why i hate facebook essay answers

Why Do So Many People Hate Facebook?

While Facebook is one of the most popular social media platforms, it also attracts plenty of hate. Here are some of the reasons why.

Facebook has been a controversial topic over the years. The social media giant has been accused of everything from selling user data to playing a role in influencing elections. While Facebook has denied many of these claims, some remain skeptical of the company.

So, why do so many people hate Facebook? Here's a look at some of the most common gripes people have with the company and platform.

1. The Platform's Overabundance of Features

If you've been using Facebook for a long time, you would have noticed what could be considered an obsessive desire to make it "the" social media platform. Twitter is where you share quick thoughts, Snapchat is where you message your friends and TikTok is for short videos. However, Facebook has tried to be everything for everyone and, in doing so, has made the platform confusing and difficult to use.

Facebook adopted Snapchat's stories feature , copied Twitter's hashtag system, and is currently forcing its way into the short video space with Facebook Reels. While it's admirable that Facebook is trying to keep up with the competition, it's also made the platform feel cluttered.

Its constant feature adoption has made it feel like Facebook is just trying to do too much and, in the process, has lost its focus. What really is Facebook for?

2. Privacy Concerns

Another big reason people hate Facebook is because of privacy concerns. The Cambridge Analytica scandal exposed how much user data Facebook really had and how it was being used. This revelation made many people question whether they could trust Facebook with their personal information.

Since then, Facebook has made some changes to its privacy settings, but many people still don't feel like their information is safe. With all the data Facebook has on users, it feels like the company knows more about us than we do ourselves.

This lack of privacy is a big turnoff for many people and is one of the main reasons they hate Facebook.

3. Data Breaches

In addition to privacy concerns, Facebook has also had to deal with a number of data breaches. These breaches have exposed the personal information of millions of users and have left people feeling like they can't trust Facebook with their data.

The most recent breach happened in 2021 and exposed the personal information of over 500 million users. This breach was especially concerning because it happened despite Facebook's claims that it had fixed the problems that caused the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

4. Its Addictive Potential

Many people also hate Facebook because it can be addictive. They designed it to keep you engaged for as long as possible. This means that you're constantly being bombarded with notifications, new posts, and ads.

It's easy to get sucked into the never-ending scroll of your Newsfeed, and before you know it, hours have passed. This can be frustrating, especially if you're trying to take a break from social media or be productive.

TikTok's rise has reduced some addiction-related criticisms of Facebook, but with its new Reels feature, it looks like the criticisms won't be gone for long.

5. Fake News

Another big problem with Facebook is the spread of fake news. With so much information shared on the platform, it's hard to know what's true and what's not. This has led to the spread of false information and conspiracy theories.

While Facebook has taken some steps to combat fake news, many people still feel like the problem is out of control.

6. Its Impact on Mental Health

One of the biggest problems with Facebook is its impact on mental health. The platform can be a breeding ground for negativity and comparison. When you're constantly seeing everyone's highlight reel, it's easy to forget that everyone has struggles and difficulties.

This can lead to feelings of inadequacy, loneliness, and depression. Several studies have linked social media platforms to increased in anxiety and depression, especially in young people. While Facebook is not the only social media platform with this problem, it gets the most criticism because of its size and reach.

6. Perceived Inaction on Hate Speech

Another reason people hate Facebook is because of the company's perceived inaction on hate speech. The platform has been used to spread hateful and divisive content, with grave consequences.

Its role in the Myanmar genocide is a prime example of this. Several groups have accused the social media giant of not doing enough to stop the spread of hate speech and bigotry, which ultimately led to widespread violence in the region.

Facebook was also accused of "continuing to allow activists to incite ethnic massacres in Ethiopia’s escalating war", according to a report by The Guardian .

Making Sense of It All

Many of the reasons people hate Facebook are valid. The platform has serious problems with privacy, fake news, and hate speech. It's also addictive and can be detrimental to your mental health.

However, it's important to remember that Facebook is just a tool. It's how we use it that matters.

Facebook Has a Superuser-Supremacy Problem

Most public activity on the platform comes from a tiny, hyperactive group of abusive users. Facebook relies on them to decide what everyone sees.

I f you want to understand why Facebook too often is a cesspool of hate and disinformation, a good place to start is with users such as John, Michelle, and Calvin.

John, a caps-lock devotee from upstate New York, calls House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “PIGLOSI,” uses the term negro , and says that the right response to Democrats with whom they disagree is to “SHOOT all of them.” Michelle rails against the “plandemic.” Calvin uses gay as a slur and declares that Black neighborhoods are always “SHITHOLES.” You’ve almost certainly encountered people like these on the internet. What you may not realize, though, is just how powerful they are.

For more than a year, we’ve been analyzing a massive new data set that we designed to study public behavior on the 500 U.S. Facebook pages that get the most engagement from users. Our research, part of which will be submitted for peer review later this year, aims to better understand the people who spread hate and misinformation on Facebook. We hoped to learn how they use the platform and, crucially, how Facebook responds. Based on prior reporting, we expected it would be ugly. What we found was much worse.

Read: Facebook is a Doomsday Machine

The most alarming aspect of our findings is that people like John, Michelle, and Calvin aren’t merely fringe trolls, or a distraction from what really matters on the platform. They are part of an elite, previously unreported class of users that produce more likes, shares, reactions, comments, and posts than 99 percent of Facebook users in America.

They’re superusers. And because Facebook’s algorithm rewards engagement, these superusers have enormous influence over which posts are seen first in other users’ feeds, and which are never seen at all. Even more shocking is just how nasty most of these hyper-influential users are. The most abusive people on Facebook, it turns out, are given the most power to shape what Facebook is.

F acebook activity is far more concentrated than most realize. The company likes to emphasize the breadth of its platform: nearly 2.9 billion monthly active users, visiting millions of public pages and groups. This is misleading. Our analysis shows that public activity is focused on a far narrower set of pages and groups, frequented by a much thinner slice of users.

Top pages such as those of Ben Shapiro, Fox News, and Occupy Democrats generated tens of millions of interactions a month in our data, while all U.S. pages ranked 300 or lower in terms of engagement received less than 1 million interactions each. (The pages with the most engagement included examples from the far right and the far left, but right-wing pages were dominant among the top-ranked overtly political pages.) This winners-take-all pattern mirrors that seen in many other arenas, such as the dominance of a few best-selling books or the way a few dozen huge blue-chip firms dominate the total market capitalization of the S&P 500. On Facebook, though, the concentration of attention on a few ultra-popular pages has not been widely known.

We analyzed two months of public activity from the 500 U.S.-run pages with the highest average engagement in the summer of 2020. The top pages lean toward politics, but the list includes pages on a broad mix of other subjects too: animals, daily motivation, Christian devotional content, cooking and crafts, and of course news, sports, and entertainment. User engagement fell off so steeply across the top 500, and in such a statistically regular fashion, that we estimate these 500 pages accounted for about half of the public U.S. page engagement on the platform. (We conducted our research with a grant from the nonprofit Hopewell Fund, which is part of a network of organizations that distribute anonymous donations to progressive causes. Officials at Hopewell were not involved in any way in our research, or in assessing or approving our conclusions. The grant we received is not attached to any political cause but is instead part of a program focused on supporting researchers studying misinformation and accountability on the social web.)

Public groups differ from pages in several ways. Pages usually represent organizations or public figures, and only administrators are able to post content on them, while groups are like old-school internet forums where any user can post. Groups thus tend to have a much higher volume of posts, more comments, and fewer likes and shares—but they also follow a winners-take-all pattern, albeit a less extreme one.

Because the number of group posts is so much larger, we analyzed groups more intensely over two weeks within that same two-month time frame in 2020, looking at tens of millions of the highest-interaction posts from more than 41,000 of the highest-membership U.S. public groups.

Adrienne LaFrance: ‘History will not judge us kindly’

Overall, we observed 52 million users active on these U.S. pages and public groups, less than a quarter of Facebook’s claimed user base in the country. Among this publicly active minority of users, the top 1 percent of accounts were responsible for 35 percent of all observed interactions; the top 3 percent were responsible for 52 percent. Many users, it seems, rarely, if ever, interact with public groups or pages.

As skewed as those numbers are, they still underestimate the dominance of superusers. Facebook users follow a consistent ladder of engagement. Low-public-activity users overwhelmingly do just one thing: They like a post or two on one of the most popular pages. As activity increases, users perform more types of public engagement—adding shares, reactions, and then comments—and spread out beyond the most popular pages and groups. As we look at smaller and smaller pages and groups, then, we find that more and more of their engagement comes from the most avid users. Complete coverage of the smaller pages and tiniest groups we miss would thus paint an even starker picture of superuser supremacy.

The dominance of superusers has huge implications beyond just our initial concern with abusive users. Perhaps the most important revelations that came from the former Facebook data engineer Frances Haugen’s trove of internal documents concerned the inner workings of Facebook’s key algorithm, called “Meaningful Social Interaction,” or MSI. Facebook introduced MSI in 2018, as it was confronting declining engagement across its platform, and Zuckerberg hailed the change as a way to help “ connect with people we care about .” Facebook reportedly tied employees’ bonuses to the measure .

The basics of MSI are simple: It ranks posts by assigning points for different public interactions. Posts with a lot of MSI tend to end up at the top of users’ news feeds—and posts with little are, usually, never seen at all. According to The Wall Street Journal , when MSI was first rolled out on the platform, a “like” was worth one point; reactions and re-shares were worth five points; “nonsignificant” comments were worth 15 points; and “significant” comments or messages were worth 30.

