I make no claims about whether TikTok is addictive or not. Nor is it about the online “exploitation of harmful images” or the spread of child sexual abuse material on social media, which Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota is trying to stop. The purpose is not to crack down on online illegal drug businesses.
This is a standard, no-frills proposition of relatively sound economics. So, overall, social media platforms undermine human well-being.
Several scholars have considered this hypothesis. But a group of economists from the University of Chicago, the University of California, Berkeley, the Bocconi University of Milan, and the University of Cologne are close to success. Basically, they measured what people would pay if these platforms didn’t exist. After all, people will pay a lot of money.
One of the standard propositions of bread-and-butter economics is that you don’t pay for something you don’t want. You have nothing to lose by not having it. However, this idea becomes strange when it comes to branded products. Not owning a Rolex you can’t afford makes you feel like an outcast at the Met Gala. The same logic applies to his teenager who wants his Jordans aired. This is the hall of mirrors. You don’t want to splurge. Yet you want them because your friends want them. Because they think all their friends (including you) want them too.
Social media is like Air Jordan on steroids. Many people join social media simply because other people are on it. But they would rather not.
Imagine social media came into the community. For example, on college campuses (where Facebook first appeared). There is a first wave of eager adopters sharing pup pictures and lame jokes with their friends about this new thing. The second wave is “so-so” in terms of their experience. But hey, sometimes jokes are funny too.
And then there’s the final group of adopters. They like to spend time with their friends at shopping malls and quads. But they have no choice. Everyone else is on Instagram or his TikTok. Not participating means being cut off from your social circle. So these people give in and end up paying for something they wish wasn’t there. This is literally the price of FOMO.
It’s an easy detour to overcome the idea that Instagram and other services are free. In other words, you’re only paying for attention and data, not cash. But what’s interesting about the new study is that it offers people, actually college students, real money to quit the service.
They value being on the network. In an experiment conducted by researchers, students asked to be paid if they left TikTok or Instagram for a month. But the next question also brought up the monetary value of having all your friends disconnect. It turns out that students actually pay for it.
Researchers found that students who use TikTok are willing to pay $28 for TikTok to disappear from their social circles for a month. Instagram’s equivalent was $10. In other words, being on the network will undermine their livelihood. But if they themselves abandon the network while their friends remain in it, their situation will be even worse. By the way, the non-users who participated in the experiment were willing to pay even more money for the network to cease to exist.
“Users’ utility is negative, but it would be even more negative if they did not use the platform, which is why users continue to use it,” the economists wrote. He doesn’t want to spend more than $200 on sneakers, but he’s like a teenager who buys sneakers because all his friends are wearing them.
By the way, this is not a story about students being naive, lacking self-control, and becoming addicted. Their decision to continue using social media is completely rational, even if it makes them unhappy. The researchers wrote: “Our evidence shows that a social media trap exists for most consumers: consumers use a product even if they derive negative welfare from it. I personally think that is the best option.”
This study is not conclusive. First, the experiment asked people to put a price on leaving a social media platform for just four weeks instead of forever. The students surveyed may take this offer like a detox break. Or maybe it guessed that it could connect to a different network. Still, these responses show that the desire to get rid of social media is genuine.
Researchers have a rather dystopian view of the human condition. In a subsequent study, economist Leonard Bursztyn of the University of Chicago found that about half of respondents spend about 2.5 hours a day on activities they wish they had not done (mainly internet-related activities). He said it was found that.
Their research opens up another dimension to the conversation about the harms of social media. The issue here isn’t that there’s anything bad out there. The problem is that social interactions exist in the first place, getting sucked into a narrow funnel, trapping people in a world they don’t want to live in.
Graham and Hawley’s outrage and Klobuchar’s proposals won’t solve this. This isn’t about stopping porn online. Any solution should make it easier for people not to participate in social networks and reduce the social costs of opting out. Maybe there’s some clever trick to making it socially acceptable to say no.
Or, if senators are truly furious, they might choose the nuclear option and ban social media altogether. It doesn’t seem easy. But Americans would be better.