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The High Cost of Living Your Life OnlineConstantly posting content on social media can erode your privacy

https://www.wired.com/story/privacy-psychology-social-media/

Constantly posting content on social media can erode your privacy—and sense of self.Photograph: Luka Milanovic/Getty Images

To be online is to be constantly exposed. While it may seem normal, it’s a level of exposure we’ve never dealt with before as human beings. We’re posting on Twitter, and people we’ve never met are responding with their thoughts and criticisms. People are looking at your latest Instagram selfie. They’re literally swiping on your face. Messages are piling up. It can sometimes feel like the whole world has its eyes on you.Being observed by so many people appears to have significant psychological effects. There are, of course, good things about this ability to connect with others. It was crucial during the height of the pandemic when we couldn’t be close to our loved ones, for example. However, experts say there are also numerous downsides, and these may be more complex and persistent than we realize.Studies have found that high levels of social media use are connected with an increased risk of symptoms of anxiety and depression. There appears to be substantial evidence connecting people’s mental health and their online habits. Furthermore, many psychologists believe people may be dealing with psychological effects that are pervasive but not always obvious.

“What we’re finding is people are spending way more time on screens than previously reported or than they believe they are,” says Larry Rosen, professor emeritus of psychology at California State University, Dominguez Hills. “It’s become somewhat of an epidemic.”Rosen has been studying the psychological effects of technology since 1984, and he says he’s watched things “spiral out of control.” He says people are receiving dozens of notifications every day and that they often feel they can’t escape their online lives.“Even when you’re not on the screens, the screens are in your head,” Rosen says.One value of privacy is that it gives us space to operate without judgment. When we’re using social media, there are often a lot of strangers viewing our content, liking it, commenting on it, and sharing it with their own communities. Any time we post something online, thus exposing a part of who we are, we don’t fully know how we’re being received in the virtual world. Fallon Goodman, an assistant professor of psychology at George Washington University, says not knowing what kind of impression you’re making online can cause stress and anxiety.

“When you post a picture, the only real data you get are people’s likes and comments. That’s not necessarily a true indication of what the world feels about your picture or your post,” Goodman says. “Now you’ve put yourself out there—in a semi-permanent way—and you have limited information about how that was received, so you have limited information about the evaluations people are making about you.”Anna Lembke, a professor of psychiatric and behavioral sciences at Stanford University, says we construct our identities through how we’re seen by others. Much of that identity is now formed on the internet, and that can be difficult to grapple with.“This virtual identity is a composition of all of these online interactions that we have. It is a very vulnerable identity because it exists in cyberspace. In a weird kind of way we don’t have control over it,” Lembke says. “We’re very exposed.”

Without the ability to find out how their identity is ricocheting around the virtual world, people often feel a fight-or-flight response when they’ve been online for many hours—and even after they’ve logged off.

“It’s kind of an adapted hyper-vigilance. As soon as you send something out into the virtual world, you’re sort of sitting on pins and needles waiting for a response,” Lembke says. “That alone—that kind of expectancy—is a state of hyperarousal. How will people respond to this? When will they respond? What will they say?”It would be one thing if only you saw any negative reactions, Lembke says, but they’re often available for everyone to see. She says this exacerbates feelings of shame and self-loathing that are already “endemic” in the modern world.We are social creatures, and our brains evolved to form communities, communicate with each other, and work together. We have not evolved to expose ourselves to the judgment of the whole world on a daily basis. These things affect everyone differently, but it’s clear many people regularly feel overwhelmed by this exposure level.

If we’re not careful, our online lives can become a source of chronic stress that subtly seeps into everything. Everyone needs some privacy, but we often don’t provide it for ourselves and end up feeling like we’re constantly battling invisible enemies.

There are things you can do for yourself, however. You can turn off your notifications for social media apps, reduce how much time you spend on them, limit when you allow yourself to use them, and more. Goodman says it sometimes helps to keep your phone in the other room so you’re not so easily tempted to pick it up.Lembke says we need to change how we think about social media and internet use as a society. She calls it a “collective” problem, not just an individual one.“We need to come up with a kind of cultural etiquette around what appropriate and healthy consumption is, just like we have for other consumptive problems,” Lembke says. “We have nonsmoking areas. We don’t eat ice cream for breakfast. We have all kinds of laws around who can buy and consume alcohol, who can go into a casino. We need guardrails for these digital products, especially for minors.”

New Report Highlights the Decline of Facebook and IG, as TikTok Becomes the New Home of Entertainment

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https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/new-report-highlights-the-decline-of-facebook-and-ig-as-tiktok-becomes-the/631694/

By Andrew Hutchinson Content and Social Media Manager

Have you found yourself using Instagram way less of late? The once trendsetting social platform seems to have lost its luster, in large part due to Instagram’s insistence on pumping more content from accounts that you don’t follow into your main IG feed. The ‘inspiration’ for that approach is TikTok, which has seen great success by focusing on content, as opposed to creators, with the app opening to a ‘For You’ feed of algorithmically-selected clips, based on your viewing habits. Instagram, as usual, saw that as an opportunity, and it’s since been working to negate your direct input – i.e. the accounts that you’ve chosen to follow – by showing you more and more stuff that it thinks you’ll like. Which is annoying, and personally, I don’t find Instagram anywhere near as engaging as it once was.