A metric like MSI, which gives more weight to less frequent behaviors such as comments, confers influence on an even smaller set of users. Using the values referenced by The Wall Street Journal and drawing from Haugen’s documents, we estimate that the top 1 percent of publicly visible users would have produced about 45 percent of MSI on the pages and groups we observed, plus or minus a couple percent depending on what counts as a “significant” comment. Mark Zuckerberg initially killed changes to the News Feed proposed by Facebook’s integrity team, according to internal messages characterizing his reasoning, because he was worried about lower MSI . Because activity is so concentrated, though, this effectively let hyperactive users veto the very policies that would have reined in their own abuse.

Our data suggests that a majority of MSI on top U.S. pages came from about 700,000 users out of the more than 230 million users that Facebook claims to have in America. Facebook declined to answer our questions for this article, and instead provided this statement: “While we’re not able to comment on research we haven’t seen, the small parts that have been shared with us are inaccurate and seem to fundamentally misunderstand how News Feed works. Ranking is optimized for what we predict each person wants to see, not what the most active users do.”

Facebook’s comments aside, it is well documented that the company has long used friends’ and general users’ activity as the key predictor of “what users want to see,” and that MSI in particular has been Zuckerberg’s “north star.” Various reporting shows how Facebook has repeatedly tweaked the weights of different MSI components, such as reaction emoji. Initially five points, they were dropped to four, then one and a half, then likes and loves were boosted to two while the angry emoji’s weight was dropped to zero. As The Atlantic first reported last year, internal documents show that Facebook engineers say they found that reducing the weight of “angry” translated to a substantial reduction in hate speech and misinformation. Facebook says it made that change permanent in the fall of 2020. An internal email from January 2020 says that Facebook was rolling out a change that would reduce the influence strangers had on the MSI metric.

Our research shows something different: None of this tweaking changes the big picture. The users who produce the most public reactions also produce the most likes, shares, and comments—so re-weighting just reshuffles slightly which of the most active users matter more. Now that we can see that harmful behaviors come mostly from superusers, it’s very clear: So long as adding up different types of engagement remains a key ingredient in Facebook’s recommendation system, it amplifies the choices of the same ultra-narrow, largely hateful slice of users.

So who are these people? To answer that question, we looked at a random sample of 30,000 users, out of the more than 52 million users we observed participating on these pages and public groups. We focused on the most active 300 by total interactions, those in the top percentile in their total likes, shares, reactions, comments, and group posts. Our review of these accounts, based on their public profile information and pictures, shows that these top users skew white, older, and—especially among abusive users—male. Under-30 users are largely absent.

Because the top 300 were all heavy users, three-quarters of them left at least 20 public comments over our two-month period, and some left thousands. We read as many of their comments as we could, more than 80,000 total.

Of the 219 accounts with at least 25 public comments, 68 percent spread misinformation, reposted in spammy ways, published comments that were racist or sexist or anti-Semitic or anti-gay, wished violence on their perceived enemies, or, in most cases, several of the above. Even with a 6 percent margin of error, it is clear that a supermajority of the most active users are toxic.

Top users pushed a dizzying and contradictory flood of misinformation. Many asserted that COVID does not exist, that the pandemic is a form of planned mass murder, or that it is an elaborate plot to microchip the population through “the killer vaccination program” of Bill Gates. Over and over, these users declared that vaccines kill, that masks make you sick, and that hydroxychloroquine and zinc fix everything. The misinformation we encountered wasn’t all about COVID-19—lies about mass voter fraud appeared in more than 1,000 comments.

Racist, sexist, anti-Semitic, and anti-immigrant comments appeared constantly. Female Democratic politicians—Black ones especially—were repeatedly addressed as “bitch” and worse. Name-calling and dehumanizing language about political figures was pervasive, as were QAnon-style beliefs that the world is run by a secret cabal of international child sex traffickers.

In addition to the torrent of vile posts, dozens of top users behaved in spammy ways. We don’t see large-scale evidence of bot or nonhuman accounts in our data, and comments have traditionally been the hardest activity to fake at scale. But we do see many accounts that copy and paste identical rants across many posts on different pages. Other accounts posted repeated links to the same misinformation videos or fake news sites. Many accounts also repeated one- or two-word comments—often as simple as “yes” or “YES !!”—dozens and dozens of times, an unusual behavior for most users. Whether this behavior was coordinated or not, these throwaway comments gave a huge boost to MSI, and signaled to Facebook’s algorithm that this is what users want to see.

In many cases, this toxic mix of misinformation and hate culminated in fantasies about political violence. Many wanted to shoot, run over, hang, burn, or blow up Black Lives Matter protesters, “illegals,” or Democratic members of Congress. They typically justified this violence with racist falsehoods or imaginary claims about antifa. Many top users boasted that they were ready for the seemingly inevitable violence, that they were buying guns, that they were “locked and loaded.”

These disturbing comments were not just empty talk: Many of those indicted for participating in the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol also appear in our data. We were able to connect the first 380 individuals charged to 210 Facebook accounts; 123 of these were publicly active during the time our data set was constructed, and 51 left more than 1,200 comments total. The content of those comments mirrors the top 1 percent of users in their abusive language—further illustrating the risk associated with pretending that harmful users are just a few bad apples among a more civil general user base.

R ecommendation algorithms change over time, and Facebook is notoriously secretive about its inner workings. Our research captures an important but still-limited snapshot of the platform. But so long as user engagement remains the most important ingredient in how Facebook recommends content, it will continue to give its worst users the most influence. And if things are this bad in the United States, where Facebook’s moderation efforts are most active , they are likely much worse everywhere else .

Allowing a small set of people who behave horribly to dominate the platform is Facebook’s choice, not an inevitability. If each of Facebook’s 15,000 U.S. moderators aggressively reviewed several dozen of the most active users and permanently removed those guilty of repeated violations, abuse on Facebook would drop drastically within days. But so would overall user engagement.

Perhaps this is why we found that Facebook rarely takes action, even against the worst offenders. Of the 150 accounts with clear abusive behavior in our sample, only seven were suspended a year later. Facebook may publicly condemn users who post hate, spread misinformation, and hunger for violence. In private, though, hundreds of thousands of repeat offenders still rank among the most important people on Facebook.

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Farhad Manjoo

OK, but What Should We Actually Do About Facebook? I Asked the Experts.

By Farhad Manjoo

Opinion Columnist

One of the most unsettling revelations in the cache of internal documents leaked by the former Facebook employee Frances Haugen has been just how little we know about Facebook, and consequently how unprepared our political culture is to do anything about it, whatever it is.

That’s the first problem in fixing Facebook — there isn’t much agreement about what, exactly, the problem with Facebook is. The left says it’s Facebook’s amplification of hate, extremism and misinformation about, among other things, vaccines and the last presidential election. President Biden put it bluntly this summer: “They’re killing people.”

Former President Donald Trump and others on the right say the opposite: Social media giants are run by liberals bent on silencing opposing views. In a statement last week, Trump called Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s co-founder, “a criminal” who altered “the course of a Presidential Election.”

Beyond concerns about the distortion of domestic politics, there are a number of other questions about Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — all of which, Zuckerberg announced last week, are now under a new corporate umbrella called Meta . Is Instagram contributing to anxiety and body-shaming among teenagers? Are Facebook’s outrage-juicing algorithms destabilizing developing countries, where the company employs fewer resources to monitor its platform than it does in its large markets? Is Facebook perpetuating racism through biased algorithms? Is it the cause of global polarization, splitting societies into uncooperative in-groups?

Inherent in these concerns is a broader worry — Facebook’s alarming power. The company is among the largest collectors of humanity’s most private information, one of the planet’s most-trafficked sources of news, and it seems to possess the ability, in some degree, to alter public discourse. Worse, essentially all of Facebook’s power is vested in Zuckerberg alone. This feels intolerable; as the philosopher Kanye West put it, “No one man should have all that power.”

So, what to do about all this? In the past few days I asked more than a dozen experts this question. Here are some of their top ideas, and what I think about them.

Break it up

Under the tech-friendly Obama administration, the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission allowed Facebook to swallow up quick-growing potential rivals. Splitting Facebook into three or more independent companies would undo that regulatory misstep and instantly reduce Zuckerberg’s power over global discourse.

It could also improve the tenor of social media, as the newly independent networks “would compete with each other by differentiating themselves as better and safer products,” said Matt Stoller, the director of research at the American Economic Liberties Project, an antimonopoly advocacy group.

Still, as Stoller notes, a breakup might be a necessary measure, but it’s hardly sufficient; competition notwithstanding, after a split we’d be left with three networks that retain Facebook’s mountainous data and its many corporate pathologies.

The breakup plan also faces steep hurdles. Over the last few decades American antitrust law has grown fecklessly friendly to corporations. It’s unclear how to undo that. In June, a federal judge threw out sprawling antitrust cases against Facebook brought by the F.T.C. and 40 states, saying that they had failed to prove that Facebook is a social media monopoly.

Place limits on its content

Imposing rules for what Facebook can and cannot publish or amplify has been a hot topic among politicians. Democrats in Congress have introduced proposals to police misinformation on Facebook, while lawmakers in Texas and Florida have attempted to bar social media companies from kicking people off for speech offenses, among them Donald Trump.

As I wrote last week , these policies give me the creeps, since they inevitably involve the government imposing rules on speech. Just about all of them seem to violate the First Amendment .

Yet bizarrely, content rules have become the leading proposals for fixing Facebook; repeal of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act — which limits tech platforms’ liability for damages stemming from content posted by users — is often described as a panacea. Among the many ways to address Facebook’s ills, speech rules are the least palatable.

Regulate ‘surveillance capitalism’

Here is a seemingly obvious way to cut off Facebook at the knees: Prohibit it from collecting and saving the data it has on us, which would severely hamper its primary business, targeted advertising.

