you will not be able to advertise your drinking brand. So, what will you do? You will do surrogate marketing 👇.

Surrogate marketing is advertising regular products but when a customer buys a regular product from the company. 90% of people buy their cigarettes and alcohol also. But why and how so?

First AI will find out your location very easily. Then they will track your location and the type of your video.

$90bn was spent on social network advertising in 2019 🤕

If AI found that your content is the same as the advertiser wants then AI will wait for the right moment. AI will also take your friend circle information and then target your dearest friend who buys alcohol.

Now, the twist comes 🤯. When AI saw your location near an alcohol shop. It will start showing you the ads. It will also know if your friend is near you or not.

Until you are convinced. You are shown ads for drinking alcohol but in a different manner. 10% conversion rate is average for these ads. This means you are fallen into the trap of drinking alcohol. But will AI make us addicted to this content?

AI in actuality are computers running at the backend. They have no emotions or respect for their customers. Their job is to manipulate your mind to think that social media is helping you connect to the world but in actuality, your mind is being used.

🥰So, what to do?

First, download another browser. This is not sponsored ad but I also use a brave browser.

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StudyWithDesign

Hi, I am interested ☺ in searching for new ways to improve my life and I also share it with you.