Una Mullally: I never liked Facebook, but now I am actually worried about it

In the past few days, I've spoken to several people who have deleted their Facebook accounts. They have different reasons for cutting the cord but, for many, Donald Trump's election was the final straw.

Social media has become a news service for many people. A generation is being raised not on newspapers but newsfeeds. In 2013, the portion of Americans who received news links from Facebook was 30 per cent; now it’s 44 per cent. But the real change is the proportion of Facebook users who get their news on the actual platform. In 2013, 47 per cent of Facebook users got news on Facebook. In 2016, its 66 per cent.

When it comes to the US election, there is the inescapable feeling that all of these new media channels we’ve created across social media are screwing us up. They’re messing with our perceptions of the world and of people who are not like us. They’re lying to us. They’re enraging us, and maybe they are not good for us. We have built echo chambers and filter bubbles and we have more information than ever before, yet we are getting things wildly wrong.

The signposting from social media to news sites further reinforces the filter bubble. You are directed to stories and points of view that reinforce your opinions, which leads to a false sense of security that your opinions are more prevalent than opposing or differing ones.

Even if you do have plenty of friends and connections who do not think like you, Facebook’s algorithms expose you more frequently to the viewpoints of “friends” that more closely match yours. Dissenting voices, even among your own connections, are pushed further out of view.

Social posturing

I’ve never liked Facebook. It encourages the worst kind of social posturing and exposes the most irritating aspects of performing identity. People get annoyed when this is pointed out. That’s because it is true. They defend it by saying how useful it is for keeping in touch with people, when the reality is, it is a performance of connection, not a real one.

We passively consume other people’s lives so that we don’t have to check in with them in a meaningful way. We don’t ask after people or take time to discover what’s really going on with them, because we are presented with feeds of life updates. We perform our social lives online in increasingly cringing fashions.

Facebook is useful for organising events, reminding people of birthdays, and disseminating details of get-togethers, meetings, and parties. Because, as we know, before Facebook no one ever ran a club night, wished their friend happy birthday, went to a college reunion, or attended a book launch. So thank god for Facebook.

A friend of mine, talking about deleting her account post-Trump, said she could no longer deal with waking up, grabbing her phone, and scrolling through other people’s drivel. Social media is a slave to “reaction”. There’s so much “reaction”, but little context or nuance and less analysis.

Even news programmes and websites ask, "How did Twitter react?" which has as much relevance as asking "How did people on the Galway-Dublin train react?" or "How did this line of randomers outside Marks & Spencer react?"

Reaction begets a heightened tone and form. Social media shouts, and actual news is losing impact. When everything is sensationalised, what hope is there for something genuinely significant in the news cycle to break through?

When everything is emphatic, people become increasingly erratic. Older news outlets are often reduced to mourn-porn, stories of personal illness and tragedy. In Ireland, Independent.ie in particular has become less of a news website and more of a hyper-human interest supermarket tabloid.

Clickbait despair

News outlets need to reassert themselves, and stop running after social media's tone. Most journalists despair at the slide towards clickbait. People don't go to college and write theses, and do internships, and try to claw their way up the media ladder so that they can rip Daily Mail stories and trawl Twitter and Facebook for viral moments of no significance.

In the aftermath of Trump's victory, subscriptions to the Guardian, ProPublica, the New York Times, the Atlantic and other outlets jumped. The reason is that people still value and want decent, fact-based, investigate journalism authored by professionals who know what they're talking about. Surely a basic tenet of business is to do what you're good at.

In the aftermath of the election, social media will now come under greater – and valid – scrutiny. Of course, traditional news outlets have been skewing things and getting things wrong for years, but this is different.

The binary discussion about social media being “good” or “bad” has moved on, but we should not avoid interrogating what something so omnipresent is actually contributing.