While the initial goal of social media was to connect an ever growing world, the rise of Meta (Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp), has largely been driven not by connecting people, but by turning them into commodities. Private information has been sold over and over for billions of dollars, leaving people (especially children and teens) behind in a wake of depression, anxiety and tragedy. However, new technologies are focusing on protecting user privacy as a primary goal. Can these new disruptive companies unseat the old order?

She was only 16 when she started receiving messages on Snapchat. A “boy” started being complementary and flirty. She had never met him, and he didn’t go to her school. After a couple of weeks, this girl met the “boy”, only to discover that he was a 25 year old man with a hidden, violent agenda. 

The teen had been “groomed” by a predator who discovered her Snapchat account simply by accessing the map feature on the popular app. After she started to balk at some of the more extreme requests he made, the 25 year-old man imprisoned the girl in his home, starved her and essentially enslaved her. 

A random Google search of the terms “Snapchat’ and “dangerous” returns 120,000 news stories, mostly relating to young children being preyed on by adults. While Snapchat is commonly thought of as a harmless and fun app, it can lead to some of the most brutal crimes against kids.

Unfortunately, this is an all-too common story, one that happens increasingly often with the use of social media. While stories about the problems about social media are abundant, it is not always clear that there is a solution available.

European Concerns

The European Union has taken exception to Meta’s data practices, and has gone so far as to demand that Meta keep all data collected on their platforms on servers within the EU. Meta, in response, threatened that they would shut down their platforms in Europe if they were not allowed to transmit this data to servers based in the United States.

The EU government has passed a bevy of laws in recent years to protect the privacy of the citizens of Europe. The General Data Protection Regulation passed in 2018 caused any website operator to change their use of browser tracking codes to help mask the browsing behavior of individuals. This was a monumental step in the protection of privacy, and has thrown a monkey wrench into the business models of Meta, Google and other tech giants.

The Meta threat to leave Europe was largely seen as empty, as Europe is a $6.8 billion dollar market for the company, and that loss of revenue would be hard to make up. But the threat does showcase the lack of concern for individual privacy by the Meta braintrust. 

The Meta Studies & The Impact On Mental Health

Amongst the news about social media companies were internal reports released by Facebook and Instagram’s parent company, Meta. These reports that the company conducted internally, showed a direct connection between teen anxiety, depresssion and suicide and use of the popular Instagram app.

The Meta study concluded that teen users, especially girls and minorities, “felt immense pressure to achieve popularity on Instagram” in the form of likes and other metrics. The lack of this created a growth in unhappiness which was expressed in high rates of “anxiety, depression and even suicidal ideation.”

The use and encouragement of engagement and posting content to social media platforms is the bedrock of the business model of Meta. The more engagement Meta can showcase, the more they can command for their advertising platform. The profit motive for Meta is directly tied to the engagement and content being produced by their platforms. Not to be outdone, Snapchat recently became profitable for the first time in ten years, primarily by following the model that Meta had set forth years ago: Drive user engagement and use to astronomical levels, and then use that data to sell to advertisers for direct targeting purposes. 

In addition, the users studied by Meta expressed feelings of “extreme social isolation” and a “lack of meaningful relationships” in their lives. One of the other findings in the study expressly stated that the efforts put forth in 2014 to “improve meaningful connections among users” failed miserably and led to more division among users than ever before.

The use of user data has been on the wrong side of the law in recent months. Meta was sued by the state of Texas for violating a state law that requires explicit consent to use biometric identifiers for any commercial purposes. Meta had been using their facial recognition technology for commercial gain, from any and all users, even children, who cannot consent to the agreements in the first place.

The commercial purpose of facial recognition data? To build the Metaverse.

The Metaverse: Using the Cause of the Illness to Provide a Cure

In 2021, Mark Zuckerberg made headlines when he announced that “Facebook” would now be a company called “Meta.” In one of the most publicized rebrands in history, the Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp companies would be part of a parent company dedicated to the promotion and use of the Metaverse.

The Metaverse, in layman’s terms, is a digital world in which interactions and experiences are virtual rather than physical. In essence, you could take a “trip to Hawaii” virtually, without ever having to get on a plane, book a hotel, or even leave your house. While it has been billed as the “next frontier” of the internet, many are concerned about the implications of this, especially in the wake of the studies mentioned above.

Proposing to solve the social isolation problem with more social isolation seems counterproductive. If a teen is already having trouble making friends, how can a world in which they never have to leave their own homes provide them with the “meaningful connections” Facebook was so desperately trying to create in 2014? 

The truth of the matter is that the problems being created by social media can’t be solved by social media. The profit motive and model that has turned social media into a billion dollar industry is so embedded at the core of their being, that there is no real way to untangle the mess. 

The other part of the problem is the resignation people feel. The power of tech giants has essentially given people the impression that there is no alternative. However, the trend in tech has been toward privacy, and some new platforms have emerged to challenge the existing order. 

The Disruptors Are Coming

There are significant challengers on the horizon for the current tech giants. Google has been the dominant force in search for years, but their tracking practices have been no better than those of the social media companies. Enter DuckDuckGo, a completely private search engine. By not exposing your search behavior to advertisers, this company has proven itself as an effective tool, and has caught the attention of investors, to the tune of $171 million dollars in funding. 

In the communication space, CircleIt is positioned as a new technology that privately connects users to their inner circle. Long before Whataspp was running advertisements to promote their end-to-end encryption, CircleIt founder Art Shaikh had military grade end-to-end encryption built into the chat function of the “generational platform” he built. Billed as a healthy alternative to social media, CircleIt connects users to their “inner circle”, providing a much more nurturing and safe community for users. CircleIt, too, has caught the attention of investors, and has garnered $7.1 million in funding through Series A alone. For a young company, this is a monumental vote of confidence.

Technologies that are focusing on privacy are cropping up in many spaces. Treating users as people rather than commodities might sound like an old-school way, but it is becoming the new school of technology startups.