How Are You Rethinking Your Relationship with Social Media?
We are both the influencers and the influenced.
This week’s episode of the podcast, with former wellness influencer Lee Tilghman, has me thinking about all the ways social media has influenced our lives, for good and (mostly) for ill.
Granted, there’s a chance I wouldn’t be writing to you right now if it weren’t for my social-media presence—you might never have heard of me otherwise. Social platforms are good at helping consumers find niche content creators who match their interests, and helping those creators find audiences who resonate with their work. I’m sure I owe at least a portion of whatever career successes I’ve had to social media.
And yet on the whole, I think social media has been bad for individual and collective well-being.
Social algorithms can quickly drive people from relatively benign searches for fitness and nutrition information to extreme diets and pro-eating-disorder content. Dubious wellness plans and harmful alternative-health practices that otherwise would have stayed on the fringes go viral thanks to algorithmic amplification.
Platforms reward users for spreading misinformation, sowing confusion and allowing bad actors to manipulate the discourse about vaccines and health in general. Algorithms also reward outrage, causing people to treat each other horribly online and sometimes spilling over into the real world.
Above all, social algorithms reward us for spending time on the platforms. That’s what social-media companies really want, to “maximize engagement”—to keep us around liking, clicking, sharing, commenting, and ultimately being served more ads, which is how they make money. It just so happens that controversy and extreme content is what does that the best. Their business models are designed to monetize our attention.
I shudder to think how much of mine has been bought and sold this way. Years ago, at the height of my social-media use, I used to wake up most mornings with my phone already in my hand (I swore I put it on the nightstand before falling asleep?), my thumb finding its way to the Instagram icon by memory before my eyes were even fully open. At the grocery store, in the bathroom, on a beach: checking, responding, scrolling, checking, checking, checking.
My breath would seize in my chest whenever I saw a mean comment, a veiled attack, a troll.
I fell down the stairs once because I was checking social media.
The truth is that many of the influencers you see sharing content related to health and well-being—whether they’re diet- and wellness-culture critics like me, or straight-up wellness influencers like Lee was—are struggling behind the scenes with the pressures of social media. They may also have their own eating disorder that drives them to post about restrictive diets and dubious wellness content, as Lee did, which only adds to the pressure.
But you don’t have to have a huge following to struggle with these issues. I think at some level everyone who has any number of followers on social media is an influencer in some sense: influencing friends and acquaintances with what we share about our lives, our diets, our wellness routines, and also being influenced by the likes and comments, seeing what’s popular and/or controversial and getting nudged, however imperceptibly, to do more of that.
We are both the influencers and the influenced.
And when it comes to diet and wellness content, I think that’s a dangerous combination. It can lead us to engage in harmful practices that we might otherwise never have discovered, and dig in more deeply because of the feedback we get from our audiences and the algorithms.
I’m curious to know if any of that resonates with you. How have you been influenced by social media, particularly when it comes to diet and wellness content?
How have you influenced others in your audience, even if it’s only a few people?
Have you rethought that influence over time and shifted the kind of content you post (or stopped posting altogether)?
And are you rethinking your relationship with social media in general? If so, how?