Source: LoboStudioHamburg on Pixabay The Social Dilemma, a new docudrama film airing on Netflix, is captivating audiences with bold claims about the dangers of social media technologies, featuring some disillusioned and morally conflicted former employees of companies such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Apple. The film juxtaposes these interviews with a fictional dramatization of people’s experiences with social media apps. Watching the film as a psychologist who studies and teaches about topics such as mental health and politics, I was dismayed to find that the main messages of the film do not measure up to the scientific evidence about well-being or political psychology. The presence of errors throughout the film is ironic considering that complaints about the spread of disinformation are a prominent feature of the film itself. This, coupled with the over-the-top melodrama featuring characters as puppets of social media manipulation, reminded me of the 1936 film Reefer Madness.
Source: G&H Productions Distributed Public Domain Reefer Madness depicts young adults falling prey to marijuana, as they experience hallucinations and other forms of severe mental illness, along with extreme violence (suicide and manslaughter). This portrayal of the supposed dangers from cannabis are laughable, absurd, and wildly inaccurate. We know based on decades of research that marijuana is not nearly as dangerous as ‘Reefer Madness’ suggests. While cannabis can cause short-term anxiety/paranoia, it does not cause hallucinations or immediate psychosis, nor does it appear to be a causal factor for violence. The consensus scientific opinion is that marijuana appears to be relatively less risky when compared to other psychoactive substances, including legal recreational ones such as alcohol or tobacco, or prescription opioid-based medications.
It is my expectation that in the future, people will look back on ‘The Social Dilemma’ in a similar way. And just as we fact-check claims about illicit drugs, psychological science can offer insight into the bold, over-reaching claims made about internet technologies and social media. I’ve written about this topic in a previous post, and for In-Mind Magazine, so check out those other articles for background. In summary, there is weak evidence that social media usage is linked with mental health in a substantial way, and many concerns about these technologies are based on misunderstandings about the human brain. Many of the studies on this topic are done with poor methods, and even the best studies find null or inconsistent evidence. For instance, longitudinal research which tracks behavior over time has shown that increases in social media use are not associated with increased depressive symptoms in adolescents or young adults.
In ‘The Social Dilemma,’ psychologist Jon Haidt suggests that social media might be responsible for an increase in suicidal behaviors in the past 5-10 years. However, historical trends must be interpreted in context. Data show that suicide rates today are almost exactly where they were 70 years ago, and are lower today than they were during periods of time from 1970-1990. Furthermore, while suicide rates have remained stable in the United States, they have fallen worldwide, including in culturally/ethnically similar countries such as the UK, Canada, and Australia. This suggests that recent rises in suicides are perhaps a uniquely American phenomenon, given that social media use is prevalent in other societies around the globe. We also have data on the most effective ways to reduce suicidal outcomes, which include things like de-stigmatizing mental illnesses and increasing access to counseling and therapy, but reducing social media usage is not one of them.
Source: Gerd Altmann from Pixabay What about political variables? Does social media cause polarization, or radicalization? And what about the spread of fake news? These are complex questions, and political scientists have some illuminating data. First, fake news is rarely seen or shared. In a representative sample of 3,500 Facebook users, over 90% did not share any misinformation during the 2016 campaign. Researchers also found that fake news was minimal and highly concentrated on Twitter. For the vast majority (over 80%) of misinformation, it was viewed by only 1% of Twitter users and shared by only 0.1% of users. Similar results were found in other countries. For example, researchers found that in 18 countries that voted in the 2019 European Union Parliamentary elections, misinformation was “largely ignored” and had “a peripheral role in online political discussions.”
As for the idea of ideological “echo chambers” being promoted by social media algorithms, this is again a false stereotype. An analysis of 10 million Facebook users found that on average, 20% of people’s connections were individuals in a rival political group or party, which, according to the authors, leaves “substantial room for exposure to opposing viewpoints.” The same study found that people’s deliberate choices (i.e., un-friending) had a much stronger effect in terms of limiting what they saw on their screens, compared to the companies’ algorithms. A separate study found that, contrary to the stereotype, people had more politically diverse interactions online compared to offline interactions (e.g., in-person with neighbors). The authors wrote that hopefully their findings would quell major concerns that “the Internet will increase polarization and threaten democracy.” But I get the sense that not many people listened to them. Yet another analysis found that social media use was linked with less misinformation about political candidates, not more. The author remarked that there is “little consistent evidence that social media use promoted acceptance of false claims about the candidates,” and “the popular claim that filter bubbles are why fake news thrives on Facebook is almost certainly wrong.”
These studies directly contradict some of the claims in The Social Dilemma about the powerful role of algorithms driving people to be more polarized and misinformed. Why wasn’t this perspective included in the film? One possibility is that counter-perspectives were deliberately excluded. And while I’m no film critic, it does seem a bit strange for a film’s narrative to focus on the supposed horrors of mind-controlling social media algorithms while at the same time intentionally screening out perspectives from experts who might challenge this narrative. I hope that people reading this will realize that we don’t need to panic about internet-based technologies such as social media. They are not the boogeyman that fearmongers would have us believe.