The Social Dilemma: Is Social Media Really Affecting Our Mental Health?

In the wake of Netflix’s hit docudrama, many people are rightly concerned about the negative effects of Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms on our self-confidence, body image, and psychological wellbeing — but are there other forces at play, too?

Netflix’s hit docudrama The Social Dilemma paints a dystopian picture of social media, arguing that Silicon Valley’s pervasive technology is now an existential threat to humanity. Having spent the past decade fine tuning their now very smart algorithms, the brains behind Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, among the other dominant platforms, have got us hooked. With the average adult worldwide spending two hours a day on social media, and the average American teenager spending up to nine hours a day, research estimates that social-media addiction now affects almost half a million people globally. But just how bad is social media for our mental health?

The film argues that social media is highly addictive, manipulatively designed on the basis of an ‘attention extraction model’ to control our behaviour, keep us scrolling and wanting more. In doing so, it exploits our human desire for the connection to and validation of others, giving us a dopamine hit every time we get a like or reply, without ever actually fulfilling our deep human needs. This can lead, as the documentary argues, to a whole host of negative emotions, which drive us back to social media for that quick fix.

As such, social media becomes a kind of digital pacifier, a maladaptive coping strategy, used whenever we feel lonely, uncomfortable or sad. As argued by the film’s protagonist Tristan Harris, former Google design ethicist and founder of the Centre for Humane Technology, this is a huge danger to our mental wellbeing, which is only going to increase due to the lack of regulation in place for these companies.

Fear of the unknown

While the documentary’s hyperbolic framing is compelling, the fear of new technologies is nothing new. “It is natural to be concerned about any new technology that reaches a certain level of popularity in society, and so also to be concerned about social media,” Dr Amy Orben, research fellow at Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge, tells Vogue. But are our concerns misplaced?

Read more: vogue