The rationale for this is straightforward. Imagine we determine that the societal harms generated by “surveillance capitalism,” the Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff’s aptly creepy label for the ad-tech business, pose a collective danger to public safety. In other such industries — automobiles, pharmaceuticals, financial products — we mitigate harms through heavy regulation; the digital ad industry, meanwhile, faces few limits on its conduct.

So let’s change that. Congress could impose broad rules on how ad behemoths like Facebook and Google collect, save and use personal information. Perhaps more important, it could create a regulatory agency with resources to investigate and enforce the rules.

“At a minimum,” said Roger McNamee, an early Facebook investor who is now one of its most vocal critics, regulators should ban second- and third-party uses of the most intimate data, “such as health, location, browser history and app data.”

Privacy rules are one of the primary ways European regulators have attempted to curb social media’s effects. So why don’t we hear more about it in America?

I suspect it’s because this is a bigger-than-Facebook solution. All the tech giants — even Apple , which has criticized the digital ad business’s hunger for private data — make billions of dollars from ads, and there are lots of other companies that have grown dependent on ad targeting. When California attempted to improve consumer privacy, corporate lobbyists pushed to get the rules watered down . I worry that Congress wouldn’t fare much better.

Force it to release internal data

Nathaniel Persily, a professor at Stanford Law School, has a neat way of describing the most basic problem in policing Facebook: “At present,” Persily has written , “we do not know even what we do not know” about social media’s effect on the world.

Persily proposes piercing the black box before we do anything else. He has written draft legislation that would compel large tech platforms to provide to outside researchers a range of data about what users see on the service, how they engage with it, and what information the platform provides to advertisers and governments.

Rashad Robinson, president of the civil rights advocacy group Color of Change, favored another proposed law, the Algorithmic Justice and Online Platform Transparency Act , which would also require that platforms release data about how they collect and use personal information about, among other demographic categories, users’ race, ethnicity, sex, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation and disability status, in order to show whether their systems are being applied in discriminatory ways.

Tech companies savor secrecy, but other than their opposition, it’s difficult to think of many downsides to transparency mandates. Even if we do nothing to change how Facebook operates, we should at least find out what it’s doing.

Improve digital literacy

Renée DiResta, the technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory and a longtime scholar of the anti-vaccine movement’s digital presence, described one idea as “unsexy but important”: Educating the public to resist believing everything they see online.

This is not just a thing for schools; some of the most egregious amplifiers of online mendacity are older people.

What we need, then, is something like a society-wide effort to teach people how to process digital information. For instance, Mike Caulfield, an expert on digital literacy at the University of Washington, has developed a four-step process called SIFT to assess the veracity of information. After Caufield’s process becomes ingrained in his students, he has said , “we’re seeing students come to better judgments about sources and claims in 90 seconds than they used to in 20 minutes.”

In his new book, “Tech Panic: Why We Shouldn’t Fear Facebook and the Future,” Robby Soave, an editor at Reason magazine, argues that the media and lawmakers have become too worked up about the dangers posed by Facebook.

He doesn’t disagree that the company’s rise has had some terrible effects, but he worries that some proposals could exacerbate Facebook’s dominance — a point with which I agree .

The best remedy for Facebook, Soave told me in an email, is to “do nothing, and watch as Facebook gradually collapses on its own.”

Soave’s argument is not unreasonable. Once-indomitable tech companies have fallen before. Facebook still makes lots of money, but it has lost consumers’ trust, its employees are upset and leaking left and right, and because most of its popular products were acquired through acquisitions — which regulators are likely to bar in the future — it seems unlikely to innovate its way out of its troubles.

I don’t agree with Soave that we should do absolutely nothing about Facebook. I would favor strong privacy and transparency rules.

But Soave will probably get what he wants. As long as there’s wide disagreement among politicians about how to address Facebook’s ills, doing nothing may be the likeliest outcome.

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An earlier version misstated the name of an advocacy group. It is Color of Change, not Color of Charge.

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Farhad Manjoo became an Opinion columnist for The Times in 2018. Before that, they wrote the State of the Art column. They are the author of “True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society.” @ fmanjoo • Facebook

Essay On Facebook

500 words essay on facebook.

Facebook has become one of the most famous social networking sites. However, it comes with its own sets of pros and cons. While it has helped a lot of individuals and business to create their brand, it is also being used for wrong activities. Through an essay on Facebook, we will go through all this in detail.

Benefits of Facebook

Facebook is experiencing dramatic growth currently where the number of users has reached one billion. It comes with a lot of benefits like video calling with your close ones and uploading your photos and videos without charge.

Most importantly, it allows you to get in touch with people from the other side of the world without spending a penny. It is also a great way to connect with old school friends and college friends.

Further, you can also make new friends through this platform. When you connect with people from all over the world, it opens doors to learning about new cultures, values and traditions from different countries.

It also gives you features for group discussions and chatting. Now, Facebook also allows users to sell their products or services through their site. It is a great way of increasing sales and establishing your business online.

Thus, it gives you new leads and clients. Facebook Ads help you advertise your business and target your audience specifically. Similarly, it also has gaming options for you to enjoy when you are getting bored.

Most importantly, it is also a great source of information and news. It helps in staying updated with the latest happenings in the world and subscribing to popular fan pages to get the latest updates.

Drawbacks of Facebook

While it does offer many advantages, it also gives you many drawbacks. First of all, it compromises your privacy at great lengths. Many cases have been filed regarding the same issue.

Further, you are at risk of theft if you use it for online banking and more. Similarly, it also gives virus attacks. A seemingly harmless link may activate a virus in your computer without you knowing.

Moreover, you also get spam emails because of Facebook which may be frustrating at times. The biggest disadvantage has to be child pornography. It gives access to a lot of pornographic photos and videos.

Similarly, it is also a great place for paedophiles to connect with minors and lure them easily under false pretence. A lot of hackers also use Facebook for hacking into people’s personal information and gaining from it.

Another major drawback is Facebook addiction . It is like an abyss that makes you scroll endlessly. You waste so much time on there without even realizing that it hampers the productivity of your life by taking more away from you than giving.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Conclusion of the Essay on Facebook

To sum it up, if we use Facebook in the right proportions and with proper care, it can be a powerful tool for anyone. Moreover, it can be great for marketing and networking. Further, any business can also leverage its power to make its business success. But, it is essential to remember to not let it become an addiction.

FAQ of Essay on Facebook

Question 1: What is the purpose of Facebook?

Answer 1: The purpose of Facebook is to allow people to build a community and make the world a smaller place. It helps to connect with friends and family and also discover all the latest happenings in the world.

Question 2: What is the disadvantage of Facebook?

Answer 2: Facebook is potentially addictive and can hamper the productivity of people. Moreover, it also makes you vulnerable to malware and viruses. Moreover, it has also given rise to identity theft.

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Facebook Essay

To make this Facebook essay easy to understand for any reader, the author will start with terminology.

Facebook is among the most popular social media networking sites today. It is popular due to its multiple applications and the ease of communication it offers to the user. It allows people to share pictures, events and statuses on a single platform.

Facebook has several benefits, such as forming groups, chatting with friends and finding information on multiple topics. The platform is also highly informative due to the multiple pages on a host of topics, including but not limited to health, education, science, exercise, etc. It is also perfect for keeping in touch with relatives and friends who can stay connected to a single platform.

Below, this essay about Facebook will dive deeper into the platform’s advantages and how it can help kids, students, and adults communicate.

More recently, mobile companies have enabled users to connect to Facebook through their phones. Mobile phone technology such as GPRS now allows users to access Facebook from any location. This feature has made Facebook extremely popular among today’s generation.

Staying connected has never been so simple and effective than it is on Facebook. Talking to friends and relatives or family members is now possible with a single Facebook account which is a perfect platform to chat and communicate.

A more recent addition to the online chat program is the video calling feature which has gained immense popularity. Not only can one talk to people but also see them live with the help of this video chat feature.

Individuals no longer have to yearn to keep in touch with their friends and dear ones. A single Facebook account enables users to achieve several functions all at once.

Another very important feature of Facebook is the online gaming portal which it offers to its users. There are hundreds of thousands of games on Facebook which one can play at any given time. The interesting aspect is the ability to play these games with friends.

There are multiple games like Poker, Diamond Dash, Zuma, Farm Heroes Sage and others on Facebook.

Playing these games is a unique and special experience since it allows users to interact with friends and engage in healthy competition. There are no additional costs and users can play games absolutely free of cost.

Facebook is becoming a highly successful platform not only for making new friends and finding old ones, but for accessing global and local news as well. Most of the news and media companies have launched their Facebook pages.

This feature has added the extra benefit to Facebook, making it educational and purposeful. Besides being a medium to interact and communicate, Facebook has become a marketing platform for many popular brands. Today, one can easily access all the famous global brands on Facebook.

Several small time businesses have become successful on Facebook. People, who do not have the capital to open a store, have launched their products on Facebook, gaining financial success and recognition.

One can buy practically anything on Facebook from shoes, bags, accessories, clothes, phones, laptops, electronic etc. Many of these online stores offer the facility to make online payments and deliver goods to the buyer’s home.

Thus, through Facebook, people can engage in a host of activities such as playing games, interacting with friends, chatting, video conferencing, marketing, buying, selling and numerous others. Facebook is no longer only a social networking site to stay connected with friends and family.

It has become a platform with online marketing options for the users. When used responsibly, Facebook is an excellent medium for several purposes with extremely low cost and high benefits to the users.

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IvyPanda. (2023, October 29). Facebook Essay. https://ivypanda.com/essays/social-media-facebook/

"Facebook Essay." IvyPanda , 29 Oct. 2023, ivypanda.com/essays/social-media-facebook/.

IvyPanda . (2023) 'Facebook Essay'. 29 October.

IvyPanda . 2023. "Facebook Essay." October 29, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/social-media-facebook/.

