TMIS Editorial: The social media addiction
Social media is one of the inventions of the contemporary age that has had the most impact on society on a global level.On the positive side, it means that we are more connected than ever before with our friends, those around us, those near, those fa
Social media is one of the inventions of the contemporary age that has had the most impact on society on a global level.
On the positive side, it means that we are more connected than ever before with our friends, those around us, those near, those far, and everything that is happening the world over. People are merely few clicks of the keyboard away, the world is at our fingertips.
Yet there is a more sinister side to it as well. Misinformation has never been so rife, abuse and insults perhaps never so widespread. Just this week we saw an instance where a person running a weather forecast page felt constrained into suspending its services after they were subjected to "a string of desperate, unjust, misleading and malicious attacks" because some perceived that they got this weekend's weather forecast wrong.
Some people have begun to be held accountable for their words and actions on social media through hate speech charges, but these cases are few and far between and it is clear that for some, social media is still an avenue for them to channel their contempt at the concept of being a mildly decent human being.
However, with social media, there is also another consideration: the consideration that, quite simply, we are becoming addicted to it - especially in the younger generations.
A recent Eurostat study, Maltese have been found to use social media a lot more than the average EU country; while 59% of all EU individuals were found to be using social networks in 2023, the same data for the Maltese stood at 76%.
According to a WHO collaborative cross-national study in the Health Behaviour in School-aged Children featuring the participation of 44 countries, adolescents in Malta (18%) are the second-most likely young nationals to exhibit signs of problematic social media usage; the only country in this study that observed more prevalent problematic SMU was Romania (22%).
When age groups were split into categories of 11-, 13- and 15-year-olds, Malta ranked in the top four of all three demographics for which its youths report problematic social media usage. On the other side of the coin, Malta also recorded the lowest proportion of non-active social media users with just 8% of adolescents, tied with Denmark and Serbia.
In an interview with The Malta Independent on Sunday sociologist Michael Briguglio said that this data is underreporting the issue since people do not care to admit the true amount of time they spend in front of a screen. "I think we spend more time than we are admitting," he said.
There are consequences to this like with any other over-use: people's attention span is reducing, people's desire to do anything other than scroll their phones may be diminishing, in early ages kids are being stimulated with the wrong things which may have an impact on their own development.
But the question is, how do you solve it? Social media algorithms are literally designed to keep you on their product - to keep you scrolling. That makes any solution no easy feat. Can any government intervene and impose limits on social media usage, especially for younger ages? That would be quite a stretch, and would be unacceptable for any government to intervene in such a manner.
The solution has to come from all of us: from those conscious of the effects of over-use of social media to act on that, and to also ensure that children are not overly exposed to it - even if it may be the 'easy way out' in keeping a child occupied.
As an administration, education and awareness is probably the best way forward. The effects of social media have not been adequately studied, and much less have their effects been the subject of education.
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