🧠 Make Your Social Media Addiction Healthy

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In today’s sunday special:

Read time: 7 minutes

📜 THE PRELUDE

It’s no secret that social media thrives on virality, and virality thrives on emotion. The content that triggers awe, anger, anxiety, or amusement spreads the fastest. These emotional triggers turn into likes, comments, and shares. While these engagement metrics fuel the feed, they only represent a small fraction of the spectrum of human emotions. So, which emotions should social media amplify?

📱 THE AGE OF THE ALGORITHMS

The world’s most popular social media platforms continuously leverage Recommender Systems to predict and prioritize what’s likely to spark high-arousal emotions like rage or panic because these emotional states immediately capture your full attention. More specifically, they employ ANNs, which mimic how the human brain processes external stimuli to establish correlational relationships between profile inputs and prediction outputs.

The profile inputs are measurable user characteristic patterns like:

The prediction outputs are anticipated user engagement patterns like:

The profile inputs are converted into vector embeddings, or numerical representations that enable the ANNs to generate prediction outputs. For example: P(Watch ≥ 30s | Profile Inputs | User A) = 0.87, which means given the profile inputs, there’s an 87% chance that User A will watch at least 30 seconds of this 37-second video. When the prediction outputs are accurate, you spend countless hours mindlessly scrolling through YouTube Shorts or Instagram Reels without even realizing it.

We only know a fraction of the thousands of profile inputs these social media platforms track, and we have no way of knowing how much weight each one carries. We don’t truly know exactly why or how certain content ends up in front of us. It’s often referred to as a “black box,” in which billions of micro-behaviors are encoded in real time to serve highly personalized content.

But one thing remains abundantly clear: we do control every swipe, scroll, search, save, and share we make. It’s well known that a user’s engagement is the primary driver of what fills their feed. In other words, it’s not based on what we want to see; it’s based on what we’ve already proven we’ll engage with.

🧭 THE PROMISE OF USER-DIRECTED FEEDS

Imagine logging into your favorite social media platform and reading this:

“Welcome back! Tell us what you want to see. First, review this list of priorities: 1. Entertainment, 2. Achievement, and 3. Connection. Second, assign each priority a -1, 0, or +1 based on how strongly it resonates with you.”

Farnaz Jahanbakhsh, an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan, recently published “Value Alignment of Social Media Ranking Algorithms,” proving it’s possible to construct a social media feed that truly reflects your explicit human value system rather than being optimized for engagement metrics. So, how’d she do it?

In 1992, social psychologist and cross-cultural scientist Shalom H. Schwartz proposed the “Theory of Basic Human Values,” identifying ten basic human values that shape people’s priorities and motivations. For example, 2. Achievement reflects the drive to demonstrate competence and earn recognition. In 2012, Schwartz added nine more basic human values to better capture the motivational continuum of globally observed value systems.

First, the University of Michigan’s CSE Department manually labeled 4,562 social media posts, scoring how strongly each of the 19 human values appeared on a 0 to 6 scale on every single post, with 6 meaning the human value was strongly expressed. Second, they leveraged few-shot prompting with OpenAI’s GPT-4o (“o” for “omni”) to automatically label tens of thousands of additional posts on the same exact criteria. Third, they validated GPT-4o’s accuracy by comparing the tens of thousands of automatically labeled posts against the 4,562 manually labeled posts.

Once every social media post was labeled with each of the 19 human values on a 0 to 6 scale, they combined the scales with value weights from 391 participants. They achieved this by having each participant assign their own value weights via an adjustable slider from -1 to +1 for each of the 19 human values. Then, each participant’s X feed was reranked based on those value weights rather than by engagement metrics. A negative weight (-1) suppressed social media posts with that specific human value, while a positive weight (+1) supercharged social media posts with that specific human value.

Jahanbakhsh discovered that engagement metrics aren’t neutral (0). The world’s most popular social media platforms, which we willingly engage with every day, favor self-centered human values like hedonism and stimulation because they amplify emotionally charged feelings that fuel likes, comments, and shares. Even crazier, 63% of participants saw an entirely different X feed when it was reranked around their explicit human value system. That means you’re not actually seeing what you want; you’re seeing what the “black box” wants.

🪴 A HEALTHIER FEED IS POSSIBLE

When Aza Raskin, a 22-year-old graduate from the University of Chicago, invented the “infinite scroll” on Apr. 25th, 2006, he unintentionally gave birth to one of the most addictive forms of entertainment ever conceived.

When you spend countless hours mindlessly watching TikToks or listening to Spotify’s AI DJ, every scroll and sound is meticulously engineered to capture your attention. And yet, a quiet emptiness still lingers. We live in the most connected era in human history, with unlimited access to entertainment. Even so, we still feel increasingly disconnected from ourselves.

So, why do we still feel so disconnected? It’s because the world’s most popular social media platforms train us on what to enjoy by repeatedly exposing us to variations of entertainment we previously liked, commented on, or shared. This creates an “echo chamber,” where we inadvertently isolate ourselves within a narrow digital reality without actively consuming anything that’s truly new. Over time, we gradually forget whether we genuinely care about a certain piece of content if we’ve simply been trained to engage with it.

Unfortunately, there aren’t any social media platforms today that let you tailor feeds based on your explicit human value system. The closest thing we have is Reddit, letting you choose from more than 138,000 active subreddits, like r/funny, which is dedicated to sharing lighthearted memes. Reddit doesn’t force you to consume content outside the active subreddits you join.

🔑 KEY TAKEAWAY

Believe it or not, social media feeds aren’t actually giving you what you want. They’re simply exploiting what you can’t look away from. By weaponizing high-arousal emotions like outrage and anxiety, they manufacture a mirror that only reflects who you are in your most reactive emotional state. But social media platforms can’t force your hand. Every like, comment, and share is a deliberate choice you control. So, be more intentional about what you choose to engage with.

📒 FINAL NOTE

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