Make social media serve you

Not the other way around

Reading Corner Shawl

I think it's fair to say a lot of us are having big thoughts about social media right now. We are spending a lot of time and energy thinking about the platforms that we use, how we use them, how much we use them.

And also it’s an inescapable fact that we are starting to realise how much they, in turn, use us.

Because let's be clear about this, social media isn't there for our benefit. Yes we derive benefit from it, but these business men didn't suddenly wake up one day and decide to develop these platforms for our betterment. They did it to make money and as the old adage goes - we are the product being sold.

As someone who has been online (and running a small business) since before Instagram was a twinkle in the developer’s eye, social media has gone through a lot of evolutions in recent years.

It isn’t even the same beast as it was 5 years ago, never mind 15. When I joined Instagram - around 2015/2016 we all snapped photos of our breakfast, stuck a vignette filter on it and posted it without a second thought. We would often post several times a day and chat to pals on there who were all doing the same. There were no Stories, no Reels, no analytics, no perceived need to dance or perform. It was just about connections.

Those days are long gone and those who are calling for Instagram to go back to being a photo sharing app have missed the point - you can’t go back. And what was once a means of connecting us to each other is now a platform for advertising and sales - loosely disguised as entertainment.

Once you reconnect with the central notion that social media isn’t there for our benefit, it is easier to remind yourself of another crucial fact - it doesn’t have an obligation to protect us or keep us safe either. That responsibility falls to us.

Yes, there are certain standards that a platform should adhere to in terms of the type of content that is allowed to be shown and we should absolutely continue to demand that these obligations are met. But each of us have our own particular triggers, those hot button items that activate our nervous systems and make us react - and it’s up to us to take action to protect ourselves from that rather than relying on a social media giant.

It’s a well known fact that negative and contentious posts ‘do better’ than positive ones - drama keeps eyes on the platform and that is the end goal - it is literally why these platforms exist.

We need to take active steps to keep ourselves safe, keep ourselves well online - however that looks for you. And the individual actions you take to do that are literally no one else's business. We have the option to mute, block, remove followers or tell the algorithm we aren’t interested in particular topics.

If you just want to use Instagram to scroll cute cat videos, that’s absolutely your right. If you want to use it to keep up to date with political news or to engage in political activism - again - that’s absolutely up to you.

If you want to delete the app from your phone and never touch it again - that’s also your choice.

No one has the right to demand how you show up, what you do or what you say online.

We have a lot more agency in this than we think we do. And I think that as more and more of us realise this and turn to places on the internet that do things differently (hello Substack) the internet landscape is about undergo another seismic shift.

It’s time to make social media work for us - not the other way around.