Social Media Analytics and Mental Health

While the ability to access social media analytics is obviously very useful for companies and researchers alike, I have to wonder what the effect is on the average user. It seems like social media is a constant numbers game, always pushing people to produce more and more content for free and obsess over how well it does. When I first joined social media, I started largely on Tumblr. One of the quirks of the platform is that your number of followers is hidden from public view. Only you really know how large your audience is, although anybody can see hints of it based on the average number of interactions your posts get and other signs like that. Eventually Tumblr fell out of favor when it banned adult content and I moved to Twitter along with many other users. On Twitter, your follower count is displayed prominently under your bio and available for everyone to see. It's no longer something you can hide at all. I think this causes a lot of people to take it pretty seriously and probably isn't great for mental health.

Another thing I've seen on Twitter that just feels unhealthy are external sites that will track things like how many people have unfollowed you in the last week. While this is probably very helpful for companies to gauge their social media success, I've mostly seen it used by average people who check it obsessively and seem to base their self-worth on keeping followers. It's especially common with young teenagers who treat unfollowing someone like a personal betrayal. That's definitely not healthy behavior.

These sort of tools are really useful for researchers and I can see why they should be available to the public, but social media isn't designed to help mental health. It's designed to attract as many users as possible and keep them scrolling so they can see ads. The addition of numbers to gauge how well their posts are doing in a very tangible way really just reinforces how unhealthy it can be sometimes.