<aside> 📖 Excerpt from “Reducing Social Media’s Negative Influence on Emerging Adults’ Mental Well-Being with a Design-Focused, Neuroscience Approach”

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Anay Gupta • May 2021

"No civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth." In late 2017, former Facebook Vice President Chamath Palihapitiya publicly expressed major regret over his time building Facebook. From expressing that social media is ripping apart society to illuminating its global implications, Palihapitiya is only one of social media’s countless critics (Vincent, 2017). The bigger issue is in the empirical evidence. At least 95% of adolescents own a smartphone and spend an average time of two to four hours a day on social media (Anderson & Jiang, 2018; Carson et al., 2018). Moreover, 91% of 16-24- year-olds use social media yet rate Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter as the worst social media platforms (Cramer, 2017). This largely correlates to the fact that the social, clinical, and neurodevelopment effects of social media are still vaguely understood.

However, early research findings show that social media platforms trigger anxiety, depression, low self-esteem and other negative mental health effects (Seabrook et al., 2016). These negative mental health effects often come about during the ages of 18 to 25, a unique period of human development known as emerging adulthood. Although emerging adulthood is characterized by identity exploration, unbounded optimism, and freedom from most responsibilities, it also serves as a high-risk period for the onset of most psychological disorders (Arnett & Jensen, 2019).

Despite social media’s adverse impacts, it retains its utility as it facilitates identity development and virtual socialization for emerging adults. Investigating the “user- centered” design and neuroscience underlying social media platforms can help reveal, and potentially mitigate, the onset of negative mental health consequences among emerging adults.

Effectively deconstructing the Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram (hereafter referred to as “The Big Three”) will require an extensive analysis into commonly persistent features. A few examples of these features include like and reaction counters, perpetual news feeds, and omnipresent banners and notifications surrounding the user’s viewport. Such social media features are inherently designed to stimulate specific neurotransmitters and hormones like dopamine, serotonin, and cortisol (Haynes, 2018). Identifying such predacious social media features and isolating their relationship to brain chemistry within the emerging adult population will serve as the first step in mitigating the negative mental health effects of today’s social media platforms.