1. IvyPanda . "Facebook Essay." October 29, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/social-media-facebook/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Facebook Essay." October 29, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/social-media-facebook/.

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Reporters Reveal 'Ugly Truth' Of How Facebook Enables Hate Groups And Disinformation

Terry Gross

In a new book, two New York Times journalists report that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg often doesn't see the downside of the social media platform he created. In their new book, An Ugly Truth, Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang write that Zuckerberg tends to believe that free speech will drown out bad speech.

"[Zuckerberg's] view was that even if there were lies [on Facebook] — lies from a politician such as Donald Trump — that the public would respond with their own fact checks of the president and that the fact checks would rise to the top," Frenkel says.

Frenkel, who is based on San Francisco, covers cybersecurity for The Times ; Kang is based in Washington, D.C., and covers technology and regulatory policy. Their book focuses on the period between the 2016 presidential campaign and the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol — a time in which Trump became one of Facebook's most profitable users.

"Trump had over 30 million followers," Frenkel tells Fresh Air . "He not only managed to bring audience and relevancy to Facebook, he created this constant sort of churning stream of information that people couldn't help take their eyes off of."

Following the 2020 presidential election, the Facebook platform became key in the "Stop the Steal" effort to challenge the election results, with users posting photos of assault rifles and openly discussing how they were going to bring guns to Washington on Jan. 6.

Donald Trump Sues Facebook, YouTube And Twitter Over Alleged Censorship

"I had never seen a Facebook group grow so quickly, adding thousands of users within hours to this group in which they were sharing all sorts of falsified videos and documents about election fraud," Kang says. "It's very clear from our reporting that Facebook knew the potential for explosive violence was very real [on Jan 6]."

Kang and Frenkel say that the company debated having Zuckerberg call Trump to try to defuse the Jan. 6 rally ahead of time, but it ultimately decided not to do so. After the insurrection, Facebook suspended Trump's account for two years , saying it will reinstate him only if " the risk to public safety has receded ."

Kang notes that the fact that Trump is no longer in office has helped Facebook avoid an extensive discussion of the ban. But political disinformation remains a problem for the social media platform, which has nearly 3 billion global users.

"There are elections coming up in a number of countries where the current head of state is very active on Facebook and uses Facebook much in the way that was modeled by Donald Trump," Kang says. "Millions of people all over the world are being affected in democracies that are being threatened by populist leaders using Facebook."

Facebook responded to the assertions in An Ugly Truth with the following statement:

"Every day, we make difficult decisions on where to draw the line between free expression and harmful speech, on privacy, security, and other issues, and we have expert leaders who engage outside stakeholders as we craft our policies. But we should not be making these decisions on our own and have for years advocated for updated regulations where democratic governments set industry standards to which we can all adhere."

Interview Highlights

An Ugly Truth by Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang HarperCollins hide caption

On Facebook's decision to ban Trump from its platform following the Jan. 6 insurrection

Cecilia Kang: There was immediate sort of understanding that this was a watershed moment and that they were going to have to have the discussion they dreaded having for a very long time, which is do they remove Donald Trump? And we see them debate that. We see them go back and forth. And really, it's not until Twitter takes action to ban Trump that Facebook sort of makes its announcement — at first that it's a temporary suspension. It's very unclear and muddled. Their messaging is that we're removing him for now, but we're going to reevaluate. And ultimately, it's finally announced that they're going to suspend the account, but they're going to refer it to the Facebook Oversight Board. They're essentially really, again, kicking the can to someone else and saying, "We've created this outside body. I'm going to allow them to rule on whether or not we should have removed Donald Trump."

Far-Right Misinformation Is Thriving On Facebook. A New Study Shows Just How Much

Sheera Frenkel: The ban was for a couple of weeks. The language was quite interesting. It was indefinite and temporary is the way they described it. They referred it to this body that they describe as a Supreme Court, [a] third-party body that makes decisions on content. Interestingly, months later, the body, the Facebook Oversight Board, kicked it back, that decision on Trump to Facebook and they said, "Facebook, you don't have policies that are clear enough on this kind of political speech and taking down an account like Trump, you have to write those policies." It was actually a pretty smart move by the Facebook Oversight Board. So currently the final decision on Trump is in the hands of Facebook. They have said that for at least two years, Trump will be banned and that two years expires, essentially ahead of his ability to campaign again for the 2024 campaigns.

On how social media companies are often creating policies about misinformation on the fly

New York Times journalists Cecilia Kang (left) and Sheera Frenkel are co-authors of An Ugly Truth. Beowulf Sheehan/HarperCollins hide caption

New York Times journalists Cecilia Kang (left) and Sheera Frenkel are co-authors of An Ugly Truth.

Frenkel: The social media companies are all struggling, and they're creating policies as we go. I will say that Twitter, though it's much smaller ... compared to Facebook, especially when you put Facebook together with its other apps, WhatsApp and Instagram, Twitter is willing to be more experimental. It's quite public in its approach and writing of its policies. I'm not saying that they've got it completely right. YouTube is still very far behind. These social media companies are all struggling with how to handle misinformation and disinformation, and along the lines of misinformation, it is a very current and present danger in that just recently, the chief of staff of the White House, Ron Klain, was saying that when the White House reaches out to Americans and asks why aren't they getting vaccinated, they hear misinformation about dangers with the vaccine. And he said that the No. 1 place where they find that misinformation is on Facebook.

FEC Commissioner Rips Facebook Over Political Ad Policy: 'This Will Not Do'

On Facebook's updated political ad policy

Kang: Facebook still allowed politicians to post ads without being fact-checked. And, in fact, politicians could say things in advertisements that the average Facebook user could not. They did change other things in the platform. For instance, they created an ad library where you could search for ads and see what politicians were posting. And that was a level of transparency they hadn't previously had. However, they did double down, and they did maintain firm in their belief that politicians could say things in ads without the benefit of a fact check.

On Zuckerberg and Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg 's belief that people would discern lies from truth

Kang: Up until the end of Trump's presidency, Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg were still defending the idea that Trump — and really political leaders all over the world — could and should say things on the platform as they wished, and people could and should respond as they wished. They failed to see what their own employees were telling us. ... One of the most fascinating things was talking to employees within Facebook who are raising the alarm again and again and again and saying, "This is a problem. We are spreading misinformation. We are letting the president spread misinformation and it's being amplified by our own algorithms. Our systems aren't working the way we predicted and we should do something." And yet, you know, Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg stay the course.

The Central Question Behind Facebook: 'What Does Mark Zuckerberg Believe In?'

On the difficulty of moderating hate speech

Frenkel: We have to remember that the scale of Facebook is nearly 3 billion users around the world. The amount of content that courses through the platform every day is just so enormous. Facebook has put in AI, artificial intelligence, as well as hired thousands of content moderators to try to detect this. But they're really far behind, and they've only really started taking this seriously since public scrutiny has shed a spotlight on the company and there is demand for change within the company. So our reporting shows, and [we're hearing] from the people inside, that they really do feel like they are racing to catch up.

Kang: And I would just add that a lot of this hate speech is happening in private groups. This is something Facebook launched just a few years ago, this push towards privacy, this push towards private groups. The idea being is that people wanted to be in small, intimate groups with like-minded people. But what happens when those small, intimate groups are QAnon or when they're malicious? Everyone is like-minded, and so no one is reporting the content. In some cases, it's not a matter of Facebook's algorithms not finding things. It's a matter of Facebook creating these kind of secluded, private, walled gardens where this kind of talk can happen, where hate speech can happen and it's not being found.

Sam Briger and Thea Chaloner produced and edited the audio of this interview. Bridget Bentz and Molly Seavy-Nesper adapted it for the web.

Editor's note: Facebook is among NPR's financial supporters.

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Home — Essay Samples — Business — Facebook — Pros And Cons Of Social Media: Analysis Of Facebook

Pros and Cons of Social Media: Analysis of Facebook

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Why I Hate Facebook

Facebook isn't as popular as it used to be, especially among teens .

And I'm really not surprised.

From random friend requests to a slew of invitations to play farming games, Facebook is getting to be more trouble than it's worth. 

Yes, I'm still on Facebook, but I don't use it nearly as much as I have in the past. And it's mostly because of how the social network has evolved and what people do on it. 

Perception is reality: Facebook can't just exist, it needs to be liked. The experience of being on Facebook needs to be enjoyable. There is no law that says established social networking sites must always stay in business, forever. Consider MySpace, for instance. What users think of Facebook is, therefore, crucial.

So Facebook, it's not me, it's really you. 

There's way too much sponsored content.

It seems that every time I visit Facebook, there's a sponsored post that is prominently placed at the top of my news feed. And that seems to be because Facebook is now replacing free content with paid content, Nick Bilton of The New York Times recently reported . 

People can see when you've read their messages.

Similar to iMessage, it's possible to see when someone has read your messages on Facebook. But this is slightly problematic because it essentially forces you to respond on the spot, and if you don't, it can lead to some very awkward encounters. 

Graph Search is kind of creepy.

With Graph Search, you can search for queries like, "friends of friends who are single and live in New York." Useful? Sure. Creepy? A little bit.

All of the information found in Graph Search is already accessible on the social network, but Graph Search takes away all of the manual labor that was once required to harvest such information.

And just imagine what would happen if Facebook opens up the search to more than just friends of friends? Anyone would be able to find out essentially anything about you, pending your privacy settings. 

There are way too many games that spam you.

In any given day, I'll receive anywhere from one to 10 invitations to play games. Sure, it is possible to block invites for specific games, as well as invites from specific friends. But with more apps and games making their way onto Facebook, there should be a way to easily block all of them. Though, it's unlikely Facebook will ever do that given the potential effects a blocking all apps feature could have on its revenue. 

Even your "friends" spam you.

