Adolescent Mental Health and Social Media Algorithms

mental health social media algorithms ethics

Adolescent Mental Health and Social Media Algorithms

Have you ever wondered why when you open YouTube you get videos recommended to you that have nothing to do with your interests, but intrigue you enough to watch the video? Have you ever wondered why when using Facebook you get recommended mutual friends of people who you weren’t even aware you were mutual friends with? The social media algorithms behind why we are shown these things are very complex and often intriguing to analyze. For college students and adolescents (Millenial/Gen-Z), we have interacted with technology on a deeper level than any generation. However, the question we need to ask is how these types of interactions make us feel and how they affect our mental health. We have inadvertently become the lab experiment for tech companies to perform their experiments on and we are only now paying attention to the effects of this. Although there is a way to make our tech experiences more ethical and less exploitative, the process and steps for change are grueling and complex. In this essay, I will be attacking these issues and providing potential solutions for the process.

Abstract

The technology behind the most common apps we use such as Facebook, Twitter, even Google, all use a very basic but increasingly complex concept called an algorithm. An algorithm is defined as “a step-by-step procedure for solving a problem or accomplishing some end” (Merriam-Webster, 2021). An algorithm can be as simple as a recipe for cooking food, building a piece of furniture, or cleaning a certain object, or as complex as determining the fastest route between two cities while making the minimum number of stops possible. In the context of social media and modern marketing, algorithms are used to provide recommendations for a certain product. For example, if you use Google to search about dogs, the algorithm behind the scenes will use that keyword to show you advertisements based on anything to do with dogs. This type of algorithm is the same for apps like Instagram or Facebook, where if you search a particular topic, you will be recommended to follow/add people who are influential in that topic. This would not seem very problematic at first glance, but where the danger lies is HOW these algorithms can be used to actively influence what people think and what people see. This in turn can have unforeseen effects on the users’ mental health.

The Problem

Adolescents have grown up in a world that was vastly different from their parents with the amount of technology that is in their lives. This leads to the area of study of how adolescents’ mental health is affected by social media. One of the biggest sub-sections of analyzing mental health is with depression, anxiety and attention. A term that has risen in its usage within the past two decades is FOMO, which means fear of missing out. FOMO is defined as “an anxiety that an exciting or interesting event may currently be happening elsewhere, often aroused by posts seen on social media.” (Oxford Languages, 2021) FOMO is a serious source of stress in all ages, but is much more prominent in children and young adults, since they are exposed to much more social media content than their older counterparts. In a study led by Christopher Barry of Washington State University’s Department of Psychology, it was found that adolescents who had a higher number of social media accounts experienced a higher number of depressive/anxiety symptoms, and ultimately FOMO than their counterparts who had less social media accounts. It was also observed that the more social media accounts a person between the age of 0-24 had, the more likely they were to exhibit attention disorders and hyperactivity. (Barry et al., 2017)

An even more negative aspect of social media that is often overlooked is the internet’s effect on suicide rates. In social psychology, the term behavioral contagion, or the Contagion Effect, is the tendency for certain behaviors demonstrated by one person to be imitated by observers. The Contagion Effect is a negative psychological behavior that flies under the radar because it can also be exhibited for good behaviors although not nearly as much as negative behaviors. A disturbing example is the “Blue Whale” game which came about in 2017. The Blue Whale game stems from Russia where in 2016, a man named Philipp Budeikin made a group where a person would do a set of 50 commands (one per day) which would go from simple things like brush your teeth, to progressively more toxic things like self-harm culminating on the 50th day, where you would be asked to commit suicide should one have made it to this point. Budeikin pled guilty to inciting at least 16 teenage girls to commit suicide and two counts of inducing suicide of a minor. It is unsure how many people took responsibility for creating the Blue Whale game but there have been three arrests from 2017 in Moscow, Russia related to deaths from the Blue Whale game (BBC News, 2017). This is an extreme example of what behavioral contagion can lead to, but the outcomes remain similar. According to the Healthy Minds Study which asked 10,000 students at Washington colleges including UW, WSU, and community colleges, various questions about their mental health. Approximately 80% of students indicated that they had emotional stress related to their academic performance, and about 33% indicated that they suffered from depression. Sadly, five percent indicated that they intended to end their life. (Long, 2018)

