We are all in this together

There has been much vilification of social media when it comes to mental wellbeing. It is everyone’s favourite villain. But in our zeal to make it enemy number one, are we missing out on all the good it has to offer?

By midnight, the memes had exploded. Twitter’s official handle crowed ‘Hello literally everyone!’ and promptly, everyone and their aunt (including Instagram’s official handle, McDonald’s and Dolly Parton) responded with clever jibes. There was so much good-natured jousting and banter on the social media handle that night that I almost forgave it for its constant toxicity. Considering that nearly 50 million people were on Twitter at one point, thanks to the six-hour-long Facebook-Instagram-WhatsApp outage, this was perhaps expected.

What I did not expect was how joyful I felt at being part of this communion of exasperation — the world coming together to snigger at its own collective addiction and laugh at its folly.

This made me wonder if social media is as harmful to our mental wellbeing as it is made out to be. After all, if humans thrive on connections, isn’t that what social media ostensibly excels in? While social media is blamed for reducing face-to-face interactions, in times of need like in the case of the pandemic, no one can deny how much solace it offered, the bonds it built and the friendships it sustained, and sometimes, even rekindled.

The ‘perfection’ problem

But, of course, social media is a befuddling beast and no single narrative can describe it in its entirety. Curiously enough, just a week before the outage-inspired global Twitter party, the Wall Street Journal made an exposé about Instagram’s internal report on the app’s effects on the mental health of teenagers. The findings of this research are, to put it mildly, perturbing.

Facebook apparently had kept this research under wraps for the past two years. The internal study, the newspaper claimed, had found that Instagram deepened body image issues for one in three teen girls. Nearly 14 per cent of boys who had been surveyed said the app made them feel worse about themselves. The findings also revealed that the app put considerable pressure on teenagers to look perfect, propagated toxic positivity and its addictive nature often sent them on crash diets, resulting in eating disorders, anxiety attacks and depressive episodes. Worryingly, among teenagers who reported suicidal thoughts, 13 per cent of British users and six per cent of American users traced such ideas to their use of Instagram.

While Instagram’s head of public policy Karina Newton contested the article saying that WSJ deliberately focused on “a limited set of findings” to cast Facebook and its affiliates in a negative light, this latest study only reiterates what several other external studies have said earlier and implicates social media squarely in what seems to be a surge of mental health problems in young adults across the globe.

Half-truths, lies and statistics

But wait, that’s not the whole story. To combat this exposé, Facebook released all its stowed-away research with added annotations. According to these latest reports, Facebook had surveyed more than 22,000 users across US, Brazil, India, Turkey, Japan and Indonesia, but only around 150 girls had responded to the body image question. The report also cited that while around 30 per cent of girls claimed Instagram made them feel worse about their bodies, a majority felt it had no impact on their overall health and wellbeing.

And between these half-truths, lies and statistics, is perhaps the real story of how detrimental or beneficial social media is for our wellbeing. Karina Newton has a point when she says anxiety and negative social comparison exist in the real world and hence they will do so on social media too. But as Nirupa Tripathi, a Mumbai-based child counsellor argues, the constant bombardment of perfection has a great impact on how youngsters feel about their own selves and “it becomes very hard for them to not compare themselves to others.”

A 2019 study by Harvard researchers found that routine social media use is positively associated with “social well-being, positive mental health and self-rated health.” The problem arises when users become deeply emotionally connected to the medium — feeling disconnected when not posting, doomscrolling, excessive checking and rechecking apps — it is these behaviour patterns that lead to social media becoming the Lucifer of our lives.

Mindful and moderate use

In an interview on the Harvard website, co-researcher of this study, Mesfin Awoke Bekalu from the Harvard T H Chan School of Public Health, says the findings suggest that mindful and moderate use of the medium may be more beneficial than harmful in the long run. In short, he believes the way people use social media has more impact on mental wellbeing than just the frequency and duration of the use.

There is empirical and anecdotal evidence to prove this. Social media often compensates for the lack of genuine, non-toxic real-life connections. It is a means to overcome barriers of distance and time to find friends with common interests and to use that millennial cliché, ‘vibe with your tribe’.

Indeed, there have been many solid instances of strangers coming forward, especially to comfort grieving souls. This is not to say that there are no cringeworthy and insensitive responses to death and bereavement on the medium, which range from liking a bereavement post to making reels at funeral ceremonies.

But that said, crowdsourced comfort, as one Reddit user called it, can be healing in its own way. In fact, some even label this the ‘human social media’ — this is a not-so-easily-visible nook where you find virtual hugs, unconditional empathy and genuine compassion. This is a place where age, class, country, religion, gender and other usual causes of discord are almost magically neutralised. And if you are lucky and determined enough to find this cozy corner in the folds of the corpulent beast, you do not have to wait for internet outage parties to feel connected to “literally everyone”.