The COVID-19 pandemic has intensified calls for urgent action to mitigate some of the worst harms societies are experiencing as a consequence of time spent immersed in social media environments. During the lockdowns, this immersion has gone from partial to almost total. While social media enables information to travel fast, it allows disinformation to spread even faster.
Writing from Melbourne, Australia, where we have recently emerged from an extended lockdown, my teenage daughter’s daily screen time had been averaging upwards of 10 hours a day until she returned to school at the end of October. At least 4 of those hours were spent on social media platforms such as Instagram, Tik Tok and Snapchat. I know I am not alone in struggling to limit not only my daughter’s time on such platforms, but my own time online.
This is hardly surprising since, on the one hand, social media platforms are designed to keep us tethered to them for as long as possible to extract our attention and data. Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma highlights just how much is at stake when we become collectively ‘addicted’ to our devices, contributing to growing awareness that the very design of social media is now driven by profit, often at the expense of truth and human dignity.
