How Do Social Media Algorithms Intensify Addiction or Mental Health Issues?

Yes, so one thing I want to separate the algorithms from the addiction a little bit, the compulsive use—we call it. There are many tools baked into these products on compulsive use; algorithms are one of them. And I’ll give you a specific example on how that works. But I also just want to add, it’s not just the algorithms, because I think people associate algorithms with content more.

It’s also things like the continuous scroll, the endless feed. There was a moment in time when you could look at your feed on Facebook and you would look for a little bit and then it would say you’ve come to the end of your feed, you’ve come to the end, right? But what did people do when they came to the end? Oh, okay, well then I’m going to go make dinner, or I’m going to go do my homework, or I’m going to—so they got rid of that.

And so now you have the endless feed. You have the pull to refresh—that is a slot machine mechanic—and you never know, that little surprise of when I pull to refresh, what’s going to pop up. That gets you a little dopamine hit, the gamification feature. So there’s all these little things in addition to the algorithms.

Now there’s one story from a former engineer that I think helps to best explain how the algorithms themselves can be addictive. The story is essentially: at one point you have these engineers at Facebook saying, hey kids aren’t sleeping at night. One thing we could do is we could design a feature so that every day when a kid opens the account it’ll say, what time do you want to go to bed? And the kid selects 10:00, and either an hour or two before, all we have to do is program the account to slow the algorithm, right? It’s the speed of the algorithm.

And if we were to just slow the algorithm—even on like January 6 they didn’t turn off the algorithm, that would be catastrophic—just turning it off, they slow it. And by slowing it, it gives us more choice, user choice, autonomy. It’s not learning in real time the thing that will keep us most engaged. It gives us the ability to choose for ourselves: do I want to keep scrolling, do I not?

So that’s an example of how the algorithm would work in terms of compulsive use. But the other big piece of those algorithms that are just wildly harmful: it’s not about content. It’s not about—these cases are not about kids who choose to go on social media and choose to look up things like suicide, self-harm, drugs, and happen to find it online. The issue is the programming.

So when you go onto a traditional search engine and you search for Chinese restaurant, you get a listing of Chinese restaurants. When you search for Gay Pride, you get examples of Gay Pride. With the social media algorithm programming, it is not about user choice. They took that program and flipped it on its head. It is now about the platform objective.

So the number one criteria is: what is our objective? And the social media companies that currently dominate, monopolize the market, their number one objective is engagement, which means that you are being shown not what you have asked to see, not what you even at least consciously want to see. You are being shown what the platform wants to show you, because its technologies have determined that that will keep you from looking away.

Examples are—and I see the data on the back end often—I see young children looking for BMX racing and getting dangerous challenges on TikTok. I see 16-year-old boys who just went through a breakup; Mason Edens is the one that comes to mind, and he was searching for inspirational quotes, and even the inspirational quote you can still see in the search bar, he got something that was depressing and sort of heartbreak-oriented, but then he also got a whole bunch of suicide and self-harm videos.

The algorithm will turn and they will not feed kids what the kids want to see. They feed these children what they can’t look away from.

I want to add to this part of why the experience is different for adults. One of many reasons is that they are designing their products, they are programming and designing around children. And the reason—in one of the publicly available Meta documents it says something to the effect of—we have saturated the adult market; our only opportunity for new growth, or for growth, are the 4 million new teens that start using the internet each year.

So in the product development decks that are publicly available and have been published, what you will see is they are making changes to these products that are targeted literally at undeveloped frontal lobes. That document has brain scans in it, and they talk with an arrow pointing to the undeveloped frontal lobe, talking about how it makes children more vulnerable, more reliant on emotion.

And so then it goes on to talk about product changes like putting more lower quality content in their feed, their discover feed, removing duplication. So all of these changes they’re making, they’re not geared towards our brains—they’re geared towards kids. So when I use the product, it’s not going to have the same impact necessarily. It may, but it’s not meant to. We’re the saturated market, right? It’s the young people that they need to hook.