Today, Explained - Like, bye

Episode Date: September 11, 2019

Facebook and Instagram are thinking about ditching the thumbs and hearts. What would life be like without "Likes"? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello? Hello, Sean number two. Hey, how you doing? Hey, it's Sean number one. Long time no talk. Yeah, honestly. How long has it been? I mean, it's been since my brother and your sister broke up. Yeah, so long How long has it been?

Yeah, so long. Sorry about that. It's all good. We're working on an episode about social media today. And seven years ago, it's 2012. I'm, I don't know, what, like 27? You're like what? How old were you in 2012? I was like 14.

14, right? You had just entered high school. And I remember I hit 100 followers on Instagram or something. And I was like, ooh, 100 followers. And your sister was like, 100 followers is nothing. And I was like, what do you mean? And she was like, my brother's got like over 1,000. And I was like, oh, my God, is he famous or something?

And she was like, no, ding dong. He's just in high school. Everyone in high school has like 1,000 followers. Yeah, it's weird. And I was just like, whoa. And then I was like, how does he use Instagram? Like, what is his style of use if he's got like 1,000 followers? And Alex told me, she she said sean will like post a photo and within like 20 minutes if it doesn't get like at least a hundred likes he'll just delete it

yeah that was me back in the day yeah when i really cared about the the image of social media and how it affected my followers and i'm not like that anymore as much, but back then, yeah, definitely. How did you decide what got deleted and what stayed up? So if I, so normally how I decided to photos, it was like say I went on like a trip or something and I got like a cool photo of myself or me with a friend. And I'd also time when I would post it. So when people during the week would most be on their phone.

So in high school, it was around Sunday night when everyone's trying to do homework, but no one really does homework. So I'll just chill it on their phone around 6 p.m. is when I normally post it. So everyone probably on their phones from 6 to 11 before school. So that's when I'd post all my photos. And sometimes I'd really notice if I posted on like a Tuesday at like 1 PM, I would get maybe a hundred less likes, 150 less likes, which is really odd because it was back then it was all chronological,

but I, I saw a big drop in my likes when I posted it during the week or like on a Friday night at 8 PM. If I posted it, it wouldn't, it wouldn't get nearly as many likes. So my process was, it was kind of a weird thing.

It was for every 10 minutes, if I didn't get four times that on my like likes, it was kind of a weird thing. It was for every 10 minutes, if I didn't get four times that on my likes, then I would delete it. So like 10 minutes, if I'm not at 40 likes or something, then I would just delete it, for example. I am by no means trying to blow up Sean No. 2's spot. Sean No. 2 doesn't even use the gram like that anymore, but a whole lot of people do.

Because Instagram likes can make you rich, famous, and miserable. Kendall Jenner went dark on Instagram, and now she's explaining why. I would wake up in the morning and I would look at it first thing. I would go to bed and it was the last thing I would look at. I felt a little too dependent on it. With millions of social media followers, it seemed like the last thing a 21-year-old supermodel would do was cut the cord between her and her legions of fans.

I'll be back. I'll come back. How long has it been? Just two days. It's been two days. Okay, so... What up, everyone? It's your girl, Lily. I am planning to take a break from YouTube. I am mentally, physically, emotionally, and spiritually exhausted.

A lot of celebrities are starting to do drugs. They dying now because they doing drugs. You want to know why? Because social media, not even social media, the media, the blogs, they drive people crazy. And that shit is sickening. Now, Instagram, its divisive dad, Facebook, and other social media companies are responding to the fatigue.

They're all talking about losing the likes. Facebook is considering running a test to hide the amount of likes on posts and pictures. This is according to TechCrunch. Instagram is already testing this feature and Facebook owns Instagram. So far, the response has been more positive than negative. Arielle Partis has been writing about this whole disliking social media thing for Wired? Yeah, so Instagram has been the most forward about it. This is a pilot that they've launched just this year, but they've started removing some of the metrics on Instagram in some countries. And they haven't said officially

that they plan to roll this out to other markets, but it looks promising at this point. Adam Masseri, the head of Instagram, has been really vocal about trying to make the platform a nicer place. And one of the ideas to sort of make that happen is to remove things like follower counts or like counts. Because we don't want Instagram to be such a competition. We want it to be a place where people spend more of their energy connecting with the people that they love and the things that they care about. Twitter has also, just as of this year, done some experiments with hiding likes and retweets.

