The Hartley Sentinel-The Everly/Royal News - Serving O'Brien & Clay Counties

I’ll never understand why people get so mad at social media platforms. You have to voluntarily sign up for them, and doing so puts you under their terms and conditions.

It also subjects you to the idiocy, lies and unrestrained vitriol that have become the bread and butter of these platforms. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and their ilk can even censor you for reposting the aforementioned garbage, which leads to more hate and bitterness strewn throughout each person’s feed – a snake eating its own tail if I’ve ever seen one.

If you’re the kind of person who wants that toxicity in your life on a daily or hourly basis, we are different people. I dumped Facebook in 2012 and Twitter at the start of this year. There are no regrets on my end.

Accordingly, I couldn’t hold back a chorus of laughs last week during all the feigned outrage over Facebook. Whistleblower Frances Haugen, a former employee and native Iowan, went public about her identity on CBS’s 60 Minutes. She previously released documents outlining how Facebook’s own research showed its algorithms amplify hate, misinformation and political unrest, but the company hides that fact from the general public. Color me shocked.

This is where I come clean, though – I do have a Facebook account to run the newspaper’s page and double-check the spelling of peoples’ names. Shamefully, I also look up the profiles of criminals charged with outrageous crimes, because everyone has a guilty pleasure.

My limited use still subjects me to all the stupid memes, lies and bogus narratives that Facebook pushes to the forefront. I intentionally have zero “friends” on Facebook, so it’s completely voluntary when I choose to go down the rabbit hole of social filth and idiocy. I absolutely regret it every time.

I will never grasp why we do this to ourselves; constantly scrolling feeds, agreeing with some meme post while vehemently disagreeing with another. I don’t know why everyone feels the need to share their thoughts on every single topic of the day, and I say that while consciously typing out an opinion column. However, as the author of said column, I am capable of grasping the notion that generally nobody cares what I think. I would honestly rather write about the weather.

That’s not the world we live in, though. Everyone has to post their thoughts on this or that, and that’s because they need the likes. We enjoy how it feels when one of our posts gets shared or one of our tweets gets a heart. As evidenced over the past months by Haugen’s leaks, Facebook would prefer that those posts are negative, because negative posts garner more responses.

Thusly, we end up where we are today. Nearly 3 billion people have Facebook accounts, which represents 60 percent of all internet connections on Earth. Facebook is a trillion-dollar company, so if negative vitriol pays the bills and turns a profit, they’re not going to bite the hand that feeds them.

There was a congressional hearing about Facebook last week in Washington, D.C., where senators repeatedly noted that Big Tech is having its “Big Tobacco moment.” Their contrived anger was laughable. They rely on Facebook to spread said outrage, in turn outraging their supporters, who then share that outrage on their Facebook profiles, and so on and so forth. Snake, meet tail.

I don’t see any way out of this pit. Some people have called for corporations like Facebook to be broken up, but that won’t solve a thing: Whatever social media companies that form from such a breakup would no doubt operate in the exact same manner. Money talks, and you don’t fix what isn’t broken. The only change will come from people deleting their social media accounts and removing the apps from their phones.

The existential crisis over our digital addiction has been ongoing for the better part of five years. We bemoan this, that and the other thing about platforms like Facebook and Twitter, but we’ll keep coming back. After all, they’re the new cigarettes. Instead of a surge from nicotine, our brains get flushed with endorphins every time our phones ping from a like or repost. Somebody likes what you think – doesn’t it feel great? Aren’t you special?

As a father of two, I dread raising kids during the Age of Social Media. I was in my mid-teens when Facebook started, and I got my first account back in 2007 before all the “old” people joined. It was a dumpster fire even in its comparatively watered down state 14 years ago. I still remember all the bullying that took place and mean comments that pervaded nearly everything you clicked on. As was true then as it is now, social media amplifies the worst of human nature and rewards people for broadcasting it.

I’ll always hate social media and raise an eyebrow to people who believe everything they see on it. If I were ruler of the world, I’d ban it outright and order people to read a book, go for a walk and find a new hobby. There is no reason your emotions need to be controlled by the algorithm that regulates your Facebook or Twitter feed. This is a choice. Until we all realize that, nothing will change.

Nick Pedley is the news editor of The Hartley Sentinel-The Everly/Royal News.