The Social Media Good, Bad, and Ugly

Recently, I had some realizations about social media that I think go to the core of the issue.

First of all, of course social media is not all bad. It can be really nice for example to find experts who discuss the news such as the blancolirio channel on YouTube, which is a channel by an experienced pilot discussing aviation crashes and mishaps and what to learn from the mistakes.

What’s bad about social media is that it’s fake social. You usually don’t make real friends and if you do it could usually be done faster in real-life. For example, if you have spent 100 hours reading and interacting with someone’s social media posts. What is the chance that this person will do anything for you like watering your plans when you go on vacation? What is the chance if you would have spent 100 hours in real-life with a person?

The ugly is the algorithm. I recently had some realizations which caused me to look up different topics on social media which in turn caused the algorithm to give me different suggestions. What I noticed is how little the algorithm makes suggestions outside of your bubble. Everything I found in these different bubbles was new to me. So it might feel like the algorithm is pushing new information from new creators and you might think that you are expanding your bubble. But in reality, you are just going deeper and deeper inside the bubble that you are in. Only when you yourself change, will the algorithm flip over to another bubble.

But this is not even the ugliest part. The ugliest part is that most of our media primarily pushes fear-based narratives. And even worse, your personal social media pushes exactly those messages that can hit you the most because the algorithm is tailored to your interests.

So what to do about it? Put the phone away and go do something else like a walk. You won’t miss anything on the social media. If the world is ending tomorrow, what can you do about it? I hope that if the world ever ends that I do not waste my last day on social media.