Social Networks Are the Largest Drug Cartels of the 21st Century
This is how it happened and what we must do now.
Social networks are fun. Social networks are evil. They help people connect. They also play with our vulnerabilities.
Okay, this is getting complicated. Let me start over.
Social networks are businesses. Businesses ran by some of the largest technology corporations in the world. Like every other corporation, their ultimate goal is to make money. Sometimes people forget that.
They have made billions of dollars by “counting likes”, and as a result, we have turned into a society that breaths and lives for these “likes”. They have managed to turn us into addicts by playing with our most human instincts. And to do that, they have used very effective tools: from beautiful landscapes and cute cats to eye-catching icons and relentless notifications. Yet, their most powerful tool is found in our brains: the dopamine high.
“High on likes”
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter found in our brains that is strongly associated with pleasure and reward feelings. Every time you share a picture online and see that your friends have liked it, you get a “dopamine high”. And it feels quite good.
Like with any other drug though, there is a darker side to it. If you share your “spontaneous” dance on TikTok, and no one has liked it after one day, you feel bad and wonder what went wrong: Did I skip a step? Do I look ugly? Should I have posted it after dinner instead?
For many years, social networks have exploited these human weaknesses to increase their revenue. And like drug cartels, they don’t care about the consequences. For them too, “The end justifies the means”. A good example of this is how Facebook allegedly kept polarizing users in Ethiopia, despite the risk of violence.
“Facebook … knows — they have admitted in public — that engagement-based ranking is dangerous without integrity and security systems but then not rolled out those integrity and security systems in most of the languages in the world,” she told the Senate today. “It is pulling families apart. And in places like Ethiopia, it is literally fanning ethnic violence.” — Frances Haugen
It is true that this is not the last addiction humans had fought against. Our hybrid lifestyles have pushed other digital addictions into our lives — like trading cryptocurrencies — but this drug is worse. You don’t need any money to get your “dopamine highs”. They are free and available for any adult, teenager, or child with access to a social media account.
Social networks in numbers
Just to put the size of the challenge into perspective, let’s have a look at some numbers. There are obviously no official revenue reports for the biggest drug cartels in the world, but we read about how some of the most popular social networks have been doing lately.
In 2020, it was estimated that there were more than 3.5 billion social media users. This means that 79% of all Internet users were on social media. In 2021, estimates point to a total of more than 4 billion social media users.
In terms of revenue, social networks don’t fall short either. These are the official reports for the 2020 fiscal year:
- Facebook’s revenue amounted to roughly 86 billion dollars. This includes 24 billion dollars generated by Instagram.
- ByteDance, the Chinese company behind TikTok announced annual revenue of 34.3 billion dollars.
- Linkedin’s revenue was 8.05 billion dollars. Up from 5.26 billion during the 2018 fiscal period.
- Twitter generated a revenue of 3.7 billion dollars.
These numbers highlight their gigantic reach and why these corporations need special attention from global organizations and governments.
What do we do about it?
Social networks are here to stay, and we can’t (and shouldn’t) change that. There is no point in asking any adult person to stop using them. You should use them as much as you want, but make sure that they bring you more joy than anxiety.
They are great tools for connecting with others and sharing our ideas, so we should keep making the most out of them. However, because of their huge user base and strategies to increase engagement, they must not be treated as regular corporations. We must limit the damage they can make to our society and people’s mental health. How do we do that? With regulation.
Regulation
Regulation, what a boring word. I hear it and I immediately feel like heading to my bed for a quick nap. Why do I want to talk about it then? Because it is the right way to control the impact that social networks’ algorithms have on us.
The algorithms — it is many, not one — that decide what you see on your news feed are out of control. Facebook’s whistleblowers have said that no one at the company has full control over them. They are created, modified, and deployed by independent teams that work towards different objectives. This means that engineering teams don’t understand the ultimate impact of their algorithms.
This is not acceptable. AI algorithms don’t need to be scary, but AI algorithms that are completely out of control can be quite terrifying. We must demand that our governments set the rules of the game, and we must ensure that social networks play by these rules.
We will need both global organizations and governments to take responsibility for this crucial task. The good news is that, after years of discussions and empty promises, we start seeing some action. A recent article by Dr Mehmet Yildiz explained how, after two years of work, UNESCO has recently adopted The Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence.
We must demand that our governments set the rules of the game, and we must ensure that social networks play by these rules.
This is one step in the right direction. I expect that governments will follow suit and create their own national legislations for AI algorithms, which will be stricter or more relaxed versions of the global recommendations. These adjustments must be made by teams of experts in AI, phycology, ethics, equality, and other relevant fields.
Materializing all these recommendations and guidelines into actual processes will be a difficult task. Some experts in AI ethics advocate for regulating these types of algorithms like pharmaceutical products. New drugs must pass several test phases during a clinical trial. Only when a product has successfully passed these, and their effects (and side effects) are clear, they get approval and become available to the public.
I personally like this idea. However, I think that it will be challenging to keep up with the speed at which top tech companies release new features and algorithms. This might end up creating artificial barriers that could slow down innovation and breakthroughs.
It won’t be easy to implement the processes and steps needed to regulate social network algorithms. Governments and global organizations are already late, but it seems that after multiple scandals involving social networks, they are finally taking this topic seriously. What is clear is that one way or another, we need to find the right recipe to protect social media users without adding artificial barriers to technological innovation. The clock is ticking.
