Tech toys are eating into our national psyche

Harm caused by social media goes ­beyond economic and information issues.

It was humbling, if somewhat depressing, to learn that Australians spend more time on Snapchat than the websites­ owned by the ABC, News Corp Australia, Nine, Seven West and Ten — combined. Snapchat is an inane app on which users send each other silly videos that self-­destruct.

About 2.3 per cent of the five-plus hours we spend online each day is devoted to reading news, a share dwarfed by a quarter­ that time being spent on ­Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Messenger, according to the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission’s landmark study into the power of the two giant digital platforms, ­released last week.

Over more than 620 pages, the competition regulator has laid out how Facebook and Google harm news media, competition and privacy. That’s what it was asked to investigate. But the damage goes beyond the economic.

Social media has supercharged some baser instincts. Facebook and its subsidiary Instagram, in partic­ular, are a canvas and tonic for at least six of the seven deadly sins: sloth, lust, pride, greed, envy and wrath.

Rates of self-harm among teenage girls in the US and Britain have increased by half since the late 2000s as their use of social media has spread, according to a new British study by Elisabeth Costa and David Halpern. It’s more than coincidence.

“Facebook users who de­activated their accounts for four weeks spent less time online, ­reduced political polarisation (at the expense of news knowledge) and, most crucially, increased subjectiv­e wellbeing,” they found.

Instagram — where users post photos, typically of their desirable holidays, physiques or possessions — had the most negative impac­t on users’ body image and fear of missing out, according to a study by the Royal Society of ­Public Health.

Take a look around the train or bus to try to find the passengers not staring at their mobile phones. There are never many.

We are yet to see a generation raised on a diet of beautiful picture­s of themselves and others grow old. The “likes” might dry up.

Timely then that Instagram, to its credit, has this month removed the “like count” on users’ profiles, making it that little bit harder for users to compare likes (my tip: hide the number of “followers” as well).

Mental health isn’t the only collateral damage of social media. Productivity, sluggish the world over for a decade, must have ­suffered too, as we spend more and more time of our time on devices ­engaged in activities that many of us know are hardly worthwhile.

“This is presumably displacing other activity as well as normalising distractions and interruptions, meaning we’re worse at focusing when we are actually on task,” the two authors reported.

“Experimental studies have found that leaving your phone in another room increased performance on a working memory task by 11 per cent compared with ­having it face down on your desk.”

Social media has created systems­ of nuisance interactions. We’re naturally social, reciprocal creatures. If you nod to someone in the street, you expect a nod back. Social media has foisted a thousand nods a day on us, which we feel obliged to return: responding to messages, “liking” other ­social posts, weighing up whether to retweet or mulling over which is the right GIF or “sticker” for the occasion. It all adds up.

Indeed, our innate politeness has crushed the online feedback systems meant to police Uber users. It’s almost impossible to find a driver or passengers with less than a 4½-star rating. On Trip­Advisor, in 2017, a backyard shed was briefly a top-rated restaurant in London.

What can we do to curb the downsides of social media? Like alcoholism, the first step is being aware that there’s a problem.

I noticed recently that a Universit­y of Chicago economics professor had switched his mobile phone’s display to monochrome. “It means I’ll look at it less,” he told me. “The colours help make us ­addicted.”

For those without the discip­line to become professors, self-control might not be enough.

Motorists kill people but we don’t ban cars. We have road rules to limit their lethal impact. The ­absence of rules for ­social media is striking, given its wider impact.

At the minimum, social media, indeed all respectable businesses selling goods and services on the internet, should promise to avoid manipulating us for their own profit. None of them invented the internet so their profits stem in part from a public good.

Social media applications might make it easier for users to detox, closing down their access for a certain period. Britain’s chief medical officer recently encouraged parents to “leave phones outside­ the bedroom when it’s bedtime”, and encourage having family meals without mobile ­devices at hand.

Terms and conditions should be made much clearer and shorter. Facebook wouldn’t have been able to obtain so much information if users had known they were granting Facebook permanent rights to their every uploaded photo.

PayPal’s terms and conditions are longer than Hamlet. Almost 100 per cent of university students invited to join a fictitious social media app, Namedrop, inadvert­ently signed over their firstborn child in a famous 2016 experiment. There should be another, mandat­ory option: “No, I haven’t read it, and I don’t plan to.” This would leave the rights and obligations up to a standard.

“Consumers may be harmed by being exposed to content that has been through less rigorous quality control, fewer content filters, and less general oversight in compar­ison with content supplied by media businesses,” the ACCC said in its report.

Fake news is a problem but the damage of social media goes ­beyond economic and inform­ation issues, as ably demonstrated by the ACCC in its latest report.

A generation ago, news outlets would have soaked up far more of our time, leaving us a less titillated and entertained perhaps but far more ­informed audience.

Google, Facebook, their various offshoots and a whole menag­erie of dating apps have enabled us to be more efficient at work, ­accessible to friends and family, and connected with the wider world. But there have been downside­s too, and so far the social­ app owners have done precious­ little to deal with them. Removing the “like counter” on photos is hardly enough.