How Did Social Media Become So Toxic?

Photo by Prateek Katyal on Unsplash

This is the first part of a series on social media and how to understand its impacts on our lives. From here, I talk about what it means for us to be social animals and why bigger platforms cause greater harm. Finally, I talk about what social media is doing to us as a species and how to forge boundaries around social media for yourself and your household.

Social media is hurting us. 

Here, I am tempted to blast you with data points. For example, around half of adolescents said social media makes them feel worse about their bodies, or how suicides among 10- to 24-year-olds increased by almost 60% in the decade after Facebook went mainstream, or how MIT researchers found that false news stories have ten times the reach and six times the speed of true stories on Twitter.

I could go on and on and on… but I don’t have to. This truth is self-evident. You see it, feel it, know it already. 

If you have kids, you’ve probably worried about their exposure to social media or some interaction they’ve had online. If you have a politically diverse family, you probably dread the holidays. Maybe you’ve tried the occasional social media “cleanse” that just hasn’t stuck. 

Maybe your product has a social component, and you’re wondering how to cultivate a healthy digital community.

Or maybe you have broken out of the Matrix — deleted your accounts, ruthlessly purged your friends list, or bought a dumb phone — and you can’t believe how much better you feel. 

It’s time for a come-to-Jesus talk about social media. In this series, I want to examine how these platforms got to where they are, what it means to be social, how to encourage healthy behavior, and look to the future of social media. 

To go forward, we must first go back. Hop in the way-back machine and take a ride with me. 

The birth of social media

People began being social through technology as soon as Morse code hit the public, and in the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s, a few scientific organizations created rudimentary digital networks to allow scientists to remotely communicate with each other. 

The first social media service that resembles how we think of them today came in 1997, with sixdegrees.com. SixDegrees, and its follow-up competitor Friendster, were simply ahead of their time. The internet was slow, not everyone had it, and nobody was on it nearly to the degree we are today. 

Then came LinkedIn in 2002, MySpace in 2003, Facebook in 2004. 

A second wave soon followed with Reddit and YouTube in 2005, Twitter in 2006, and Instagram in 2010. 

Initially, these platforms boasted modest feature sets. Facebook had no Like button, no News Feed, not even a Wall. Tweets were capped at 140 characters. YouTube videos were capped at ten minutes. Instagram consisted of a single feed of photos in chronological order — no Explore tab. 

Simpler times, right? 

Over the next decade, these platforms would introduce features that preyed more and more viciously on their users. If Samuel Morse could see the state of social media now, he’d probably say the same thing he first transmitted through his electronic telegram – “What hath God wrought?” 

Features with fangs

To chart the evolution of features that I believe create the toxic environment we’re addicted to today, I’ll focus my scope here on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. 

Pre-2009

Up until 2009, feeds for Facebook and Twitter were simple: They showed what your friends had been doing in reverse chronological order. You could see who went to that house party last weekend, who changed their relationship status from “Single” to “It’s Complicated.”

This was mostly fine because 1) behavior was limited to your friends and 2) it was presented chronologically.

The scroll was finite. You could reach the end of it and go do something else. 

In 2006, Facebook started allowing anyone to join, not just college students, and it released a mobile version (Facebook for Mobile). In 2008, a year after the first iPhone hit the market, Facebook released its mobile iOS app. 

This set the stage for mass adoption.

2009 - 2014

By 2009, social media was off to the races. Facebook boasted over 150 million users while Twitter marked over 58 million accounts. At the UX level, these platforms ramped up the addictive elements of their apps.

In 2009, a few key changes occurred.

• Facebook started allowing users’ content to reach beyond their friend network and it introduced the “Like” button. 

• Twitter debuted its Retweet feature, the mechanism by which posts go viral (and get dunked on). It also implemented its Highlights feature, which displayed the most popular tweets from accounts the user follows. 

These developments mark a shift in the direction of promoting content based on engagement and user “interests” — and of course, advertising — rather than content based on relationships and chronology. Platforms built and introduced engagement-based algorithms to their feed features.

Over the next five years, YouTube got rid of its video length restriction of 10 minutes and introduced its own Likes feature. Facebook created the Reshare function, its own version of the Retweet. Instagram hit the digital streets and adopted its Popular feed, which aggregated the most popular posts on the app at the time. 

In 2014, both Twitter and Facebook introduced “trending topics” features. This truly laid the groundwork for both platforms to gain prominence as outlets for news, political advertising, sponsored content, and generally not-friend-related stuff. Behind the scenes, egregious privacy violations happened left and right. 

