Blaine Kuehnert
The popularity of social media exploded in part because it posed as a beneficial technology that could connect people around the world. Social media offered a way to be close to others online when you cannot in person, but it has evolved into something much more threatening. The social aspects of social media that got so many people to join these platforms are no longer the focus for these companies. Instead, influencers and celebrities steal the spotlight because they attract advertisers and revenue to the platform. Most social media users compare their own lives to the highly curated and filtered pictures they see from these sponsored influencers every day. But that shift has increased the feelings of envy and depression for average platform users.[i] To avoid those feelings, some users dive deeper into the platform, finding forums and groups that the influencers don’t influence. These secluded parts of a platform are more isolated and less moderated, not often visited by anyone outside the group. Known as echo chambers, these groups are now common throughout social media and can be breeding grounds for polarized and extreme viewpoints that may incite violent action and deepen the divide in politics, identity, and religion.[ii],[iii]
The current architecture of social media amplifies these problems, but a small tweak to the mechanism that incentivizes the number of friends or followers that a user has could be the biggest influencer to mitigate them.
An anthropologist named Robin Dunbar discovered that most people can manage to have meaningful and stable relationships with somewhere around 250 people at most, any more than that and the relationship quality begins to degrade.[iv] So why do we brag about the 500, 1000, or more friends and followers we have collected on social media? Will a person ever actually have a meaningful relationship with most of those people? For almost everyone, the answer is no.
The current approach to social media is to gain as many followers as possible. In general, the size of your following indicates the size of your reach and support on most social media platforms. But if instead there were a limit to the size of your friend group, the focus could shift to the quality of the friend group instead of the quantity. For instance, if every user could have at most 250 friends or followers, that upper limit for the number of friends on the social media site would guide users to be selective in who they add to their group. It would prompt people to slow down and consider the opportunity costs of adding a new friend to the group. This small change would allow people to cultivate legitimate relationships with the people they interact with, replacing the persecution mindset surrounding echo chambers with a new status quo of intentionally small groups throughout the platform.
Additionally, limiting friend group size is an attempt to combat the phenomenon where a person’s erroneous or harmful claims and opinions are instantly spread to millions, not because they are qualified in any way to share that opinion, but rather because they have millions of followers. Instead, a limited friend group approach would mean that ideas must spread in a more grassroots, organic way. For an idea to reach outside of a sharer’s friend group, those friends would have to show their support by sharing within their own group. Rather than 50 million people being exposed to an idea at the click of a button, for an idea to reach an audience of similar magnitude, hundreds of thousands of people would have to support the idea enough that they would be willing to share it themselves. Instead of the current top-down system found on most social media sites, this platform would be a bottom-up system, resembling a democratic social media, where ideas that spread through the platform can only do so with the support of many of its users.
The social media status quo is not benefiting many of its users. In fact, it is harming some. The current state of events surrounding the potential harms of social media have opened a small window to reconsider the approach. Shifting away from emphasizing the quantity of friends in a group and towards the quality of friends in a group is one way to address these issues.
[i] Tandoc, E. C., Ferrucci, P., & Duffy, M. (2015). Facebook use, envy, and depression among college students: Is facebooking depressing? Computers in Human Behavior, 43, 139–146.
[ii] Kramer, A. D., Guillory, J. E., & Hancock, J. T. (2014). Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111, 8788–8790.
[iii] Cinelli, M., et al (2021). The echo chamber effect on social media. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118 (9) e2023301118; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2023301118.
[iv] Facebook: 150 is the limit of real friends on social media. (2016). ABC Science. https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2016-01-20/150-is-the-limit-of-real-facebook-friends/7101588