Social media is bigger than ever. Everyone uses some form of social media: Instagram, TikTok, Facebook… These days, it’s the way we communicate and share things with our friends and followers around the world. In the past, you would call people to ask how they were doing. Now, you just check your social media to see what that person is up to at the moment. Nowadays, everyone always knows everything about you: when you were online recently, where you went on holiday, who your friends are… Everything is public.
Almost everyone uses social media. This indirectly ensures that people who do not have social media also want/need to use it. Everyone is aware of everything because it is online, so you don’t want to be left behind. You have to follow and also be on these social media platforms to maintain good contacts and keep up with the times. Today’s world revolves around social media. Everything that is communicated in some way is then immediately posted on social media to ensure that everyone has seen it. Snippets are even made from large fragments so that you can still get the main points.
The snippets seem very innocent, but they can actually have a lot of influence. Everyone sees them and absorbs all this information. By watching lots of short snippets, you can gather a lot of different information from those videos in a very short time. But the danger behind this is that the snippets do not summarise the entire source, but simply show a popular part of the video. The people behind these videos influence what types of snippets are shared on social media. So they are not very transparent and can be capable of influencing people. This happens without you even realising it.
“Your political preference: your own choice or influenced by social media?” (Zonneveld, 2023)
Influencers and algorithms ensure that you unconsciously adopt different viewpoints on topics such as politics. If you watch a lot of videos about extreme right-wing parties, for example, you will only get more videos about this. Once you get caught up in this extreme right-wing spiral, it is not easy to get out of it. Your entire “for you” page will be filled with similar posts, and that is all you will see. Everyone with extreme right-wing accounts enters your bubble, and in this way, you influence each other by discussing these topics. This prevents you from viewing the entire situation and all options transparently. You are forced to adopt a certain way of thinking and do not even realise that you are being swept up in these kinds of things. Social media has you in its grip, and ultimately there is nothing you can do about it. You no longer see the difference between “good” and “evil”; you have only one opinion, and social media sucks you right into it.
Social media was originally used for entertainment and to communicate with others. The whole thing has now simply gotten out of hand, because it is also being used as a kind of strategic weapon that is easy to deploy, since so many people use it. Many people are also lazy, so they don’t bother to read the privacy terms and conditions and are fine with it all. As a user, you have the right to change these privacy settings. This allows you, for example, to prevent your search history from being stored, to turn off automatic algorithms (so you don’t get caught up in that spiral of thoughts), to make certain data invisible to other people… There are so many ways to protect yourself, but yet this is rarely done. People secretly enjoy having a “for you” page filled with things they like. They can lose themselves in it for hours.
Personally, I was done with this endless scrolling on social media. I was in a very deep spiral and, as a result, I was no longer really thinking for myself about whether all this was real, I just assumed it was. Because I didn’t want this anymore, I turned off all the automatic algorithms and only came across fun videos that I wanted to see by searching for them in the search bar. This has helped me enormously to view things more purposefully and not get caught up in that endless scrolling. Because of this change in how I use social media, I also spend much less time on these apps, as suddenly it wasn’t all that interesting anymore. I am now very happy with this change in my social media use. I can look up things much more myself and only watch things that I need at that moment, which is much less addictive than aimless scrolling.
Admin. (2023, 12 juli). Tips to Beat the Instagram Algorithm. My Blog. https://digitalrosogulla.com/tips-to-beat-the-instagram-algorithm/
The Dare Company – https://www.thedarecompany.com. (z.d.). Hoe bepaalt het social media algoritme wat jij ziet? The Dare Company. https://www.thedarecompany.com/blog/hoe-bepaalt-het-social-media-algoritme-wat-jij-ziet
Zonneveld, F. (2023, 21 november). Jouw politieke voorkeur: eigen keuze of beïnvloed door sociale media? NPO 3FM. https://www.npo3fm.nl/nieuws/human/25295dfb-fec2-4f65-ac7a-e08f8fd09677/jouw-politieke-voorkeur-eigen-keuze-of-beinvloed-door-sociale-media
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