Thanks to the tagging feature, friends can say they were with you, even if it's totally not true. When someone tags you and other people in a post, they can easily put their content on several different Timelines without needing to manually post on each individual one. Next thing you know, your Timeline has effectively turned into one big advertisement. 

Facebook keeps changing its privacy settings.

It seems that every time we get used to the current privacy settings on Facebook, it decides to switch things up.

We all know by now that Facebook shares your personal information (anonymously) with advertisers so that they can effectively target you. But Facebook has tended to change its privacy settings in a way that requires you to opt out if you want to keep your privacy.

It gets in the way of real-life relationships.

It's unbelievable how many times Facebook has put a damper on in-person social situations. It seems that people are very quick to grab their phone and open up Facebook at the mere risk of having an awkward silence.

There's too much oversharing of uninteresting content. Facebook just isn't exciting anymore.

As much as I adore my friends and family who use Facebook, some things would be better kept to themselves. Not everything your cat, or baby, does is amazing. Sure, scientists have shown that posting to social media sites releases dopamine, and therefore gives us pleasure. But at what cost? 

It can ruin your life if you take it too seriously.

Many people have reported feeling bad or jealous while looking at Facebook,  according to a recent survey . Even more, some people have reportedly used it for malicious purposes. Last year , a teenager committed suicide. In her suicide note, she mentioned how some comments she read on Facebook contributed to her feeling upset. 

This isn't Facebook's fault. And it's important to mention that the social network partnered with the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline back in 2011 to help prevent suicides. 

People from work want to be friends.

When Facebook first launched, it was all about connecting with friends. But something has seemingly changed. I have received way more friend requests from people whom I've met at business-related events or currently work with. There's always a part of me that doesn't want to accept, but then I worry that declining the request would ruin my professional relationship with these people. On the other hand, accepting the request could have the same, if not worse effect. 

Interested in learning more about Facebook?

Some Of Facebook's Best Features Were Once Hackathon Projects >

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Evaluating Author Arguments and Claims Worksheets

Related ela standard: ri.7.8.

When you are critically evaluating the work of an author you will be required to do some research. This can be done several different ways. If an author cites the work of anyone else to validate their claim, it is pretty easy. View the source that cited and first makes sure it an established authority on the subject and review their work. If the author doesn’t use a source, you should hit the references available to you and find the means to validate it. These worksheets will have students evaluate the work of various authors and look for a means to validate their claims.

Evaluating Arguments and Claims Worksheets To Print:

The Smart Snacking Choice – Time for us to bash processed foods.

To Buy or to Lease? – The author isn't big on leasing cars.

Why I Hate Facebook – This author goes as far to say that social networking can cause you physical harm.

Is Eating Grass Bad for My Dog? – It is definitely harmful to the carpets in my home.

Deconstructing Arguments – You basically trying to outline the author's thoughts.

Get Rich Slowly – Which of the choice arguments does the author make?

Roger's Rabbit – Are the sources of Roger's information appropriate and credible, given his argument? Why or why not?

Author Arguments – Complete the activity below to trace and evaluate the author's argument.

Argument Analysis – There's an old saying: Don't believe everything you read. Read the assigned text.

Is the Argument Sound? – What are the author's reasons? What appeals does the author make to convince the reader?

Following the Tracks – Complete the activity below for the assigned text to trace and evaluate the author's argument.

The Power of Books – Are the author's examples credible? Why? Choose all that apply.

Tracing an Author's Argument – What is the author's claim?

What Do You Think? Evaluating an Argument – You can use this for basically any form of media or literature.

Should You Juice? – The author basically encourages you just to try it.

How Can Authors Validate Their Arguments and Claims?

It is easy for any writer to make a claim but a writer's real job is to provide evidence for that claim. Arguments without any supportive evidence are worthless. To convey his work convincingly to the audience, the writer is bound to provide valid proves of his claim. Selection of a right argument and evidence is essential for the validity and reliability of the claim. To prove his claim, a writer should keep the following points in mind:

Works of Experts

One of the most effective ways to validate a claim is to register scholarly works in the paper. Adding citation of a recognized journal increases the reliability of an author's claim. Use of secondary research is salient to build a dependable claim. If a writer makes a certain claim, then it is the duty of the writer to brace his argument by adding evidence from the known researcher's work. The strength of the claim is based on the quality of scholarly research that is used as secondary research. The author should use a reliable and trust-worthy source of a recognized researcher.

Include Statistics

A writer can also enhance the validity of his work by incorporating reports, surveys, scholarly articles and literature review. For the authenticity of a claim, the writer needs to add numbers and figures in his work. Moreover, the addition of numbers is crucial for the accuracy of the claim.

Reach a Conclusion

One sign of a valid argument is that it always gets to a conclusion. The writer should reach a conclusion after making a strong claim. The conclusion will work as proof and assures that the writer's argument is valid and genuine. It is not necessary that the conclusion is true always but the conclusion that the writer's claim is not ambiguous.

How to Evaluate Claims in a Text

The main purpose of an author to write is to deliver personal ideas to the world. The author usually wants to spread his message and evaluations to the readers through the text. In the process of doing so, the author uses a lot of evidence from the research and work of others. The evaluation of these claims is important. You can evaluate the claims with the help of following tips.

Identify the Author's Purpose

The first step towards evaluating claims in a text is to identify the author's purpose of writing. You need to understand thoroughly why the author wrote the piece. You have to determine the motivation behind the writing. You can research a little on the author's background to find out the reputation he/she holds and what things define the author. It will give you a lot of insight into the text as well.

Determine The Rhetoric Reasoning

Once you have understood the purpose of the author's writing, it is time to give it a thorough read. When you are done reading and comprehending the text, you can start looking for the rhetoric reasoning for evaluation. The rhetoric reasoning means all the claims and evidence that are logical, credible, and give some sort of emotions. These claims are true and have credible sources. If you have determined the rhetoric reasoning in the text, then it is evident that the claims are authentic and logical.

Determine the Fallacious Reasoning

It is also possible for the authors to use fallacious reasoning sometimes. This mostly happens when the author is desperate to make the argument strong and credible. With thorough research and mindful reading, you can easily identify the fallacious reasoning. It will help you a lot in evaluating the claims.

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Does facebook make people unhappy, a new study synthesizing information from almost 1 million people gives answers..

Posted August 21, 2023 | Reviewed by Davia Sills

• Congressional testimony, documentaries, and media suggest social media like Facebook causes unhappiness.
• New research synthesizes data from Facebook and Gallup on almost 1 million people to estimate this connection.
• The researchers find that increasing Facebook use in a country is not associated with negative outcomes.
• Overall, there's no one big effect of Facebook on well-being. More detailed analyses are needed.

Social media , in general, and Facebook (now called Meta), in particular, have been linked to problems in society in recent years. In Congressional testimony, a former Facebook employee acted as a whistle-blower, revealing that internal analyses suggested that more Facebook use was associated with poorer mental health. The use of Instagram—a platform also owned by Facebook—was related to young girls developing eating disorders. YouTube has been associated with the radicalization of political beliefs, especially those related to white nationalism and the alt-right. White nationalists now pose the largest terrorist threat to U.S. citizens.

It seems like one of the broad takeaways from research and the national conversation around social media in recent years is this: Social media, particularly Facebook, is bad for people.

But is that true?

Newly published research combines data from Facebook and Gallup to examine the link between Facebook use and well-being across 72 countries. This dataset synthesizes information from close to 1 million people, representing an enormous sample that can provide very good estimates of the association between well-being and Facebook use. Before I reveal their conclusions, let me explain how they did the study. If you were in one of the university classes I taught, I would ask you to think—as you read—about what you predict the outcome of the analysis would be. Given how the researchers did their study, what would you expect?

The researchers measured Facebook use across countries using data from Facebook on Daily Active Users (DAUs) and Monthly Active Users (MAUs). These are what you’d expect: the number of people logging in daily and monthly from a given country. (If you’re playing along, you might be considering now what that’s missing. Does it capture how long they spend on the platform? What kind of content—political outrage, photos of friends’ perfectly curated lives, silly memes and puns, etc.—are people seeing and engaging with?)

The researchers measured well-being through several questions collected by Gallup. The well-being measure was a single question, essentially a 10-point rating scale, on how happy you are with your life. They also measured positive and negative daily experiences. These questions asked about experiences the day before.

Given enough interviews conducted on enough random days, this method should be able to capture how people’s daily lives tend to be in general in a given country. Positive questions asked things like, “Did you smile and laugh a lot yesterday?” Negative questions asked things like, “Did you experience worry during a lot of the day yesterday?”

Again, if you’re playing along at home, consider what this study is and isn’t capturing. It’s not looking at mental health outcomes—which has been a key point related to people’s negative opinions about Facebook. It’s also not looking at specific problematic—or positive—attitudes people might develop on Facebook. So they didn’t ask whether people had less trust in public institutions or less trust in their neighbors and community. They also didn’t ask whether people felt like they had good coping skills or were better informed.

The analysis looked at the relationship between Facebook use and well-being across 72 countries from 2008 to 2019. If Facebook use was higher, did people have higher or lower well-being in that country and year? They could do this within a country—meaning, as a country gained more Facebook users, did well-being start to decline? They could also do this between countries—meaning, did the countries with more users have lower well-being than those with fewer users?

I’ve walked through the details of the study because the results are surprising—especially to someone who’s been following the media narrative developing around Facebook over the years. As countries gained more Facebook users, there was no change in well-being, the number of positive experiences, or the number of negative experiences. Facebook didn’t make things worse.

When you look between countries, the results are also striking: Countries with more Facebook users had more well-being, more positive experiences, and fewer negative experiences. This might tempt us to say that Facebook actually improved countries where it was adopted, but the researchers were careful to point out that this is probably not the case. Rather, rich countries where people have a lot of access to technology and free time to use Facebook were both more likely to have more Facebook users and to experience greater well-being. But that’s likely because of their money and free time, as opposed to because of the great benefits Facebook provides.

