How can we build less toxic social network?
How can we build less toxic social network?
Social network and toxicity
What is toxicity in social network?
What is toxicity in social network? Toxicity means generally its ability to cause harmful effects, mostly about a chemical substance or a particular mixture of substances can damage an organism.
In terms of social network, it refers to harmful effects to your brain or mental health by getting exposed to social network.
Toxicity in Social Network
Instagram Envy
published an article about Instagram Envy.
According to this article, viewers on instagram are expected to let the sumptuous photos wash over them and chip in with comments (“Gorgeous sunset!”) and “likes,” which function as a form of social currency, reinforcing the idea that every shot is a performance worthy of applause. The result is an online culture where the ethic is to impress, rather than confess.
So instead of sharing your ordinary day, people try to impress others.
What we see through these posts is just a tiny part of someone’s day, yet the way it gets presented makes it seem like our peers has a way different life than themselves.
Psychologists call that phenomenon ‘Instagram envy’.
People are looking at filtered and edited bodies of people, selling magical leggings, detox diet, weight-loss tea or any other such product to impress others.
The same people get forced to buy with the hopes of getting similar results. Unknown to the unrealistic standard that they have internalized. It creates a very harmful and toxic body image which poses numerous health threats.
SnapChat Streak
Created photos and filtered content on snapchat has the same phenomenon, and that make teens feel that their real appearance isn't good enough that will lower their self-confidence.
But the real problem is in Snap Streak. Snapchat creates a game to see what users can keep up a "Streak" by using the app a lot, and that makes hierarchy of their friendship by showing number indicating how many days you have messaged with your friends.
Teens tend to compare their friendship by this number.
Social network and mental health
Depression, FOMO, and anxiety related to social network
There are many studies on correlation between social network and mental health.
conducted an experiment by comparing a group of people who can use social media without restrictions with a group of people who get limitation to use Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat use 10 minutes per day for three weeks at the University of Pennsylvania for 143 students.
"The limited use group showed significant reductions in loneliness and depression over three weeks compared to the control group. Both groups showed significant decreases in anxiety and fear of missing out over baseline, suggesting a benefit of increased self-monitoring."
Minorities are marginalized
According to researchers at Columbia University, sexual minorities tend to get isolated, less connected and have lower social status among friends.
"Using social network data, we examined three characteristics of adolescents' social relationships: (1) social isolation; (2) degree of connectedness; and (3) social status. Sexual minority youths, particularly females, were more isolated, less connected, and had lower social status in peer networks than opposite-sex attracted youths. Among sexual minority male (but not female) youths, greater isolation as well as lower connectedness and status within a network were associated with greater depressive symptoms. "
For Black teens, mental health has been particularly impacted by widespread access to viral videos of police shootings.
revealed that African American and Latinx adolescents viewed traumatic events online, they had higher rates of depressive and post-traumatic stress symptoms, including re-experiencing, avoidance, numbing, and hyperarousal.
Each incident might serve as a reminder to Black youth that, in this country, their lives have been devalued. In light of data showing that social media causes the most harm for teenage girls, Black teen girls are even more at risk by virtue of their intersectional identities.
Social Network to Cherish Friends
wave app is a new communication app where you cherish your friends, especially on the group chatp. wave is focusing on spontaneous and authentic conversation among friends instead of checking number of followers or likes.
Online Status
When you open the wave app, you will notify to your friends that you are online and available to talk.
You never know whether your friends are available or not on FaceTime and you need to text to your friends but you don't have to, you never bother your friends as well.
Send wave to your friends
And when you want to talk to specific friends, you can just send wave. This is the same as what's happening in your life.
Social network and inclusion
Current social network is not inclusive
Social network is not inclusive enough because of nature of current social network, where people seek similar content instead of exploring something new.
Algorithm on Tiktok
Most of people on Tiktok watch videos through "For you" on the top of the app, where Tiktok recommends video based on your preference using machine learning from the result after 36 min use of you watching activity on Tiktok.
That means, the more you use Tiktok, the less diverse content you will get exposed to, likewise on YouTube.
Danger in seeing the similarity
Sociologists have found that almost all decisions affecting the entire population are made in social situations.
So decisions can be made based on the "wisdom of the crowd" rather than on individual judgments.
When engagement is high and intense in a group, the same ideas may come around again and again. However, because ideas change subtly from person to person, they may not be recognized as mere repetition of ideas. As a result, they assume that "everyone is following the same" and become more convinced that they should too.
This is called echo chamber.
Echo Chamber Problem on Facebook and Twitter
Researchers in Italy done Echo Camber Effect among social networks; Gab, Facebook, Twitter and Reddit.
" We perform a comparative analysis of more than 100 million pieces of content concerning several controversial topics (e.g., gun control, vaccination, abortion) from Gab, Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter. We quantify echo chambers over social media by two main ingredients: 1) homophily in the interaction networks and 2) bias in the information diffusion toward like-minded peers. Our results show that the aggregation of users in homophilic clusters dominate online interactions on Facebook and Twitter. We conclude the paper by directly comparing news consumption on Facebook and Reddit, finding higher segregation on Facebook."
So not all social media cause the echo chamber but the social network which have controlled algorithm such as Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, SnapChat and Twitter might have more chances to have echo chamber effect.