Trapped

The secret ways social media is built to be addictive (and what you can do to fight back)

- Catherine Price

Ever looked up from your phone and wondered where the past 30 minutes have gone?

If so, you’re certainly not alone. According to Moment, a time tracking app with more than 4.8 million users, the average person spends nearly four hours on their phone every day. That’s one-quarter of our waking lives, and much of that time is devoted to social media apps such as Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat.

But while we’re busy burying our noses in our newsfeeds, a strange thing is going on in Silicon Valley: tech insiders have begun to speak out against some of the very products they helped to create.

“I feel tremendous guilt… I think we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works,” said Chamath Palihapitiya, Facebook’s former vice president for user growth, last November during a talk at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. He added that he himself rarely uses Facebook, and that his children “aren’t allowed to use that sh*t”.

Social media “literally changes your relationship with society, with each other,” said Sean Parker, the founding president of Facebook, at an event in Philadelphia around the same time. “It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways. God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.” Meanwhile, Apple’s chief executive Tim Cook has said that, when it comes to his nephew: “There are some things that I won’t allow. I don’t want them on a social network.”

So what do the social media executives know that we don’t? And what tricks do they use to keep us coming back for more, and more… and more?

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