Humans of the internet: Social media platforms, algorithms and our need to belong

In the second part of our series on belonging, we explore the advent of social media and social networking at the turn of the century as well as how it might have affected what it means to belong.

It is arguable that social media models and algorithms intentionally work on the vulnerabilities of human psychology to manipulate you to belong

“Research has revealed both the benefits and harms of social media use, but the public has very little guidance on how best to use social media to maximize the benefits to their health and well-being while minimizing the potential harms”

Facebook is ranked number one on the list of most popular social media platforms in the world with more than 2.7 billion active monthly users. Vying for second place is YouTube and WhatsApp messenger with 2 billion active users respectively. WeChat (1.2 billion active users), Instagram (1.1 billion active users) and one of the newest additions, TikTok (689 million) follow closely behind. In South Africa, out of a population of more than 58 million, 36 million are internet users, of which 22 million are active social media users.

There is little doubt that social media is a force in the world that is affecting the way society forms and feels part of it.

In a paper published on the

American Counseling Association website titled “Social Media as an

Avenue to Achieving Sense of Belonging Among College Students” by Elizabeth Vincent, a doctor in counselling and counsellor education proposes, “social media provides new and more accessible opportunities to facilitate social connections” and as such has been used as a tool to enhance a sense of belonging since the very first social networking sites emerged at the beginning of the

21st century, like MySpace and current social media giant, Facebook”.

In an interview for the 2020 Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma, Tim Kendall says: “These tools have created some wonderful things in the world. They have reunited lost family members, they have found organ donors … There were meaningful, systemic changes happening around the world because of these platforms that were positive. I think we were naive about the flipside of that coin.” Kendall is the former president of Pinterest and director of modernisation at Facebook for five years.

Humans of the internet

Katherine Collins, 27, checks her favourite social media site, Instagram, for the first time every day around 11am. “If

I’m posting content then

I check Instagram sooner because I usually post around

9am – that’s my best engagement. I feel my engagement is high because people have maybe arrived at work and are waiting for the day to start, or they have woken up and are flicking through the app,” says Collins.

Robyn Kriel, 24, says: “I’m on social media just because it’s a trend, I guess? It became popular and it was something everyone had so I downloaded the main platforms – Instagram, Facebook, Twitter. Now it’s just become a habit and part of the daily routine to just mindlessly scroll.”

Besides keeping up with their friends, both Collins and Kriel follow pages on their respective social media platforms that align with their interests.

“I suppose social media has skewed our vision and now, by contacting people online we consider that being social even if it lacks face-to-face communication,” observes Kriel.

This “skewed vision” is not an unfortunate coincidence but rather an intentionally choreographed system, as has been implied in arguably the most startling accounts of the underbelly of social media, The Social Dilemma.

In the documentary, American computer scientist

Tristan Harris observes:

“Never before in history have 50 designers – 20- to 35-yearold white guys in California – made decisions that would have an impact on 2 billion people; 2 billion people will have thoughts that they didn’t intend to have because a designer at Google said this is how notifications will work on that screen you wake up to in the morning.”

The inventors of the Facebook ‘like’ button took a very simple psychological notion: not only do we want to put stuff out there for people to read but we want to know whether people like or don’t like what we put out there.

“It is very instructive that Facebook has deliberated for over a decade but has still not pulled the trigger on implementing a ‘dislike’ button. Have you thought about that? They [Facebook] are so nervous about its implications. You want to be on social media because you want to be liked, you want to feel that sense of affinity and that sense of affection which you don’t feel you are getting from your more traditional community for whatever reason,” says political psychologist Professor Rajen Govender of the Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance, UCT.

According to Govender, we are now seeking it within the virtual space; and while he acknowledges that it can be a force for good, in the same breath he warns us to take heed.

“Two things: we always overestimate and simultaneously underestimate the impact of technology. Social media is a good instance of that and what I am seeing now is how social media itself has evolved to prey on our base fears, anxieties and predispositions, offering a veneered sense of community,” he says.

It is arguable that social media models and algorithms intentionally work on the vulnerabilities of human psychology to manipulate you to belong.

As discussed in part one of this series, from a historically evolutionary perspective humans have belonged to social units because they have served multiple purposes and those have been very real things

like getting food, shelter, affection, love, education, socialisation. Today, a lot of belonging that comes from being on social media is much more narrowly defined.

