Written by Aviral Gupta
Has it ever happened to you? You receive a notification on your phone and open it gleefully, only to see a blank screen. This phenomenon is known as ‘Phantom Phone Vibration’. It is one of the behaviors that can signal a growing problem: Social Media Addiction.
Professor Daniel Kruger, an expert in human behavior from the University of Michigan, compares social media to a drug. Just like a drug, social media satisfies the psychological cravings of our brain. And like any drug, it comes with its own withdrawal symptoms, such as the Phantom Phone Vibration mentioned already.
According to statistics, an average millennial checks their phone at least 150 times a day, with this number increasing with decrease in age. Thus, with us spending more time on our phones, the battle between social media apps to keep us hooked into their ecosystem grows. And to do this, they use algorithms, and a lot of them. Algorithms are present in every single app that we use, and learning about them will help us better understand our craving towards social media.
Social media algorithms are a way of sorting posts in a user’s feed based on relevancy instead of publish time of the content in question.
Earlier, most social media feeds displayed posts in reverse chronological order. In short, the newest posts from accounts a user followed showed up first. But now social media algorithms deliver content to you based on your behavior, not chronology. It’s how you get content that you want to see, and not a bunch of TikTok videos on top of your feed.
For example, Facebook or Twitter might put posts from your closest friends and family front-and-center in your feed because those are the accounts you interact with most often. YouTube recommendations work similarly. They look into your individual behavior, dig into your video history and what other users with similar tastes have watched. Elements such as categories, hashtags and keywords also factor into recommended content on any given network.
There are thousands of posts, photos and videos published per minute on any given platform. So the existence of these algorithms becomes critical for the working of any social media platform.
Without these algorithms, sifting through all of this content on an account-by-account basis would be impossible. Some users follow hundreds of accounts on a network. Here, algorithms do the heavy work of sifting and weeding out lower-quality content and deliver key content to hook the user for a bit longer.
One of the most famous algorithms out there is that of Instagram. Unlike Twitter and even pre-2016 Instagram, you can now see posts from days ago on Instagram. Instagram’s goal is to show you the content you’ll engage with, to keep you on the platform, and to show you as many ads as possible. Despite what Facebook says, it is not here to connect you to your friends and family. In essence, it’s a perfect platform for advertising, and it’s doing everything to make the most money out of it.
Instagram uses ‘ranking signals’ to decide how to arrange each individual user’s feed based on interests and relevancy.
There are three main ranking signals:
- Relationship: Instagram’s algorithm prioritizes content from accounts that users interact with a lot with each other. If you and a person tag each other, DM each other, comment, and like each other’s posts, Instagram recognizes both of you as ‘close’. It will then put the other person’s content on top of your feed.
- Interest: The algorithm also predicts which posts are important to users based on their past behavior. This includes the use of image recognition to identify the contents of the photo, similar to how Artificial intelligence works in smartphone photography. It also considers the various tags and the types of account you follow. So, users who like baby animals are more likely to see baby animals up there.
- Timelines: The algorithm shows newer posts first, while considering relevancy at the same time. This means that content based on interest, if posted when a user is online, gets high priority.
Thus, using algorithms, social media apps do their level best to keep you entranced within them. And when combined with other tools, they can do so much more as well, form indirectly deciding your next purchase, to maybe even deciding your next vote, as seen from the Cambridge Analytica case. So is there a way to overcome these seemingly invincible algorithms and overcome social media addiction?
The key to beating them is similar to how you overcome any other addiction, i.e. abstinence. Start small, with taking chunks of dedicated ‘off-time’ from your phone. Create physical distance between you and your device. Turn off those notifications which keep calling you back or allot a set amount of time for which you will use Instagram for. Purge your following list to leave only the ones you truly care about. Instead of keeping up to date with your friends’ and family members’ lives through a screen, spend time with them in the real world and reconnect with them. Make new memories and keep them personal to you — you don’t need to document everything you do in life with selfies.
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