Welcome to 2020, in which “doomscrolling” should be done in doses.

Good afternoon. 

Mary Duan here, and I’m feeling anti-social about social media.

Karen K. Ho, a finance and economics reporter for Quartz, uses the term “doomscrolling” to describe the phenomenon so many of us have indulged in, especially during the pandemic and the long slog to the Nov. 3 election: It’s a constant obsession with the latest bad news that keeps us glued to our phones (or tablets or computers), refreshing and reading the latest bad headlines as the minutes and hours disappear. Ho changed her Twitter moniker to “Doomscrolling Reminder Lady,” and each night reminds people it’s OK to log off, go take some deep breaths, hydrate and get some rest. “How about putting your physical recovery and mental health first by logging off for the night and going to bed early?” she writes.

As consumers, we have the innate ability to turn off and tune out if we choose. 

Or do we?

A Netflix documentary released in August serves as a wake-up call that while we may consider ourselves consumers, the platforms consider us the product. Everything we do online is tracked, analyzed, commoditized, packaged and sold to marketers that package it neatly and spin it back to us so we will buy everything from food and clothing to political candidates.

For companies like Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok and many others, the entire business model is to keep people looking at their screens.

Titled The Social Dilemma and directed by Jeff Orlowski, the documentary seemingly seeks to answer a question from design ethicist Tristan Harris, formerly of Google and co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology: “It feels like the world is going crazy. You have to ask yourself,” Harris says early in the film, “is this normal, or have we all fallen under some kind of spell?”

At Google, Harris worked on the Gmail design team, and found himself increasingly addicted to email. And as a design ethicist, he wondered why nobody was working on a way to make email less addictive. He created a presentation about it, sent it to a group of colleagues and the next day found hundreds of people were reading it and agreeing with him. It reached the office of CEO Larry Page, and Harris says he thought the company would take it seriously and act on it.

“And then, nothing,” he says. 

That’s just email, just one platform. As a result of inaction on how to make email notifications less addictive, Harris points out that 2 billion people will have thoughts they didn’t intend to have because a small group of mostly white guys are making decisions on how those notifications happen.

So take the example of Google and Gmail and extrapolate it out to dozens of other platforms many of us use—Instagram, with its idyllic shots of travel or filters that can wipe so-called imperfections from our faces. Pinterest, which has become part of my brain, because I use it to keep track of everything from recipes and gardening tips to travel plans. Twitter, great for the aforementioned doomscrolling and fighting with people in a way I would not in real life. TikTok—I started down that rabbit hole earlier this month. It was a tradeoff, I told myself, because I was trying to delete Facebook from my life, tired of the conspiracy theories that kept creeping into my feed.

Computer philosophy writer and father of virtual reality Jaron Lanier, who wrote the book Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, points out that our behavior when interacting with these platforms doesn’t change overnight: It’s gradual, slight, imperceptible change in our behavior: “There’s nothing else on the table that could possibly be called a product,” he says. “That’s the only thing there is to make money from.”

When the Trump administration announced Trump had tested positive for Covid, Twitter’s communications team quickly announced that tweets by any user wishing for anyone’s death or harm would be removed—yet those types of tweets are posted regularly, especially for women. Facebook helped tank democracy, allowing as it did for actual fake news to proliferate, but only this week did the company announce it would ban Qanon pages, groups and accounts. 

My week without Facebook was a great one. I’m looking forward to not going back there again. Now I have to work on deleting the rest of the platforms from my life. If I can.

-Mary Duan, managing editor, mary@mcweekly.com