Deconstructing Social Media

Thoughts from Semafor's Wellbeing Summit

I sit here on Tuesday afternoon after having attended Semafor’s summit on, “The Global State of Wellbeing.” Speakers ranged from researchers, technologists, psychoanalysts, academics, and even nutritionists. Although the summit did not exclusively discuss technology and its role in supporting or eroding mental wellbeing — in an era where one out of every four people around the world reports that they are lonely and where one in five Americans is socially isolated—the conversation inevitably went in that direction. Shortly after the summit concluded, the news broke that 33 states are suing Meta for harming teens’ mental health.

Despite evidence to suggest that the rise of social media correlates with a decline in global happiness, speakers made various arguments regarding how social media may help or harm wellbeing. For every argument saying that Instagram foments depression among teenage girls, there was a counterargument about social media’s ability to bring people together and form community where none existed before. Additionally, a common theme ran through the conversation: social media can help or harm wellbeing depending on how individuals use it.

As I sat in the back of the conference room, I realized that although these pro/con-style arguments seemed contradictory, they are actually complementary. Understanding how social media can both help and harm mental wellbeing can help us think more critically about how to build healthier platforms.

There was a consensus at the meeting that the most mentally harmful part of social media is scrollable feeds, where people compare themselves against the curated profiles of their friends and acquaintances and measure their own self esteem by the number of “likes” on their posts. In today’s social media, these feeds are the products that platform companies promote the most; they are most responsible for bringing users back to the platform and monetizing them via advertisements. Within the context of mental health, there are misaligned incentives between platforms that monetize attention with advertisements and individuals who are seeking to engage in a healthy manner with their networks.

However, social media does have wellbeing benefits in terms of bringing people together. A hypothetical example: a transgender kid in conservative Iowa can now connect with more tolerant communities outside of their state. Another: a person with disabilities and limited mobility can connect with friends online based on mutual interests. A third: a bullied teenager can seek mental health support and mentorship from creators who have gone through the same struggles. Pre-social media, in various ways, these three people were alone. Now they are not, at least not in a digital sense.

What ties these three hopeful narratives together is that they can occur beyond the addictive and comparison-driven environments of scrollable news feeds; they can happen in private messages, groups, and from promoted videos from credible content creators.

Perhaps, as we look towards creating a healthier social media, there is a high-level playbook: focusing on one-to-one or small-group communication and amplifying “quality” content rather than pushing out random user-generated content on news feeds. Simply put: get rid of the bad features and build around the good ones.

Some good news on this front: the era of news feeds may be waning. The core Facebook app is hemorrhaging users in the US, particularly young ones (source: data.ai). The app formerly known as Twitter has become a dumpster fire, also hemorrhaging users. Tik Tok’s feed is still problematic, both from a mental health and a scrolling perspective. Nevertheless Ben Thompson (the author of the tech newsletter “Stratechery”) and others have argued that we are in a transitional period in social media, where companies are moving away from old-fashioned feeds.

Regardless, deconstructing social media — to focus on the features most likely to foster connection and away from those likely to cause anxiety and depression — is a first step to thinking about what a social media looks like that brings people together and supports wellbeing. Demonizing social media as “all bad” or lionizing it as “all good” misses opportunities to build an internet that supports our collective thriving rather than simply harvesting our attention and wellbeing for clicks.