How Social Media Has Poisoned Your Life

A stock photo of various social media platforms on a screen.

I was reading the August 2020 Issue of UK’s Red Magazine and came across British author Laura Jane Williams speaking about her journey towards overcoming social media addiction and how her life changed thereafter.

The author, who took a hundred days off the platforms, admitted to the difficulty she had to go through when she made the decision, carefully painting a picture of the anxiety many of us would undergo should the platforms be yanked away from us at a moment’s notice, showing just how far too we are entrenched in these cesspools.

“Feeling seen, understood and liked was addictive. But then stuff unfolded in my personal life that I had to keep offline and doing so revealed just how wonderful having secrets can be. I don’t have to tell everyone everything. Some things are too delicate. Too special,” she told Red UK.

These sentiments were echoed by Ezra Klein, the founder of one of the fastest-growing digital news spaces in the world Vox.com, during his interview with Playboy Magazine May-June 2017 issue.

“The constant diet of social media is like dumping toxins into your veins. I don’t know how long people will voluntarily expose themselves to things that make them feel so bad,” he said.

These sentiments took me to some research I read some time ago saying that in the next 20 years, one of the worst cybercrime headaches would be Identity Theft due to the overabundance of highly private information in the online space voluntarily shared by the users themselves.

You don’t believe it? Let’s go on a tour. 

An overenthusiastic couple would live stream the birth of their child with every single detail, including the name of the hospital, the doctor’s name, and everything in between, information that not many might think harmful right now but has some people rubbing their hands in glee.

A stock photo of a computer hacker (Image courtesy)

 

Every week the kid makes it to Whatsapp statuses, Facebook and Instagram profiles and many other platforms. Everything, from the goofy things the child does, to the first day of potty training, to the first day at school, makes it to social media, creating a clear roadmap of everything the child is about, along with the timestamps.

By the time the kid turns nine, anyone who has been carefully watching and following its progress knows them almost as well as the parent; what they like, what they hate, who their friends are, the name of their pets, and where they hang out. 

This is highly dangerous information.

In the sad world of today, a kid has a right to everything except freedom. From the moment it is born, parents take over their lives in an utterly selfish way just to brag to their friends or show off just how good their lives are. They snatch the child’s privacy by ensuring that it is always paraded before the camera, and we all know that it is never about the kid.

Some parents have taken to turning their children into money-making machines; leading a barely talking kid into the advertising industry and starting social media accounts with followers, grown men and women ogling at a two-year-old, letting themselves into every private moment in the child’s life as the parents milk the returns.

These cash cows have no choice but to play along to a game they never started, a lifestyle they’ve been taught to have, a privacy they’ll never get, a normal childhood they’ll never have and a perfect façade they’ll have to keep up for their whole lives to their own detriment.

Just to make it clear, this is not a dissertation in condemnation of these social media platforms. Anything can be good when done in moderation, but remember the saying ‘winning the war and losing the battle’? Choose carefully to make sure that the knee-jerk decisions of today do not put the person you love most in jeopardy a few years from now.