Three years ago, Exposure Labs created and released the documentary “The Social Dilemma,” exposing the dangerously manipulative technology that drives the wildly popular social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter (now X), Instagram, and all the others. Between 2011 and 2013, researchers began to see a disturbing trend emerging. Depression and anxiety among young people began to increase.
By 2019, hospital admissions due to self-harm increased among 15 to 19 year old girls by 62% compared to the first decade of the 21st century. For 10-14 year old girls, the increase was a shocking 189%. There was a dramatic increase in suicides among these girls as well. For older girls, 15-19 years old, suicides increased 70% over the first ten years of the 2000s. For girls 10-14, the increase was 151%.
This increase is directly linked to increased use of social media, and every indication is that these numbers will keep growing.
Globally, more than half of the world’s population, 4.48 billion people, have social media accounts. In North America, the figure is 75%, but if you consider only those 13 years old and older, the number increases to 82%. Of those, the average number of social media accounts they have, as of 2020, is 8.4 per person.
When you consider that recent studies show social media platforms were created to be addictive, these are ominous numbers. Social media companies don’t just know their platforms can be addictive, they conduct research and design algorithms specifically to make them increasingly addictive.
They know what you like and don’t like, what interests you and what doesn’t. They know who you love and who you hate. The idea is to get the users to stay connected as long as possible and to push products or preferred narratives onto them.
The social media companies have made you into their product by using your psychology against you. They have become such masters of manipulation, they can influence you to buy the products they support, to attend the movies they promote, and to elect the politicians they prefer. They can expand your exposure to the opinions of their choice or restrict your access to views contrary to the preferences of those who run the platform. Your decisions are no longer yours. You are being played.
They have become such masters of propaganda it is becoming exceedingly difficult to distinguish between fact and fiction. It becomes even more difficult to counter a lie once it has spread to billions worldwide.
Some of these lies are being promoted by our government, with the collaboration of friendly social media companies. After Elon Musk bought Twitter, he brought in journalists Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and Lee Fang and writers Michael Shellenberger, Alex Berenson, and David Zweig to review Twitter’s past content moderation files. They wrote about their findings between December 2022 and March 2023. What they found gave us all even more concern about social media.
Dozens of federal agents from multiple federal agencies had been in regular contact with Twitter, urging Twitter to suppress content the government deemed “disinformation.” And Twitter complied. Presumably, these same federal agencies used the same tactics with other social media companies.
Twitter was encouraged to suppress content that:
- claimed Covid may have originated in a Chinese Lab
- the Covid vaccines were not adequately tested and could cause harm
- there was little reason to vaccinate healthy children
- masks were ineffective in preventing the spread of Covid
- the Covid death rates were much lower than the government was claiming
- information on Hunter Biden’s laptop pointed to Biden family corruption, including Joe Biden
Stories about all these issues were suppressed, yet later proved true. There were no apologies or corrections offered by anyone and not one person in the government or Twitter lost their jobs over their suppression of the truth.
So, social media is not so social.
The various platforms are causing an increase in anxiety, depression, self-harm, and suicide. Loneliness, too. They have been designed and calibrated to make them highly addictive, especially to younger people. They are used to subconsciously persuade consumers to act as the platform desires. And they are spreading disinformation while suppressing the truth, sometimes in collaboration with our government.
This isn’t all.
Early last month, the U.S. Senate held hearings about Facebook’s failure to crack down on predators using its platform. Facebook is the largest social media platform in the world, with 2.8 billion users.
During the early 1970s, it was generally believed that child sexual predators were loners who stuck pretty much to themselves. The agency I was with at the time conducted an eight-year investigation into the sexual exploitation of children from the mid-70s to the early 80s, and one of the significant findings was that these child predators were very social.
They sought out relationships with like-minded predators for a variety of reasons. In the years following, this fact became widely known. Because of this, once the internet was invented, law enforcement agencies worldwide quickly began to use social media applications to hunt for predators.
But apparently, the social media companies did not, at least not Facebook.
According to an article in LifeSiteNews, Arturo Bejar, the former Director of Engineering for Protect and Care for Facebook,
“confirmed to the committee that on October 5, 2021, he had sent an email to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Chief Operating Officer (COO) Sheryl Sandberg that ‘one in eight children’ on Facebook had received sexually inappropriate messages on the platform within the ‘last seven days,’ and nearly one in three children had experienced similar ‘sexual advances’ in general.”
Neither Zuckerberg nor Sandberg responded to Bejar, and nothing was done to get the predators off Facebook.
Facebook and other social media companies were more focused on moderating different kinds of dangerous content, like conservative opinions and ideas that conflicted with the progressive agenda.
If the social media companies prioritized targeting predators, they could disrupt their networks and assist law enforcement in taking them down. Instead, these companies have developed algorithms, according to Bejar, that help the predators form relationships with each other and get connected to their preferred targets.
I’m not sure the deficiencies and dangers of social media can be cured. But until they are, it might be a good idea to delete these apps from your children’s smartphones, tablets, and computers. Then again, maybe they should replace their smartphones with dumbphones and only allow the use of computers and tablets in your presence.