Govender illustrates this using the example of joining a group for the love of cats: “You join an Instagram group because you love cats. That’s fantastic as long as you only talk about cats. One day somebody pops a comment in the chat that says they’re devastated about the US election and Trump’s loss. You’re suddenly struck by this person’s political opinion. You joined the group for the affinity with the person around the issue with cats but suddenly you realise you probably don’t have anything in common with this person”.

“Social media allows you to hop from group

to group easily. In real life, it is far more difficult to do that. If you don’t get on with your community it is a developmental learning curve. Growing up, not liking the community within which you have been socialised compels you to look within and encourages personal growth, and it helps you build the skills to negotiate complex and difficult social situations,” says Govender.

A 2017 study, authored by a team of researchers and experts from the US University of Pittsburgh, surveyed a pool of 1,787 young adults between 19 and 32, specifically from the country, taking a closer look at how the frequency of social media use affected the participants’ “perceived social isolation”. According to their findings, “young adults with high social media use seem to feel more socially isolated than their counterparts with lower social media use.” The study is yet another addition to a growing body of research into the effects of social media; a field that is, like social media itself,

A veneered sense of belonging

still in its nascent stages.

“Since social media started gaining traction in the past 20 years, there has been an increasing emphasis on physical attractiveness and appearance. On social media, you can ‘fool’ the system to an extent because you can use an avatar, or you can choose the most flattering or visually manipulated photographs of yourself to upload and present yourself. This is problematic. While your sense of belonging might be fulfilled when the likes, hearts and followers start streaming in, it is a very superficial sense of belonging because those ‘affirmations’ are based on a carefully curated version of yourself,” says Govender.

In another study ‘dubbed’ The impact of social media use on appearance and self-esteem from childhood to adolescence – A 3-wave community study and published in January 2021 on ScienceDirect, the team of researchers found that, “Social media users are extensively exposed to photographs displaying idealized self-presentations. This poses a potential threat to youth’s appearance and self-esteem, but the negative impact may depend upon types of social media engagement. Youth who actively post updates (i.e. self-oriented social media use) may position themselves to receive positive feedback and appearance confirmation and thus show enhanced self-esteem, whereas youths who mostly view and respond to others’ posts (i.e. other-oriented social media use) are exposed to these idealized presentations, while not receiving positive feedback on their own appearance, which may result in reduced self-esteem.” On this, another study published a year earlier and focusing mainly on social media use in Singapore, titled ‘The Effects of Instagram Use, Social Comparison, and Self-Esteem on Social Anxiety: A Survey Study in Singapore’, had some interesting highlights related to the above. It notes that, “Congruent with the growth of social media use, there are also increasing worries that social media might lead to social anxiety in users (Jelenchicket et al.,

2013). Social anxiety is one’s state of avoiding social interactions and appearing inhibited in such interactions with other people (Schlenker & Leary, 1982). Scholars indicated that social anxiety could arise from managing a large network of social media friends, feeling jealous of their lives, and the “fear of missing out” on activities in online interactions (Hampton et al., 2015). Despite the concern about the negative effects of social media, in the current literature, three important gaps remain.” Amongst those gaps, the researchers pointed to current research being done mainly in the US and Europe, and therefore potentially missing out on context that can be particular to one given country and culture. Thus, making broad statements about how social media impacts or affects the way we belong still needs a nuanced look, something some researchers in the field are actively calling for, as illustrated in this paragraph from a paper by the University of Connecticut’s Center for Health and Social Media, titled ‘A Call for a Public Health Agenda for Social Media Research’: “Research has revealed both the benefits and harms of social media use, but the public has very little guidance on how best to use social media to maximize the benefits to their health and well-being while minimizing the potential harms. Given that social media is intricately embedded in our lives, and we now have an entire generation of social media natives, the time has come for a public health research agenda to guide not only the public’s use of social media but also the design of social media platforms in ways that improve health and well-being.”

Scholars indicated that social anxiety could arise from managing a large network of social media friends, feeling jealous of their lives, and the “fear of missing out” on activities in online interactions

I suppose social media has skewed our vision and now, by contacting people online we consider that being social even if it lacks face-to-face communication

“You want to be on social media because you want to be liked, you want to feel that sense of affinity and that sense of affection which you don’t feel you are getting from your more traditional community for whatever reason”