Editorial

TECHLIFE’S EDITOR ASKS WHETHER SOCIAL MEDIA USE IS WORTH THE COST.

WITH AN ESTIMATED 2.07 billion monthly users — or more than a quarter of the global population — it’s undeniable that Facebook wields a lot of power in today’s world. And the social network can be an incredibly useful tool, offering users a convenient way to see what friends and family are doing while catching up on important news (and not-so-important funny memes). But it’s also easy to spend way too much time on the site on in the mobile app — something that more and more people are speaking out about... even tech moguls who’ve made billions of dollars from the service.

In a recent interview with website The Verge (see tinyurl.com/tla72-parkface) tech billionaire Sean Parker, who created Napster and was an early investor in Facebook, railed against the company and the design tactics it employs to keep users hooked on the service, saying it was deliberately “exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology” through social-validation feedback loops. And the introduction of fake news to the pot makes the issue of our social-media use all the more important to consider.

Facebook has at least made moves in trying to fight the latter. In the wake of the 2016 US presidential election and the potential impact that ‘fake news’ had on the American electorate, the company hired dedicated fact-checkers in an attempt to minimise the number and impact of these types of stories. Unfortunately, those fact-checkers have recently come out and stated that, with their current level of resources, they’ve had minimal effect on the spread of blatant falsehoods across the social network — effectively making them little more than a PR ploy. Facebook, of course, has a reputation for trying to fix things programmatically — in other words, by using code wherever possible — so it’s perhaps no big surprise that the people it has hired feel under-resourced...

It’s the users who are ultimately Facebook’s greatest resource, so it’s worth asking ourselves whether we’re getting a positive return on the social and mental time we’re investing. I’m of the opinion that, at the very least, if the social giants want to keep our attention, they need to stand up and take more responsibility for what appears on their networks.

In the meantime, as with anything potentially dangerous, the age-old advice probably still holds true: use only in moderation... and definitely not after you’ve been drinking.