Solutions

The current business model of most social media is maximizing profit through personalized advertisements, in-app purchases, data collection, and app engagement. Currently, aggressive tactics like these are more heavily used than ethical software development and will be for quite some time. There are many psychological tactics at play that bring people to engage with these apps. One of the most noticeable and common ways of app engagement is with infinite scrolling. Infinite scrolling was created by computer scientist Aza Raskin in 2006. However, The psychological concept of infinite scrolling is not new. In a study led by Brian Wansink, he found that people are able to be tricked into eating soup more if you offer them bowls that have the capability of refilling themselves. It was found that those who did not know they were eating from a self-refilling bowl ate 73% more soup than people who had normal bowls and did not think they had eaten more (Wansink et al., 2005). This is the psychological concept of why infinite scrolling works so well since it toys with how our brain actually operates. Raskin has stated how remorseful he has felt about the innovation for many years and has made many steps to improving ethical software design and is a part of many organizations that advocate for open-source and ethical technology. A quote from Raskin states, that “it’s as if social media companies are taking behavioral cocaine and just sprinkling it all over your interface and that’s the thing that keeps you like coming back and back and back.” The best way to tackle the addictive habits of social media are designing these applications in a way that does not promote habit formation. I am fortunate enough to be dealing with this concept of ethical design in my internship at Microsoft. A part of my introductory learning was Microsoft’s best design practices and while learning I learned the history of how the user experience of their products has evolved over time to promote accessibility and inclusivity in all forms of their products. Ethical design going forward would require a massive industry mindset shift, but with open-source technology and a desire to avoid unethical practices becoming more prevalent, it is already becoming a positive trend. On a personal level, the best practices to avoid becoming addicted to social media are to limit the amount of social media accounts one has, as well as acknowledging how much time you are spending on social media. Equally as important, is identifying which apps have features that are designed to keep you engaged with them for prolonged amounts of time and doing your best to stay away or limit your usage of those features as much as possible.

The long-term solution is a lot harder to implement and takes a wide array of milestones to be reached before anything concrete is set in stone. In particular, the United States has been a solid source of tech innovation around the world bringing apps such as TikTok, Facebook, and Twitter into many millions of people’s lives. Woefully, there have been some heavy misuses of these apps for malicious purposes and these misuses have contributed to events that many of us only a few years ago would have never thought possible. In Europe, there has been a heavy call for citizens’ data rights to be respected by tech companies who rely on that data for their platform analytics. In response, the European Union crafted the General Data Protection Regulation as a solution and has had a massive positive influence on how tech companies operate with user data. According to the European Commission, “69% of the population above the age of 16 in the EU have heard about the GDPR and 71% of people heard about their national data protection authority.” (European Commission, 2020) Also according to Digiday, behavioral advertising in Europe fell 25-40% after the GDPR was implemented. (Davies, 2018) Unfortunately, due to the political and economic climate in the United States, this is much harder to achieve and would require a significant amount of effort that would not be accompanied by an actual will to implement such a regulation. However, we can analyze what it would take for such a regulation to be implemented in the United States. The first steps would be to update and improve the current definitions for what is encompassed under privacy rights for a U.S. citizen. Next, Net Neutrality would have to be reinstated and improved under the FCC. Additionally, there would need to be a new federal commission dedicated solely to Cybersecurity and Data which would deal with issues like ethical design, data storage and rights, and data security, so that we can define a comprehensive framework for how our data should be handled and protected by anyone seeking to use our data. Finally, tech companies would need to be held to a higher standard and be kept in check much harder regarding their practices with user data. Currently, companies are fined too little for data breaches and are going as far as marking these fines as business expenses when running the numbers for each fiscal year. This leaves no incentive for no companies to act ethically when handling user data and informing users when there is a breach.

The Washington State University community was hit hard with the unforeseen suicide of the star quarterback Tyler Hilinski. Unfortunately, they were not able to determine a motive, despite him being a very successful quarterback during his tenure. Pullman Police Department reported from February 16 2020-2021, three deaths by suicide, 62 attempted suicides, and 58 threats of suicide. Individuals who were taken to the hospital were men and women in their 20’s. (Fairbanks-Clouser, n.d.) Some individuals have stated that suicide was the only way to end their pain. Students at Washington State University can be put under immense stress for a variety of reasons. Cougar Health Services published data stating that 86% of Washington State University students felt overwhelmed, and 64% stated they felt very lonely. These feelings of overwhelming stress and loneliness can lead to serious depression, anxiety and suicide if not carefully monitored and approached with care. Washington State University has done a great job at providing resources for people who have these feelings and does great research at the Department of Psychology. However, there are limited resources dealing specifically with emotional intelligence and well-being. Students who are exposed to emotional manipulation may not exhibit the typical signs a depressed person would, but can show signs that can end up leading to these symptoms if not analyzed. A majority of emotional abuse comes from relationships and can even come from cyberbullying. Currently, emotional intelligence courses are only offered to employees of the school who are completing their pre-work training (WSU Human Resource Services, 2021). I believe this course and knowledge should be offered to all students so they can identify these signs in their own relationships.

Conclusion

Changing the way we interact with social media is imperative going forward as it becomes increasingly integrated with our daily lives. One of the more dystopian examples of how social media can affect our lives is the Black Mirror episode titled, Nosedive (Season 3, Ep. 1). In Nosedive, society has evolved to a point where each person is associated with a rating out of five that directly influences how people perceive you, and ultimately what you can and cannot do, a social credit score if you will. For example, only people with a four and above rating can rent cars and you can only board a plane with a 4.5 rating and above. This episode has been described as one of the terrifying episodes of the series because of how frighteningly close we are to this reality already. The episode culminates with the main character embracing that their credit score really means nothing to them despite all the consequences it gets them along the way. Interestingly enough, China has already implemented a social credit score much to the world’s shock. It is imperative to emphasize the benefit of using technology as a tool to enhance our lives and increase our efficiency and productivity. Ethical design, emotional intelligence awareness, and data privacy, and many others are effects of technology that we must never lose sight of as we head into an increasingly technologically advanced society.

References