• Facebook made a lot of user information public and indexable on the broader web while maintaining the lie that users still have control over their data. It also allowed app developers and advertisers to run absolutely wild with customer data without users’ consent — among many other transgressions. 

• Twitter asked users for certain personal info under the guise of securing their accounts, but then sold that info to advertisers. It came to light that Twitter employees could access any user accounts and data that they want.

Meanwhile, smartphone adoption exploded. By 2014, about a quarter of the entire world’s population used or had regular access to a smartphone. 

On the surface, feeds provide an endless scroll, content is algorithmically curated based on sheer engagement, and users carry these apps around in their pockets everywhere they go. 

Beneath the screen, user data is being sold and exploited at an incomprehensible depth and scale. It’s being used to influence what we think, what we buy, and how we see the world.

Post 2014

More outrageous content gets more engagement. More engagement makes advertising more valuable. More value means more money for social media companies. 

Social media platforms continued to go whole hog on this principle, cementing what we now call the attention economy. The post-2014 era is marked by the scandals that ensued. 

• In #Gamergate, toxic users leveraged social media to conduct mass harassment campaigns against women and journalists in the gaming industry. 

• Cambridge Analytica, a British political consultancy, harvested Facebook data on 87 million users through a personality profiling app. They used that data to psychologically target voters in the 2016 presidential race and in other elections around the world.  

• Facebook itself experimented with manipulating the emotions of almost 700,000 users through the content shown in their news feeds — all without their knowledge or consent. 

• Radical groups and thinkers start drawing together violent weirdos on Reddit, Facebook, and YouTube, resulting in the 2014 Isla Vista massacre and the 2020 Christchurch shooting. The Rabbit Hole podcast shows how YouTube played a part in radicalizing young men.

• Under Elon Musk, Twitter started selling user data to a surveillance firm that supplies information to the U.S. Secret Service, as well as state and federal law enforcement, with no oversight.

• A bipartisan report from the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence found that Russia leveraged American social media platforms to influence the 2016 election and “sow discord in American politics and society.” 

There are many, many more examples of how these technologies have run amok. By now almost everyone agrees that this genie shouldn’t have been let out of the bottle. But here we are. 

An upside-down internet

An insidious fact of the social media landscape is that a person without it is at a disadvantage. That’s how vital social media has become in running and promoting our businesses, creating new connections, absorbing news, and finding new cool things. 

Social media’s capacity for conflict and manipulation isn’t accidental. Here’s how I know. 

They want us to be on it all the time.

As with anything, moderation is key. Sure, it’s up to us to exercise some self-control, but I doubt most people understand the power of what they’re up against. Tristan Harris, founder of the Center for Humane Technology, describes it as a supercomputer aimed directly at your brain. 

For many, social media has become their window to the entire internet. People search for gardening advice and toaster reviews on Reddit. They sell furniture and knick knacks on Facebook marketplace. They send memes to their group chats on Instagram. They get news and basketball scores from Twitter. The younger generations watch YouTube the same way millennials and older used to watch TV. 

This sort of functional consolidation weakens the broader ecosystem of the internet and makes users over-dependent on the algorithm to navigate the web. 

They don’t let us curate our own experience.

For a while, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter allowed users to choose between an algorithmically curated feed and the classic chronological feed… but that choice quietly went away. 

Similarly, whenever users complain about the algorithm, the platforms make promises to change the algorithm, but they never grant the ability for users to give actual input and curate their feeds themselves. 

They run on bad incentives.

One hill I will die on as an app developer is the hill that any product must radically center the user in the experience. Creating digital addicts by amplifying our worst instincts does not count as catering to the user.

Social media platforms feed (and feed on) our lizard brains. This part of our brain craves quick hits of dopamine that the social media slot machines provide. They are not looking out for true wellness, or for what’s moral or just. 

For example, Meta knew the harm Instagram was inflicting on teenage girls, but did nothing. Because more time spent online means more money in their pockets.

Many believe AI has the potential to make social media even more damaging. 

It is what it is. 

It is what it is. Social media platforms are companies in a capitalist economy. When tech companies with soft-spoken founders talk about being “for the good of humanity,” raise an eyebrow.

To balance the scales, we need truly regulate these overpowered platforms. 

Next time, I’ll talk about what it actually means to be social, and what it might look like when social media encourages our best instincts, rather than our worst ones.