I was just recently asked to look at a study of Facebook, made in 2012, for my online Ethics class at my local university.

The Facebook 2012 study refers to the social media company’s manipulation of the feed of users to see if it affects the posting of positive of negative posts. “Posts were determined to be positive or negative if they contained at least one positive or negative word, as defined by Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count software.” The findings of the study found reducing positive content in users’ News Feeds led to fewer positive posts and more negative posts. Reducing negative content led to fewer negative posts and more positive posts. So there is some evidence for emotional spread.

Firstly for a bit of background about myself, I don’t use any social media at present, not Twitter (X), not Facebook, not Tiktok, not Instagram, not Reddit. I recently gave up using Youtube. I am 32 years of age and I live in the city centre of Inverness so I get my social interaction from real life person to person interactions, usually via social groups. Although I am neurodiverse so perhaps I get less of a dopamine hit than neurotypicals. I understand some people live in the countryside or in isolated suburbs where they have little access to public transport, have little access to real in life social groups. Some people are tight with money because they’d rather spend on holidays, save for a deposit for a house/car, or are saving for whatever consumer possession.

However I have used FB in the past when I was at university in Glasgow in the early 2010s and I did at one time find a use for it. You’d meet people at parties and social events and you’d only have to get their first name (or sometimes second name too) and you’d add them on FB and then you could browse their posts, their pictures and learn something about them without going through all the tedious usual questions in conversations. You couldn’t always be at a party of course. There would be be recovery days (from the drinking of alcohol) and time when you were waiting in between lectures or just procrastinating instead of studying. There would be groups for your Major. There would be social events (pub crawls, football etc) via the website. I think in this way Facebook was once actually quite a useful and socially useful website. It complemented social activity. However since I have left university in 2013 I have struggled to find  a use for FB.  I have often found the website to be a hive of unpleasantness and toxicity. There is lots of venting, lots of complaining, posting of toxic content, misinformation etc. The people on it seem lonely and angry.

I remember enjoying the film Social Network when it came out in 2010 and thinking Zuckerberg was some sort of world changer. Perhaps he was. His original vision was a way university students could advertise their relationships status (to their peers) and view pictures of each other. It was a website to complement the social activity of the university campus. To quote Justin Timberlake when he was asked about monetizing the site he replied “the Facebook is cool, thats what its got going for it, you don’t want to ruin it with ads because ads aren’t cool, its like your throwing the greatest party on campus and somebody saying its gotta be over by eleven. You don’t even know what the thing is yet.”  The line ends with Timberlake stating the goal isn’t a million dollars but a billion dollars. The original vision of the site has been corrupted in my opinion by greed and profit. 

With regard to people who use it nowadays, its difficult for me to relate. Nobody in my family or close circle of friends really uses the website regularly. My only real advice is to leave the site.

https://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788

Here is the Facebook study link for those who are curious.