That's been on their prototyping app, which is called Twitter with a lowercase t. Again, they haven't made any official comment about whether or not that's going to roll out to the main platform, but it's something that they're looking at. And then YouTube has also made some small steps in this direction. They recently changed the way they display subscriber counts so that the number of subscribers is sort of rounded and it's not as precise. And recently it came out that Facebook is trying to do something similar. Do we know what Facebook is trying to do? We do and we don't. We do know that they're experimenting with a system that would hide like counts. And we basically know that because of some thoughtful reverse engineering in the Facebook app, which suggests that they're doing something

similar to what Instagram has already begun rolling out, some kind of system that would hide likes in particular. Facebook is like what? I mean, it's the biggest country in the world. It's an enormous platform that really helped make this whole like culture a thing, is rolling it back basically saying like, hey, that wasn't such a great idea. I think so. Facebook and its executives haven't been quite as vocal about this as other people in Silicon Valley.

But we've heard, for example, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey say very explicitly that he doesn't think the platform should have had likes all along. It's sort of an open question as to whether or not you can really change the culture at this point, or if it's too late, if we've already sort of trained our minds to think in this like-oriented way. Mark Zuckerberg, to my knowledge, hasn't said anything explicitly about, you know, admitting that maybe Facebook was responsible for

creating some kind of negative culture around liking and posting. But it does seem like, at least in their experiments, they're acknowledging that maybe there's a better way. Might it affect the bottom line of any of these social media platforms? Do we know? Yeah, I mean, that's a million-dollar question, a billion-dollar question, really. I think the answer is yes, but it remains to be seen exactly how. Some platforms like Twitter, for example, they've suggested in their early experiments that actually engagement is not as good when they've removed the metrics from the platform. So there's some indication there that maybe you're making the place a little bit nicer.

You're making the posting environment a little bit more friendly, but that maybe it affects engagement in a way that affects profit. But then on the other hand, Facebook is bleeding users. Facebook isn't cool anymore. It's the place where your parents hang out. It's the place where maybe you friended your high school teacher and you get like sporadic updates about their dog. Facebook has sort of lost its cachet and there's been this great migration to Instagram, which is of course also owned by Facebook. So in one sense, like they could actually improve their bottom line by making Facebook a place that people want to go and want to post and find meaning in. And so if changing the likes changes the culture enough that it draws people back,

in theory, it could improve their bottom line. Arielle, you disliked your social media way before it was cool. Tell me how exactly that happened. Last year, I met this guy named Ben Grosser. He's an artist and a UX designer. And in 2012, he started building these little hacky tools that he calls demetricators. He's made them for Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. And what they do is they remove all of the numbers from the platform. So you install one of Ben's demetricators on Google Chrome. And then when you log onto one of these platforms from your browser,

you don't see any of the numbers that show how many likes or retweets or comments or even timestamps in some cases. So I became sort of obsessed with Ben and his vision, which is very much an artistic one, right? Like Ben isn't trying to necessarily force these platforms to change something about the way they present information, but he is trying to make an artistic statement about how we've come to assign value to the numbers. So how did you feel when you started demetricating with this plugin? When I first started using the demetricators, it was a little bit scary. But over time, it sort of led me to believe that I was putting too much value in things like how many likes or retweets or comments that my posts were getting. It really made me aware of how quickly I was judging other people's profiles for how many followers they had,

or how quickly I was judging somebody else's post for how many likes it received. Did it change the way you felt while you were using these platforms? Yeah. There's a sort of blissful oblivion when you don't know how well something is performing. It sort of gave me the freedom to imagine that perhaps my post had gone viral. And perhaps no one liked it at all, right? So it did make me feel less anxious. I mean, when you can't check something, I think you do feel anxious initially. But over time, you come to sort of just feel like it doesn't matter,

which in the end, it doesn't. Did you ever cheat? Did you ever like grab someone else's phone and look at one of your Instagram posts to see how it did? I did cheat once. I had a relapse. There was one tweet that just was such a funny tweet. Like I just knew that it was going to perform well. And I sent it out on Twitter. And then I just couldn't help myself. I opened Twitter in another browser without the demetricator installed. And sure enough, it was getting tons of likes and retweets and applause on the internet. And I felt the tremendous dopamine rush that I had been missing all along and thought, oh, demedication is for losers.

