You are the product

A closer look at The Social Dilemma and how social media monetizes your attention, not your content.

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Estimated reading time: 8 minutes.

Social media is most people's productivity arch nemesis. They are a time sink, making you believe that you're doing something nice, while in reality you're doing nothing more than giving the tech oligarchs more money, power, and prestige.

I've recently had to watch "The Social Dilemma" for a class and write a summary about it, but while watching that documentary, I had the idea of creating this article. The Social Dilemma is a dramatized documentary about how social media works behind the scenes, the strategies they use to capture your attention for as much time as possible, how they can extract as much data and profit as much as they can from it.

You are the product

There's a famous quote that summarizes my intent with this article:

You're not the customer; you're the product

- Richard Serra and Carlota Fay Schoolman, 1973

Yes, the quote is from 1973, way before I was even born. This quote is related to how TV channels at the time were filling up the broadcasting with advertisements, it was a broadcast of a short video titled "Television Delivers People". At the time, most media consumption was done through TV. Even then, your attention was already being sold to advertisers, on paid channels. Viewers were not the consumer of television, they were the end product for advertisers, and they paid for the privilege of being consumed. You did not have a say on what was broadcasted on the TV, you only had a say on when to turn on your TV and which channel you'd watch. Other than that? No choice, only consume.

With the rise of the internet and mobile devices, the focus of advertisers shifted from TV to web advertising, but with a bigger shift: now marketers could get tailored data out of users, with their buying habits and interests.

That’s why you will get ads for items that you searched for a few days ago. No, it’s not magic, it’s the result of your data being sold to a marketing company that is now using that data to show you an ad about something you will potentially like. Sounds scary, right? But don’t worry, it only gets worse from here.

Social media is a data minefield

With the rise of social media, these corporations have even more ways to extract data out of you, while making you give it to them out of free will. With social media like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and the like, these companies can know:

• Your buying habits

• The places you visit

• Who you know

• What the people you know consume

• Your hobbies

• Your work

• Your relationship

• Your family

• Your insecurities and fears

• Your buying power

• The websites you visit

• Your favorite brands

And many more. Social media markets themselves as ways to become more present with your family and friends, and meet new people through them. However, they’re nothing more than a minefield of data they gather from you, while making you think that you’re sharing about yourself without consequences.

After collecting all of this data, they sell this data to advertisers that follow you not only inside a specific social media, but on other platforms and websites as well. These marketing agencies and tools associate your data through your digital footprint across many apps, so they can make the most accurate profile of you, show you even more targeted ads, and make you buy the item on the advert.

These tools are also free for the user, so the users don’t care about the data, since they don’t need to pay for that tool. In exchange, the corporations capture your attention for as long as possible, while capturing as much data as they can. And that is why the original quote from Richard and Carlotta changed to:

If you are not paying for the product, you are the product.

How social media captures your attention

Social media apps increase their profits by making you stay even longer on the platform. To achieve that goal, they apply various techniques and technologies that mess up with the chemicals of your brain. These techniques focus specifically on stimulating your brain through dopamine, which is a chemical related to pleasure. The more pleasure you get from an activity, the more dopamine you get from it, and the more your brain seeks that activity.

Here are some of the methods used to lock your attention to the screen:

Notifications

Every social media will send you notifications about something to make you return to the app. A new post from someone you follow, a like on a post or comment that you made, someone started following you, and anything else that might get your attention.

These notifications tempt you to look at the app, causing the effect of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out). They make it seem like there might be information that you’re missing out on, that you’ll be out of the loop and excluded from the newest breakthrough, and that makes you open the app out of fear of being excluded.

Being notified about some changes on your social media (like getting likes on a post or someone commenting on your video) also causes your brain to feel pleasured, feel accepted by others, and give you the impression of socialization.

Likes, comments, and follows

Getting a like or comment on your post feels reassuring, like your opinion is being heard by someone else. It gives you a sense of belonging, of being part of a community that understands you.

Commenting on people’s posts or answering people's posts allows you to spend more time on the platform, sharing either pieces of knowledge or opinion about something, giving social media even more data to use in their favor. Long discussions also make you more engaged in the platform, spending more time on it and giving even more data.

