Company-controlled social media platforms, designed to maintain us hooked, are fuelling a silent psychological well being epidemic.
As of February 2025, TikTok has greater than 1.5 billion month-to-month customers worldwide and 4 billion folks use not less than one among Meta’s core merchandise every month.
Between Instagram, Fb and Whatsapp, Meta is ready to extract behavioural knowledge about half of the people dwelling on Earth. The monopoly over our technique of communication is very large.
It’s our use of corporate-controlled platforms that facilitate this course of, which has drastic penalties on our psychological, collective and societal properly being.
In an age the place each click on, like and share is meticulously tracked, packaged and offered, the corporate-owned social media platforms we use every day have develop into digital panopticons — prisons of our personal making.
These platforms, masquerading as instruments for connection, are in actuality engines of surveillance capitalism, extracting our most intimate knowledge to gasoline profit-driven algorithms that manipulate our behaviour and polarise our societies
Each thought you specific on corporate-owned social media is harvested, analysed and used to foretell your subsequent transfer.
Your feelings are monetised, your friendships are diminished to knowledge factors and your sense of self is formed by opaque algorithms designed to maintain you scrolling, shopping for, reacting and conforming.
Platforms resembling Fb, Instagram and Twitter — X — have turned our lives right into a market, the place we’re each the product and the patron, trapped in a cycle of countless consumption and surveillance.
As brilliantly offered by Professor Shoshana Zuboff in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, tech giants resembling Fb and Google generate billions of {dollars} yearly by promoting consumer knowledge to advertisers.
This exploitation of private info raises critical privateness considerations, as a result of we, the customers, have little management over how our knowledge is extracted, offered and used.
The Cambridge Analytica scandal, the place the information of thousands and thousands of Fb customers was harvested with out consent to control presidential elections, is a stark reminder of the dangers.
The price of this association is staggering: the erosion of privateness, the amplification of hate, the unfold of misinformation and the silencing of marginalised voices. These platforms don’t serve us; they exploit us, and in doing so, they undermine the very foundations of a free and equitable society.
Moreover, corporate-controlled social media platforms, designed to maintain us hooked, are fueling a silent psychological well being epidemic. Disrupted sleep patterns, decline in vanity, anxiousness and stress upon logging off social media are a number of the signs of social media habit.
The fixed comparability to curated, idealised lives breeds emotions of inadequacy and loneliness. The countless scroll, the dopamine hits from likes and shares, and the strain to carry out on-line are eroding our community-rooted well-being.
The irresistible feeds of those platforms function on an insidious enterprise mannequin: the eye economic system. Your consideration is the product, and it’s offered to the best bidder. Fb, Instagram, X, YouTube and TikTok use refined algorithms to maximise engagement, exploiting psychological vulnerabilities to maintain you scrolling.
Analysis in communication research discovered that emotionally charged content material, notably anger and outrage, is prioritised to maintain customers engaged. This affective manipulation of consideration fragments our focus and our capability to look after what issues essentially the most, leaving us mentally exhausted and emotionally drained. Hyperactivity on-line typically results in an abrupt change into hyperpassivity in actual life.
Now that the web has develop into breeding grounds for misinformation, there’s worldwide concern over false information and the way it can affect political and financial energy.
Analysis by Soroush Vosoughi et al discovered that false information tales unfold six instances quicker than true ones on Twitter, largely as a result of falsehood elicits robust emotional reactions resembling worry, disgust, and shock. Equally, social media algorithms typically amplify dangerous stereotypes and discriminatory content material. These biases are usually not unintended; they’re embedded within the design of the platforms.
In in the present day’s political local weather, we’ve a collective duty to not take part in corporate-own social media, which has real-world penalties, from eroding historic realities and mass manipulation to political polarisation.
We all know these platforms prioritise engagement over accuracy, permitting dangerous content material to proliferate farther, quicker, deeper and extra broadly than the reality, whereas censoring scientific figures, civilians journalists, devoted activists and on-the-ground reporters.
By divesting from corporate-own social media, we boycott these programs of inequality and exploitation, and help options that prioritise equity and fairness. It’s time we use instruments that improve fairly than undermine our capability for connection, motion and social change, the place our knowledge isn’t a commodity, the place our voice isn’t manipulated by algorithms designed to maintain us scrolling silently.
It’s time we collectively take a stand in opposition to this exploitation and help options that serve the widespread good, the place group, not revenue, is the driving power.
It requires a collective effort to alter our habits however it’s value it. Open-source applied sciences resembling nos.social and Mastodon supply decentralised, community-rooted options that prioritise consumer management and privateness, so “your posts, feed, and connections belong to you, not an organization”.
You should utilize these platforms free of charge to construct your individual social media group. These platforms are constructed on core ideas and objectives of the digital commons: emphasis on consumer privateness and safety, it’s open supply, and it’s nonprofit. Digital commons contain the distribution and communal possession of knowledge and applied sciences. These platforms are designed to rebuild social connection by serving communities, not exploiting them.
Group-rooted instruments are usually not simply options to company social media; they’re weapons within the struggle in opposition to surveillance capitalism and mass exploitation. They empower us to reclaim our knowledge sovereignty and construct a extra simply and equitable world. Through the use of these instruments, we will talk, act, and set up for social change, free from the manipulative algorithms and data-hungry firms that dominate the present digital panorama.
The act of divestment isn’t just a private alternative; it’s a collective motion. It’s a declaration that we’ll not be complicit in our personal exploitation. It’s a dedication to constructing a world the place expertise serves human dignity, fairly than the opposite manner round.
By organising, educating, and advocating for these options, we will contribute to dismantling the buildings of surveillance capitalism and substitute them with programs that replicate values resembling solidarity, equity, and autonomy. It isn’t straightforward to ditch WhatsApp or share content material via less-known platforms however we should have the braveness to alter. The stakes couldn’t be greater: our privateness, our worldwide justice system, and our freedom hold within the stability.
Divesting from corporate-owned social media isn’t just about rejecting the harms of Massive Tech; it’s about performing for the longer term we wish with solidarity for many who undergo essentially the most from this ongoing exploitation.
We should relearn methods to use our cellphone and methods to collectively work on initiatives however these instruments, constructed by and for the folks, supply a strong different to the fascist-oriented surveillance capitalism that fuels platforms like Fb and X. The struggle in opposition to surveillance capitalism isn’t just a technological battle; it’s an emergency, a battle for the soul of freedom within the twenty first century.
The selection is ours: proceed to feed the machine, or reclaim the lifetime of our thoughts, spirit, and soul, and construct a extra equitable future for all.
Anaïs Nony is an affiliate researcher within the School of Humanities at College of Johannesburg.