So is Facebook a problem?

Does it disrupt society and cause mass unhappiness? The simple answer is that, on the whole, Facebook itself is not good or bad. When all of the aspects of Facebook are considered together, we don’t find that it makes people any more or less happy.

But think about what considering Facebook as a whole involves. Using Facebook means watching political rants and seeing violent images and rhetoric about political outgroups—but it also means getting to see your newborn nephew and marvel at how quickly he grew in his first month of life. Using Facebook means comparing yourself to professional photoshoots of your high school classmate’s engagement—but it also means seeing that your work friend’s band played a good gig at a bar near your apartment.

There isn’t one clear effect of Facebook because Facebook is a platform that has all kinds of communities and niches. Negative effects from angry content are being averaged in with positive effects from keeping up with friends, which are also being averaged in with neutral content, like a birthday reminder or a meme that didn’t really resonate with you. This study suggests that banning Facebook overall isn’t likely to improve people’s quality of life. Instead, we will have to get a bit more nuanced in what aspects of Facebook and what patterns of use do and don’t contribute to well-being.

Vuorre, M., & Przybylski, A. K. (2023). Estimating the association between Facebook adoption and well-being in 72 countries. Royal Society Open Science , 10 (8), 221451.

Alexander Danvers, Ph.D. , is a social psychologist by training with an interdisciplinary approach to research. Currently, he works on measuring and improving mental health outcomes.

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Facebook is a harmful presence in our lives. It’s not too late to pull the plug on it

Undaunted by scandals, the social media giant plans to tighten its grip on our everyday activities. We don’t have to just submit

F acebook is in perpetual crisis mode. For years now, the company has confronted waves of critical scrutiny on issues caused or exacerbated by the platform. Recent revelations have lengthened the charge sheet.

That list includes the mass data collection and privacy invasion by Cambridge Analytica ; the accusations of Russian interference during the 2016 presidential election; unrestrained hate speech, inciting, among other things, genocide in Myanmar ; the viral spread of disinformation about the coronavirus and vaccines, with Joe Biden proclaiming about Facebook and other social media platforms: “They’re killing people”. Add to that Facebook Marketplace: with a billion users buying and selling goods, ProPublica found a growing pool of scammers and fraudsters exploiting the site, with Facebook failing “to safeguard users”.

The latest wave of investigative reporting focused on the company, meanwhile, comes from the Wall Street Journal’s Facebook Files series. After pouring over a cache of the company’s internal documents, the WSJ reported that “Facebook’s researchers have identified the platform’s ill effects”. For instance, the company downplayed findings that using Instagram can have significant impacts on the mental health of teenage girls. Meanwhile, it has been implementing strategies to attract more preteen users to Instagram. The platform’s algorithm is designed to foster more user engagement in any way possible, including by sowing discord and rewarding outrage . This issue was raised by Facebook’s integrity team, which also proposed changes to the algorithm that would suppress, rather than accelerate, such animus between users. These solutions were struck down by Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, because he prioritised growing engagement above other objectives.

What’s more, the WSJ reported, Facebook employees “ raised alarms ” about drug cartels and human traffickers in developing countries using the platform, but the company’s response has been anaemic. Perhaps because executives are, yet again, hesitant to impede growth in these rapidly expanding markets.

This is consistent with claims by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, who said at the weekend, in an interview with 60 Minutes , “Facebook, over and over again, has shown it chooses profit over safety.” It also emerged that Haugen has filed at least eight complaints with the US financial watchdog over Facebook’s approach to safety. Haugen testified before the US Senate on Tuesday, backing up her revelations. “I’m here today because I believe Facebook’s products harm children, stoke division and weaken our democracy,” she said. “The company’s leadership knows how to make Facebook and Instagram safer, but won’t make the necessary changes because they have put their astronomical profits before people.” We shouldn’t be surprised that making money hand over fist is any company’s primary motivation. But here we have further evidence that Facebook is a uniquely socially toxic platform.

Despite the executive team’s awareness of these serious problems, despite congressional hearings and scripted pledges to do better, despite Zuckerberg’s grandiose mission statements that change with the tides of public pressure, Facebook continues to shrug off the great responsibility that comes with the great power and wealth it has accumulated.

Each surging wave builds on the last, hitting Facebook even harder, enveloping it in scandal after scandal. In response, the company has decided to go on the offensive – rather than truly address any of its problems.

In August, Zuckerberg signed off on an initiative called Project Amplify , which aims to use Facebook’s news feed “to show people positive stories about the social network”, according to the New York Times . By pushing pro-Facebook stories, including some “written by the company”, it hopes to influence how users perceive the platform. Facebook is no longer happy to just let others use the news feed to propagate misinformation and exert influence – it wants to wield this tool for its own interests, too.

With Project Amplify under way, Facebook is mounting a serious defence against the WSJ Facebook Files. In an article posted on Facebook Newsroom by Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice-president of global affairs, , accusations of “deliberate mischaracterisations” by the WSJ reporters are lobbed in without supplying any specific details or corrections. Similarly, in an internal memo sent by Clegg to pre-empt Haugen’s interview, Clegg rejected any responsibility for Facebook being “the primary cause of polarisation”, blamed the prevalence of extreme views on individual bad actors like “a rogue uncle” and provided talking points for employees who might “get questions from friends and families about these things”.

It’s all spin, with no substance. A trained politician deflecting accusations while planting seeds of doubt in the public’s mind without acknowledging or addressing the problems at hand.

In another response to the WSJ, Facebook’s head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, made a strange analogy between social media and cars: “We know that more people die than would otherwise because of car accidents, but by and large, cars create way more value in the world than they destroy,” Mosseri said. “And I think social media is similar.” Mosseri can no longer deny that platforms like his are forces for destruction. His tactic is to convince us that a simple cost-benefit analysis comes out in his favour. He happens to elide the fact that cars cause more than crashes; they are also responsible for systemic social and environmental consequences at every level. Of course, this is exactly the kind of self-interested myopia we should expect from a tech executive under fire.

Beyond pushing back against critical reporting, however, an initiative like Project Amplify should be understood as Facebook attempting to pave the way for its deeper penetration into every facet of our reality. After all, when asked last year by Congress why Facebook is not a monopoly, Zuckerberg said it’s because he views all possible modes of “ people connecting with other people ” as a form of competition for his business. And if we know anything about Facebook, they are very good at capturing market share and crushing competitors – no matter what it takes.

Facebook needs users to form an intimate relationship with the platform. In quick succession this summer, it announced two new products that represent the company’s next planned phase of existence – both its own and ours.

First is the “ metaverse ”. Named after an explicitly dystopian sci-fi idea , the metaverse is, for now, pitched as essentially a virtual reality office – accessed through VR goggles like Facebook Oculus – where you go to see colleagues, attend meetings, and give presentations without having to leave home. Zuckerberg proclaimed that over the next five years, Facebook “will effectively transition from people seeing us as primarily being a social media company to being a metaverse company.”

Second is Ray-Ban Stories, Facebook’s attempt to succeed where Google Glass failed. Ray-Ban Stories are pitched as a frictionless way to stay constantly connected to Facebook and Instagram without that pesky smartphone getting in the way. Now you can achieve the dream of sharing every moment of your day with Facebook – and the valuable data produced from it – without ever needing to think about it.

Importantly, access to both kinds of reality – virtual and augmented – are mediated by Facebook. The executives at Facebook would like you to believe that the company is now a permanent fixture in society. That a platform primarily designed to supercharge targeted advertisements has earned the right to mediate not just our access to information or connection but our perception of reality. And Facebook’s aggressive attempts to combat any scepticism, combined with its reality-shaping ambitions, shows how desperate it is to convince us to accept the social poison it peddles and ask for more.

Days before Facebook’s latest congressional hearing – this time on the mental impacts of Instagram on teenagers – Mosseri announced his team was pausing Instagram Kids, a service aimed at people under 13 years old, and developing “parental supervision tools”. It seems yet again that they will do the bare minimum only when forced to do so. Speaking about this change of direction in her Senate hearing, Haugen was sceptical: “I would be sincerely surprised if they do not continue working on Instagram Kids, and I would be amazed if a year from now we don’t have this conversation again.”

For Facebook, all this negative attention amounts to an image problem: bad publicity that can be counteracted by good propaganda. For the rest of us, this is indicative that Facebook doesn’t just have a problem; Facebook is the problem. Ultimately, an overwhelming case is growing against Facebook’s right to even exist, let alone continue enjoying unrestricted operation and expansion.

We must not forget that Facebook is still young. It was founded in 2004, but didn’t really come into itself, becoming the behemoth we know today, until going public in 2012, buying Instagram for $1bn (£760m) that same year and then acquiring WhatsApp for $19bn two years later. True to its original informal motto – “Move fast and break things” – Facebook has wasted no time wreaking a well-documented path of destruction.

When Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp temporarily went offline this week due to a technical problem , we saw just how dependent we have already become on these services for so many everyday activities. It was a shock to suddenly be without them. The company would probably see this as evidence that our lives are too intertwined with its services for them to ever go away. But, as the company has proven time and time again, our interests and its interests are rarely aligned. We should instead recognise that allowing a rapacious company to design and own critical infrastructure with zero accountability is the worst of all possible options.

If its executives want to compare social media to cars, then at the very least this dangerous technology must be subjected to the same level of heavy regulation and independent oversight as the automotive industry. Otherwise, Facebook must be reminded that it’s not too late for the public to pull the plug on this social experiment gone wrong. Right now, almost any alternative would be better.