It's almost as if knowing how well the tweet was doing was a form of blissful oblivion. What is this stuff done to our brains, though, you know? It really, it really does make me feel like an addict in a sense to think about how much of a rush I get from seeing a tweet perform well. And even that, that phrase that we use, right? Like a post performing well feels so gross and reductive, but I'm addicted to it. After the break, what has this stuff done to our brains, though? I'm going to go. lawyer who once served as the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, which is like the most storied federal prosecutor's office in the country. Yes, I'm talking about Preet Bharara. And yes, I'm talking about his podcast. Stay tuned with Preet. Preet digs into major issues surrounding justice, power, law, and democracy with his other really smart guests. Previous guests include Pete Buttigieg, Bryan Stevenson, Bill Browder,

and he approaches the subjects with his signature calm and wit. He's a gentleman, smart guests. Previous guests include Pete Buttigieg, Brian Stevenson, Bill Browder, and he approaches the subjects with his signature calm and wit. He's a gentleman, he's a scholar, he answers audience questions and speaks with the people shaping our history. They got a show coming out tomorrow with retired FDNY captain Brenda Berkman. She was one of the first women firefighters in New York. She talks about suing the city twice to get the chance to serve and what happened when after the first plane hit on 9-11 she rushed to the nearest firehouse and spent the next few months of her life helping out. That episode comes out tomorrow but you can subscribe to the show right now. Stay tuned with Preet, that's P-R-E-E-T. It's playing wherever your podcasts are playing.

Would you mind saying your name and how you'd like us to identify you for purposes? Candice Audgers. I'm a professor of psychological science at the University of California, Irvine. I imagine that means you teach young people, huh? I do. I spend a lot of my time interacting with young people both on campus and then also in our studies where we track young people on their mobile devices. And how are the young people doing? You know, that's a really good question. There's actually a lot of positive things about this generation, things that we don't talk about a lot. So young people today actually are the most connected, educated, the least violent, engaging a lot less risky activities. So rates of violence, rates of substance use, rates of teen pregnancy have been falling for the last decade or at some of the lowest points that we've seen.

So on a lot of metrics that we've really cared a lot about historically, so education, teen pregnancy, violence, substance use, the young people today look okay. Actually, they look a lot better than we did. What's the flip side to that? Is there one? Yeah, so there has been a flip side, and what we've seen has been troubling. There have been rises in depression, anxiety, suicidal behaviors among young people. Now, it's important to put this in perspective also. The increase has been stark, especially among young girls around suicidal behavior. Suicide has been increasing among every age group in the United States. And interestingly, the United States is actually an outlier worldwide where the suicide rate is declining globally.

What do you make of this argument that social media is the reason kids are sadder, more anxious, more suicidal? Yeah, I guess to kind of put it nicely, it's kind of a crazy idea. But it's one that's really taken off. So people have strong beliefs about this, and this is something that can cause an argument pretty quickly. Adults in particular like to blame smartphones for the downfall of this generation as they see it.

And it's been an easy target for a lot of people to point to smartphones as the cause of things that they don't like to see among this generation or among young people. David became withdrawn and stopped talking to his parents until they took matters into their own hands. I got woken up, 4 a.m., just two guys with my bags packed, and I was pretty frightened at first, but, I mean... Did you know these guys? No. My parents had hired them to take me here. They forced David into the Paradigm Malibu rehab facility for 30 days to treat his social media addiction. I'm curious, like, if we've seen this kind of

hysteria before. Is the way people want to scapegoat social media comparable to the way some people want to scapegoat video games for causing mass shootings? So I think there are some contemporary examples like video games where we know that there's a very small linkage between aggression and violent video game usage that basically that association is explained by individuals who are more aggressive, tending to seek out that kind of content, and that it's not a major contributor to what we're seeing now in terms of shootings, etc. So there's some contemporary examples, but there are a lot of historical examples. Going back to Socrates, when the pen and writing came into fashion. The pen? Yes, yes. This was going to damage the mind because we would no longer hold things in our mind when we can hold them on paper.