And it seems many other users agree – according to a new report from The Wall Street Journal, Instagram engagement is declining, with Reels, in particular, seeing a significant drop-off in user engagement of late. As reported by WSJ, TikTok users are spending over 10x as many hours consuming content in that app as Instagram users currently spend viewing Reels. According to a leaked internal report, Reels engagement is also in decline, dropping 13.6% in recent months – while ‘most Reels users have no engagement whatsoever.’ Meta has lightly refuted the claims, by stating that the usage data doesn’t provide the full picture. Though it declined to add any more context – which is Meta’s usual process when it can’t dispel such with its own insight. Take, for example, total time spent in its apps. Back in 2016, as part of its regular performance reporting, Meta noted that people were spending more than 50 minutes per day, on average, using Facebook, Instagram and Messenger.

It hasn’t reported any official stats on this ever since, which many believe is because that number has been in steady decline, and Meta sees no value in reporting that it’s losing ground, and has been for years now. Meta, instead, is keen to talk about daily and monthly active users, where its figures are solid. But this almost feels like misdirection – Facebook and Instagram, in particular, have traditionally been based on building your social graph, and establishing a digital connection with the people that you know and want to stay connected with, and informed about.

As such, it makes sense that a lot of people log onto these apps each day just to see if their friends and family have shared anything new. That doesn’t, however, mean that they’re spending a lot of time in these apps. Which is another reason why Meta’s trying to push more interesting content into your main feed, and in between updates from your connections – because if it can hook those people that are just checking in, then logging straight back out, that could be a key way to get its engagement stats back on track. But it’s not working.

Again, Facebook and Instagram have spent years pushing you to establish connections with the people that you care about, even introducing an algorithm to ensure that you see the most important updates from these users and Pages every day. At one point, Facebook noted that an average user was eligible to see over 1,500 posts every day, based on the people and Pages they were connected to – which is way more than they could ever view in a single day. So it brought in the algorithm to help maximize engagement – which also had the added benefit of squeezing Page reach, and forcing more brands to pay up. But now, Facebook is actively working to add in even more content, cluttering your feed beyond the posts that you could already be shown, and making it harder than ever to see posts from the people you actually want to stay updated on. Hard to see how that serves the user interests.

And again, it seems that users are understandably frustrated by this, based on these latest engagement stats, and previously reported info from Facebook which showed that young users are spending less and less time in the app. Facebook usage by age bracket

Because it’s fundamentally going against its own ethos, purely for its own gain. Accept it or not, people go to different apps for different purpose, which is the whole point of differentiation and finding a niche in the industry. People go to TikTok for entertainment, not for connecting with friends (worth noting that TikTok has actually labeled itself an ‘entertainment app’, as opposed to a social network), while users go to Facebook and IG to see the latest updates from people they care about.

The focus is not the same, and in this new, more entertainment-aligned paradigm, Meta’s once all-powerful, unmatched social graph is no longer the market advantage that it once was. But Meta, desperately seeking to counter its engagement declines, keeps trying to get people to stick around, which is seemingly having the opposite effect. Of course, Meta needs to try, it needs to seek ways to negate user losses as best it can – it makes sense that it’s testing out these new approaches. But they’re not the solution. How, then, can Instagram and Facebook actually re-engage users and stem the tide of people drifting across to TikTok? There are no easy answers, but I’m tipping the next phase will involve exclusive contracts with popular creators, as they become the key pawns in the new platform wars. TikTok’s monetization systems are not as evolved, and YouTube and Meta could theoretically blow it out of the water if they could rope in the top stars from across the digital ecosphere. That could keep people coming to their apps instead, which could see TikTok engagement wither, like Vine before it.

But other than forcing people to spend more time on Facebook, by hijacking their favorite stars, there’s not a lot of compelling reasons for people to spend more time in Meta’s apps. At least, not right now, as they increasingly dilute any form of differentiation.

But essentially, it comes down to a major shift in user behaviors, away from following your friends, and seeing all the random stuff that they post, to following trends, and engaging with the most popular, most engaging content from across the platform, as opposed to walling off your own little space.

At one stage, the allure of social media was that it gave everyone their own soapbox, a means to share their voice, their opinion, to be their own celebrity in their own right, at least among their own networks. But over time, we’ve seen the negatives of that too. Over-sharing can lead to problems when it’s saved in the internet’s perfect memory for all time, while increasing division around political movements has also made people less inclined to share their own thoughts, for fear of unwanted criticism or misunderstanding. Which is why entertainment has now become the focus of the next generation – it’s less about personal insights and more about engaging in cultural trends. That’s why TikTok is winning, and why Facebook and Instagram are losing out, despite their frantic efforts.

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