Jathan Sadowski is a research fellow in the emerging technologies research lab at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia

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Many of us spend hours every day tethered to our devices, pawing at the screen to see if it will deliver a few more likes or emails, monitoring the world and honing our online presence. Social networking platforms such as Whatsapp, Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter are supposed to make us feel more connected. Yet our reliance on technology to “see” the social world around us can be a heavy burden.

The Pew Research Centre recently reported that about a quarter of US adults say they are “almost constantly” online. Stress, addiction, depression and anxiety seem unsurprising consequences of using social platforms often specifically designed to keep us repeating the same actions over and over again.

Even so, many would find the prospect of living offline worrisome, or simply impossible. That’s why we undertook a small study with 50 people who may seem nothing less than social outcasts in today’s screen saturated environment. None of our participants used social media or had a mobile phone, and most even refused to email.

We wanted to understand why these people had decided to switch off, and how they managed it. But rather than seeking quick fixes for overuse, we explored the principles and values that drove our participants to live the way they do. Much has already been written about how we can switch off – but that won’t achieve much, unless we really feel the benefits.

Here’s what our respondents said they’d learned, from living their social lives offline.

1. Spending time with others

Part of the problem with social networking platforms is that we don’t just use them for communicating – they also promote a particular way of being connected to and supportive of those around us. These interactions are channelled through the platform to create data, which is ultimately fed back to data brokers and marketers.

Our participants shared a deep belief in, and attachment to, a different way of socialising that’s focused on expression, touching, talking and being in the same space, physically. For them, this helped to maintain a feeling of human bonding and connection.

And while this slower, deeper acknowledgement of others was especially valued by our participants, they also thought it might be valuable to society more broadly. Given the angst-ridden nature of frenetic social networking, we could all benefit from slowing down and taking stock more often.

For many people today, the sense of being “always-on” is generating a desire to achieve greater balance and disengage from the things that are causing them stress. For our participants, who didn’t use smartphones and social media, time with others was associated with a sense of calm and purpose in life.

2. Switching off is not missing out

Our participants questioned what exactly is “social” about social media: what constitutes communication, and what do we get from the way that social stuff is measured on online platforms – whether that’s friendship, support or social contact. Rather than having hundreds of “friends”, they would always choose to see people face to face and nurture relationships that would support them through the tough times.

Taking the opportunity to switch off may, at first, cause some anxiety. But the trick is to realise that switching off is not the same as missing out. When you first switch off, you may spend more time in your own company. But from these moments may come a realisation of how exhausting it is to sustain online connections, and indeed how superficial it is to be locked in endless exchanges of trivial information.

Those who chose to disconnect are neither sad nor excluded. Freed from the screen, they escaped from the overwhelming flows of information and tasks. Their deep sense of connection with the world, and their loved ones, was clear to see.

3. Being, rather than doing

Many of those who switched off enjoyed new-found vitality, because they found time to connect with the world in the here and now. This is crucial to helping us reset and relax , so that we are prepared for more stressful times.

Time spent scrolling through content may feel as though it makes light demands on body and mind. But the visual interference from a bright screen is far from relaxing. You are much less likely to have restful sleep if you share a bed with your smartphone, or surf to sleep .

As mindfulness is becoming more popular, its core ideas are often coopted by technology. On Instagram, for example, successful influencers show off their yoga skills and promote spiritual disciplines. Fitness trackers, health data and yoga apps consistently rank among the top apps downloaded by smartphone users.

Our disconnected group told us that we should be more critical of our use of apps and start leaving our phone behind. If mindfulness is a state of being focusing on the present – channelling thoughts, feelings and sensations as they flow through us – then what use is a screen? Constant connection paradoxically results in less free time, and periods when we are able to think without interruption give precious refuge from the demands of daily life.

These disconnected people did not switch off to be “anti-social”. They did so to take charge of when and where they connected with people. They may well be part of a vanguard, leading to new ways of being happier, more rested and, yes, more social.

Ten years from now, we might look back at the emergence of social media as a part of humanity’s growing-up – a time that created social divisions, anxiety and restlessness and which damaged the health and well-being of many. Until then, maybe it’s best to put our smartphones down – or at least switch them off a little more often.

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Facebook explains why it’s bad at catching hate speech

By Adi Robertson , a senior tech and policy editor focused on VR, online platforms, and free expression. Adi has covered video games, biohacking, and more for The Verge since 2011.

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As part of Facebook’s promise to answer “hard questions,” the company has published a long explanation of how it finds and removes hate speech — or at least, why it’s often not very good at it. The post runs through the difficulties of defining hate speech across different countries, teaching AI to handle its nuances, and separating intentionally hateful posts from ones that describe hate speech to critique it.

Facebook lays out ambiguous scenarios that could flummox automated tools, including insulting terms that communities have reclaimed. It also describes some cases where it clearly got things wrong: it removed a piece of hate mail that activist Shaun King had posted in order to condemn, for example, a mistake Facebook acknowledges can be “deeply upsetting.” (It later restored the post.) It also lists occasions where it thinks it made the right call on a difficult issue. But it doesn’t delve into some of the thorniest hate speech questions, like semantic tweaks that turn ugly sentiments into acceptable opinions — “migrants are dirt” versus “migrants are dirty,” to cite one example from last year.

This is a problem that goes beyond hate speech; as leaked moderation guidelines showed, there’s a frustratingly fine line versus serious and non-serious threats. And it requires responding to several different sets of legal requirements, because a hateful post could be acceptable in one country and banned in another.

There’s one major, unstated background question: can Facebook ever come up with a system that can handle its nearly 2 billion users? The company says it removes around 66,000 hate mail posts per week, and it relies heavily on user flagging to catch them. Facebook is committing to adding 3,000 more members to its 4,500-strong moderation team, but that’s still minuscule for a platform so big. And if Facebook ever wants to really solve its moderation problems, it will have to find its purpose first .

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10 reasons why you see more arguments on facebook nowadays.

Facebook is a Social Media giant. It's been around long enough that we have generations who have never gone without it, while still being new enough that older generations are still sporadically experimenting with it and popping up in unrelated comment threads wishing their nephew a Happy Birthday.

With Facebook becoming a hub, entertainment center, public forum, and political hotspot it is no surprise that there is friction. I looked into exactly why this year we have seen more of this sort of conflict in an effort to shine some light on our own engagement with Facebook.

You may be guilty of more than one of these, but that's okay! We are all going to have to work a bit at a time to keep the platform healthy. So, to start, let's find out what the problems are...

Here are the 10 reasons why the number of arguments on Facebook is increasing every day.

1 . You’re Using Facebook More than you should!

Even if the rate of irate comments hadn’t increased overall (Spoilers, it has!) then one reason the toxicity is more apparent is the simple increase in time that we have all spent on the site. Attributed to the COVID outbreak this Statistica graph shows how Facebook still dominates our social media time, even more so than Tik Tok which is the new and flashy social for most younger people (As well as taking a surprising hold with the over 35's for some reason).

The important thing to note here is that even at its peak Tik Tok was still not as popular as Facebook at its lowest user count. This goes to show just how much hold Facebook has over newcomers to the social media scene. As we’ll see later, however, it isn’t just the youngsters getting riled up that’s causing the Facebook friction…

2. You’re Between 12 and 34 Years Old 

Findings from Edison Research  have shown that 32 percent of people in that age group use Facebook the most compared to other social media. With an increase in the global population on Facebook, and a huge proportion of the ages being 12 – 34, there can be some quite interesting analysis.

For example, the differences in people around 12 and those around 34 go without stating, the range isn’t just large but it is placed in such a way it covers 3 generations. It includes only 22 years of time and yet covers pre-teens, teens, young adults, and adults all the same. This is a volatile mix of cultures and ideological differences as education, media, and Facebook itself address these groups vastly differently.

The way these groups approach each other is vital too. Even the Court of Law respects "Age Bias" as a category worth accounting for, proving exactly how fundamental this issue is. With our psychology constantly subconsciously distrusting those much younger or older than us it is no surprise that Facebook is a catalyst for conflict.

3. Internet Anonymity Increases Aggression

This one is a term that a lot of readers will be familiar with, especially the idea behind it, and you might even feel guilty about it! (That’s okay). On the internet, the only names and faces the public sees are the ones you outwardly put up. While hacking certainly exists and can mine more data, in general, it’s very much customer-based how much we give Facebook to work with. This has led to Facebook becoming a place where strangers can connect and comment on the same content from any country behind the safety of an internet version of themselves. Anonymity is a factor in everyone’s online life no matter how open you personally are. It is a simple concept that we are more receptive to aggression, conflict, and snideness when online and not having to face that situation in person. The psychodynamics of social networking by Aaron Balick sums it up: “You’re much more likely to throw outrage and anger, particularly if you have an anonymized account”

4. You’ve Seen Too Many Echo-chamber Results Talk About Politics

Even people who don’t know these groups exist are affected

The term "Echo-chamber" refers to spaces online where people meet to share posts and content. However, unlike public spaces, Echo Chambers rely on private corners of things like Facebook or Reddit to meet. This in itself is not inherently an issue, but the problems arise when these private gatherings stagnate and lack the diversity public spaces offer. Now, I’m not against a little wholesome community support, but these groups will be very specific and ordinarily very prejudiced.

For example, a group that outright bans a certain kind of person, or only allows proven voters of a certain political party. You can see how this creates the term “Echo-chamber.” These people spend so much time on Facebook *thinking* they’re on Social Media when in fact they’re just on their own isolated island of very particular views. They aren’t harming anyone there of course, but the problem is that this political polarization makes them then unable to see “real” Facebook, public Facebook, without absolutely losing their mind when someone doesn’t know what their Echo-Chamber go over every week.

We will see later how humans inherently believe what we are told, especially if we are constantly fed that information. This quirk of psychology makes Echo Chambers very, very dangerous.

What is Polarisation on Facebook?