There are all kinds of historical kind of writings on whenever a new technology is introduced, panic about how this will change in a harmful way. So we saw hysteria around the opening of public libraries, for example, you know, more recently, comic books or radio, rock and roll. So adults generally don't like how young people spend their time. Now, this has been a pretty extreme time, right? So we're going through one of the kind of most rapid,

stark digital transformations we have seen. And so there might be something different about this time. Is there anything to the argument? I mean, is there a correlation? Is there anything scientific that points to a causation to say mental health issues, depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, suicidal ideation, and social media? So, you know, we've been looking at this for a while. We started about a decade ago following young people on their mobile devices, and we weren't interested in this question at all at that point. We just wanted to follow young people through their daily lives to get better measures of their mental health. And we thought we could do that by getting kind of in-the-moment reports on how young people were feeling, what they were doing, what types of things might be triggering depressive symptoms, anxiety, etc. So what have you found? You see very little strong evidence of a meaningful link between depressive symptoms, anxiety, and the amount of time that young people are spending on social media and digital technologies.

In fact, in our most recent study, when we did find effects, they were actually in the opposite direction. So young people who were spending more time texting throughout the course of two weeks were actually reporting less depressive symptoms throughout that time. Wow. It's like you have to take that into consideration while also taking into consideration the fact that

sometimes you just look at social media and feel sad, right? And then sometimes, obviously, you look at social media and you see some guy with this thick Chicago accent chasing down like a coyote in a field to try and help it, and you feel nothing but joy. You need help. You know, and I just don't want to get bitten. I want to help you, but I don't want to get bitten. Did some redneck shoot your parents? What's going on? Come on, hey.

It's okay. I'm not going to fuck with you. Not in a bad way. But please don't bite me. But I've had my rabies spider. if it makes you feel any better it's okay what happened to your folks social media much like life will make you happy it'll make you sad but kids are getting sadder might it have something to do with pressure to perform on social media to keep up with everyone else's likes and retweets and shares?

So it's interesting the types of social comparisons that are happening on social media. These social comparisons have happened all the time, whether it was advertising or people in kind of your real lives. And of course, it's amplified now in a social media and digital environment. It's very possible that social media has negative effects on mental health for some individuals. The common trend that we see is that individuals who are struggling, experiencing mental health problems, struggling offline, tend to have the worst experiences online. So are more likely to have social media experiences that spill over into their offline lives. And so it may be the case that social media and digital

technology use isn't the cause of these things. It's a reflection of individuals that might be struggling offline. And in some cases, you know, it may be contributing. It's not a one-size-fits-all kind of explanation. And I think that's probably what's gotten us in this mess. That being said, do you think this idea of getting rid of likes or little hearts, this demetrication could help people have a more positive experience on social media? Yeah, so this has been a very interesting conversation. And I think that there's a couple of dimensions of this that are really, really fascinating. One is the possibility that social media companies are actually, for public relations purposes, fighting demons that don't exist, but the public believes that they do. Right. So that this these kind of modifications will have no real effect.

But you can claim from the technology companies that they're doing something kind of about this. I think in general, we need big technology companies, social media companies to be invested in creating digital ecosystems that promote good things, and especially for kids. So it's a positive thing that there's some experimentation that people are thinking about to figure out how to do that in the best way. The concern here is that it's being done behind closed doors. So it's not clear at all what the kind of metrics that they're monitoring are here and whether those have anything to do with mental health. We need the data to be open. We need the research design, how they're going about testing this to be open so that people can come in and actually audit it, like we would do in a clinical drug trial, like we would do with anything that we think is having harmful effects

on serious problems like depression, like anxiety. You think they're going to open it up so people like you can study it? I would hope so. It would be the responsible thing to do, but I doubt that that will be the case. Well, okay then. I guess we'll leave it there that was Candice Hodgers professor of psychological science at the University of California Irvine thanks so much I'm Sean this is Today Explained Thank you.