Facebook wants to be the solution and the problem

The problem with Facebook has always been its sense of self-importance. Instead of just getting on with its purpose – namely, to flood our lives with virtual social options and news feeds full of (often not-all-that-cute) toddlers and pets – it also wants be everyone’s best friend and parent. The result often comes across as preachy virtue-signalling.

And the social media giant’s latest steps to be the good guy just take the biscuit. Having worked hard to hook in hundreds of millions of people around the world since its launch in 2004, Facebook now wants to be the solution as well as the problem.

It has launched an ostentatious suite of “digital wellbeing tools” to help people limit their dependence on its apps. The tools include pop-up alerts limiting one’s time browsing and messaging, the ability to block push notifications, and alerts telling one how long one has spent on the app that day. When I read about these so-called measures – which are due to be rolled out over the coming weeks – I did something that combined a snort, an eye-roll and a head-shake.

It’s amusing, on one level, that Facebook has the hubris to think that a pop-up alert is going to solve the by-now extensive set of problems sown by the technology it pioneered.

In Silicon Valley, decades of slowly percolating digital addiction may be the kind of thing one can solve with a message flashing up on your smartphone. But to those of us who have been on Facebook from the start as regular citizens, people just trying to live as jolly and sociable a life as possible, the issues are going to be far more difficult to solve.

Don’t get me wrong: social media has made all sorts of things possible; it has saved lives and kick-started businesses. But as long as we are expected to live our lives on our phones, we’re going to be looking for those red dots of validation – the notifications, likes, comments, taggings – that social media offers us.

The reality is that it is our job to wean ourselves and our children off phones, not Facebook’s.