Infinite scrolling

Infinite scrolling is a technique that makes your feed look infinite. No matter how much you scroll, new content will be loaded and ready for you to consume. You will never run out of content, and it will make you wonder about what will come next. Will the next reel be a hella funny one, or will I see someone practicing self harm and have it ruin my day?

This is what causes you to lose way more time than you would like to. Your brain hates leaving tasks undone, and social media can never be fully consumed.

Attacks to your feelings and morals

Social media algorithms tailor the content you see based on data collected from your behavior. This means they don’t just show you what you like and engage with; they also surface content that provokes strong reactions, including posts you may disagree with or find harmful, because it keeps you scrolling.

Harmful content will prompt you to comment on it, and spend more time seeing it. You will train the algorithm to showcase more of those posts, and spend more time on the app, getting more opportunities for ads to appear on your screen.

Viral hits

A post of yours becoming “viral” makes other people see more of your posts, get more likes and comments, highly stimulating you and motivating you to continue using the app. It also makes the FOMO effect even more apparent if you don’t know about the viral hit. You’ll feel left out and estranged from your friends as they speak about it.

The side effects of social media usage

Using social media for long periods of time will cause extremely harmful effects on the medium and long term. The average person spends a little over 2 hours on social media every day. Some effects of exaggerated social media usage are:

Brain Rot

Brain rot is a term used to describe low-effort and short content and to refer to the effects of viewing excessive digital media, especially the ones similar to short-form content. Short-form content gives a smaller but much more frequent dopamine hits, causing you to stick to viewing this type of content for longer periods of time, enhancing the feeling of brain rot.

Higher possibility of mental illnesses

Since social media targets your mental state to keep you glued to your screen as much as possible, users can develop mental disorders about their appearance, body, feelings, or career success.

Social media often makes others appear better off, leading you to compare yourself and feel inadequate, less attractive, less successful, less disciplined. These comparisons can fuel anxiety, depression, and even eating disorders.

Procrastination

As you spend more time on social media, you will eventually run out of time to do the things you enjoy doing, such as hobbies and external activities. This might even cause you to procrastinate on hard tasks at your job and make you lose deadlines.

Procrastination will also lead to the feeling of anxiety for what you should be doing with your time, which ironically causes you to procrastinate even more on what you should be doing and dive even deeper into social media consumption.

Corporates don’t care about you

With all the side effects, you might think that corporations would be doing something to solve these problems, but in reality, they’ll lean even more into it. They will apply even more predatory data collection methods and make them look innocent enough for the general user to use, until it eventually becomes normalized and not using that tool makes you stand out as the “weird” person.

Collecting your data makes them more money. They don’t care if they will damage your health in the process, or if they will cause issues to entire small cities due to their data centers consuming a lot of water and emitting bright lights at all times of the day.

Information is a commodity in today’s society, and those who possess information hold power. It allows them to manipulate what the masses consume, and eventually change their views and opinions to match theirs, to gain even more power.

How to mitigate the damage to social media

Avoiding social media is a hard task, since it’s especially made to be addictive and hard to leave, but you can highly lower your consumption by applying specific habits:

Disable notifications

Notifications are one of the main strategies for apps to drive you to use them. If the app is not important, disable its notifications and only look at the app when you decide to, not when the app thinks you should.

Add time limits

Android phones have an app preinstalled called “Digital Wellbeing”. Through it, you can monitor which apps you’re using way more than expected, and set schedules to block specific apps from being opened.

There are some useful apps that you can install as well, such as One Sec, which prompts you to take a moment to process if you’re really opening a specific app because you want to, or because you’re simply bored.

Use blocking apps

If you’re like me, who spends a hella lot of time on social media even through the set limits, you can use blocking apps, as they will either completely block specific apps and websites from your notes, or highly limit the app to make it harder to compulsively consume content.

What I’m currently using is Unhook, which is a browser extension for YouTube that blocks specific items from appearing, such as shorts and recommended videos. This allows me to be more intentional with what I consume on YouTube.

Conclusion

Social media is a great way to stay in touch with other people, but you should use it wisely and know its risks before you spend way more time than you should in it. I still have quite a few issues with it myself, but I’m slowly working on improving it.

But a question for you: open your app tracking usage, and let me know in the comments what’s the app that you use the most.

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