Political polarization, in fact, polarisation about every topic, is a huge part of online life. The internet encourages people to have one view or another as people treat each "side" like an army. The word Polarisation refers to any situation in which there are only 2 distinct choices, which are polar opposites.

Magnets are the prime example, but the phrase is used for non-scientific endeavors too. On Facebook, polarisation can be seen in posts and groups and comment threads where there is a pre-established set of opinions all the users are expecting to see.

For example, if I see a post about US Politics I am certain to encounter a Republican and a Democrat crowd. Since these are already distinct ideas in the user's minds, the groups become polarised. It becomes very hard, or impossible, for people to see an opinion that does not fit either of those groups.

The fact that opinions are held like Ultimatums leads to people feeling there is no sensible middle-ground. These False Dichotomies are everywhere on the Internet; if you don't think Capitalism works in its current form you're a Communist, if you think Facebook stores too much personal data you're a conspiracy theorist, etc.

In reality, these views can actually be perfectly validly held together, simultaneously, it's just that many people online enforce this "With me or against me" mentality that polarises themselves and everyone around them.

Even people who don’t know these groups exist are affected, even you and I are! Because comments and posts are saturated with a collection of these people, and that in turn polarises us. When all the comments on a post are either hate or unconditional devotion it can be hard to argue for a middle ground. Facebook becomes the battleground for these groups, and their private groups are their barracks.

5. Stress Levels on Facebook Follow Exponential Growth

Anger in general is something we tend to describe as “building up”

Between the polarisation, the engrossment of time, the commitment to the platform and the freedom of anonymity Facebook manage to draw you in gradually.

However, the difference between your 30 minutes of Facebook being a chill walk on the web or a fight-for-your-life sprint past the denizens of the deep is a matter of this mood of conflict exponentially growing. Anger in general is something we tend to describe as “building up” or we may say someone has “pent-up” energy or anger or even rage.

Well, according to an interview ScienceFocus performed there is credibility to that assessment and the connection I made to Facebook. Our friend examining psychodynamics on Social Media, Aaron Balick, made the statement that “You could say that people are chronically wound up.”

We are constantly aware, even if subconsciously, of Facebook and the conversations going on there; the stupid political views we’re missing, the friends posting MLMs again, all of it. The more time we spend on Facebook, the more this stress builds and the faster it climbs up out of our Subconscious. This becomes a kindling of sorts, just waiting for a spark…

6. There Are People Online Deliberately Causing Arguments

it’s no wonder that Facebook has so much more of this raw emotion and anger than ever before.

Of course, there are people who just want to watch the world burn. They see that kindling and think it's fun to start the fire. Baiting is a hot topic on the internet what with people’s entertainment coming more and more from Facebook over the COVID Lockdowns.

One way people found their fun is a cheap and dirty thing called Baiting. I could write a whole article on the cursed thing, but let’s focus on the basics of how it causes more arguments than entertainment.

Baiting itself is what it sounds like. A Facebook user will go to a post and comment something…well, let’s just say they know which buttons to press. Perhaps it’s a rant about Microchips in the Vaccine, perhaps it’s simply “Orange man bad”, perhaps it’s just an image with no text of an opposing political figure or celebrity depending on context.

All these things aren’t done to make any actual point or show any real disagreement, they are done purely for the aftermath. These people with enough time and energy to expend on Baiting get a sick joy out of seeing others squabble and knowing in their hearts that they are the cause.

Baiting is a superiority complex at its core, where the Baiter gets off on knowing that they know the *real* situation while others argue over the politics, or extremism, or whatever the bait was about.

It’s the internet equivalent of spiking someone’s tires and then shouting, “It’s just a prank bro!”. Very similarly: A “harmless prank” is never harmless and the prankster is always the one everyone is judging and disagreeing with.

When people are out there deliberately causing arguments because it’s the only way they can feel good about themselves it’s no wonder that Facebook has so much more of this raw emotion and anger than ever before.

7. You Have A Facebook Addiction You Can’t Kick

if it does start to wear on you, you can always give yourself an excuse to put it down for a week.

With Facebook and its users forming this unsightly beast at times, it’s a wonder any of us stay on the platform at all. That’s the kicker, there’s enough victory and wholesomeness and positivity mixed in to keep us hooked. The scary thing is that even if there *wasn’t*…we’d stay anyway.

Facebook Addiction is a very real phenomenon in that everyone with an Addictive personality can find such things the catalyst for their addiction. Using Facebook as a source of self-esteem boosting or procrastination can be a slippery slope to it affecting your daily life.

Facebooks constant refresh, unlimited scrolling, instant commenting and replying, and the fact hundreds of people can react to the content in seconds all combine to make what could be called a Gameplay Loop. It's not so different from a game to some people who spend so much time there.

A study by the Stanford and New York Universities that paid students to not use Facebook for a week found this statement in a report to the New York Times : “it was kind of nice to have an excuse to deactivate and see what happened”.

This is a man who can see and acknowledge the negative effects of Facebook, even finding the payment not an incentive in itself but merely an “excuse” to put Facebook away. There’s no reason any of us couldn’t uninstall it all right now. We could do that.

But we don’t, because maybe like the student here we don’t have our excuses and it’s easier to stay in the loop than break it for “no reason”. Really, the negative effects of Facebook should be enough when they’re getting to us for us to say, “Enough is enough.” So remember that while Facebook isn’t some devilish place, if it does start to wear on you, you can always give yourself an excuse to put it down for a week.

8. We Believe What We See

Even if we know something is sugar, we can be convinced it’s Cyanide with nothing more than a label

It’s a simple fact that we all, even without wanting to, have a tendency to believe what we see. In an age of Photoshop, Baiting, and downright misinformation, however, that approach is causing more and more problems.

There’s an idea that is commonly talked about: Normalisation. If we see an opinion enough, no matter how extreme, it becomes part of our expected spectrum of opinions, pushing the border further and further.

This can be excellent and break down previous restrictions such as Gay Marriage becoming legalized and normalized. However, it can also result in us all learning to slowly accept, to normalize, extreme views on almost everything.

While this is a key factor, I personally think there’s a deeper and slightly different angle that this comes in from on Facebook. It harkens back to my early days in Sixth Form doing AS-Level psychology, but let’s not rely on my memory of that, eh? Instead, the same sentiment is found in The Sympathetic Magical Law of Similarity, Nominal Realism, and Neglect of Negatives in Response to Negative Labels by Paul Rozin.

Rozin outlines truth, lies, and misinformation or misinterpretation thoroughly here. The base idea is that we as humans tend to believe what we see. We have no reason to doubt information we are visually given right into our own eyes (Which we tend to trust above all else!).

He alludes to an experiment with Sugar where simple white sugar was labeled as Cyanide. Despite the subjects placing the sugar in the bottle themselves…well, you can guess I’m sure. Hardly anyone took the sugar from the “Cyanide” bottle despite bottling the sugar themselves. Now imagine all the information we see on Facebook is in bottles. These can be groups, celebrities, friends, or even the topics themselves. How we see that bottle, the current impression, makes all the difference. Even if we know something is sugar, we can be convinced it’s Cyanide with nothing more than a label. This psychological flaw, combined with the misgivings of Facebook and the work of Echo-chambers and Baiters, makes Facebook a time bomb of frustration and distrust whenever any of these bottles are opened.

9. You Have Too Many Facebook Friends!

Facebook psychology can cause real detriment to our aggression levels and cause arguments online.

We all know Facebook friends aren’t *real* friends. At least, not all of them. That’s not to say people you only know online can’t be genuine friends, some of the people I enjoy talking with most and feel comfortable with I don’t even know the names of because we met on things like Twitch or Discord.

People whose names I only know as Shark or Too-Lazy or some other moniker. With this pressure taken off and Facebook friends not being something we need to make time for or stress over, some people end up with thousands or even into the 10’s of thousands. I am honestly still processing that; I have under 500 and follow about a quarter of them. But I digress.

The issue is that when this many people are linked in this way, regardless of what meaning we attribute that “Friendship”, the number itself can be a marker for more bombastic and extreme behavior online. People viewing that number as a mark of pride, or an audience to perform to, will often fit themselves into that role they have created.

A journal published with research from Western Illinois University shows a correlation between certain narcissistic behavior and the number of friends students have on Facebook.

The full journal is linked as to not disservice a huge endeavor like that, but essentially the study breaks down behaviors into categories that can then be referenced across to Facebook behavior. This means that regardless of what we might think of Facebook friends being real or not, the number matters.

Of course, this is a correlation, not causation and so I am certain there are people who care, in no uncertain terms, about their friend count while also being perfectly nice people! It is simply another way in which Facebook psychology can cause real detriment to our aggression levels and cause arguments online.

10. You’re A Victim Of All These Systems

The final reason you might be seeing more aggression on Facebook is that you are essentially a victim of all these effects we have covered. Maybe you never even considered Baiters existed (Why would they in a sane world?), or maybe you never took the time to find an “excuse” to leave Facebook for just a week and see the change (If any, of course). Maybe you’re even guilty of some of the behaviors here, which is completely fine! Just remember these factors when you see the friction online and remind yourself that you are more than just your Facebook.

"What's on your mind?"

After everything we’ve spoken about today, it would be easy to assume I hate Facebook in all its forms, but really this is just the expected outcome of looking into argumentative psychology online. I find Facebook has its uses, has its positives, has community and passion, and creativity.

The trick is learning when that all ends and, as I hope this article did, find out *why* such a place can turn so toxic. I’ve been in more Facebook arguments than I care to admit, but it’s not for joy or entertainment for me.

I have my own drives that Facebook uses in all the ways we have spoken of here, and I suspect so do you. We all have some work to do to make Facebook the least toxic it can be. So, let’s get started and really make this world a better place to live.

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