Name: Are You Addicted to Social Media?
Uploaded: undefined
Duration: undefined

NOVA

Carlisle Companies

Viking

NOVA Science Trust Logo

Have you ever wondered why you can't stop scrolling through TikTok, Instagram, or X? We dive deep into the psychology behind addictive social media algorithms. Learn how they're designed to keep you hooked from Professor De Liu, an expert in information and decision statistics at UMD. Plus, discover the real value of your data with Marat Bakpayev, PhD.

Have you ever wondered why you can't stop scrolling through TikTok, Instagram, or X? We dive deep into the psychology behind addictive social media algorithms. Learn how they're designed to keep you hooked from Professor De Liu, an expert in information and decision statistics at UMD. Plus, discover the real value of your data with Marat Bakpayev, PhD.

Are you Addicted to Social Media?

Are You Addicted to Social Media?

Tech & Engineering

Are You Addicted to Social Media?Published: October 11, 2024Speaker 1: Have you ever opened TikTok, Instagram or X, and before you know it, you've spent an hour sucked into scrolling? It's not just you. Social media algorithms are designed to entice and enthrall you.Speaker 2: Whenever I have free time or I'm sitting at home, I used to watch TV, used to read, and now it's just constant scrolling.Speaker 3: I can just scroll on YouTube for hours, scroll on TikTok for hours. I stay up way too late.Speaker 4: If I have downtime at work, I'll just pull out my phone, I'll start scrolling.Speaker 1: So how do these algorithms work, and why are they so addicting?Speaker 5: Algorithms are basically used to make automated decisions. So they try to estimate at any given time how a particular user will react to something that they put out, like next photo or next video or next piece of content. They estimate the probabilities of you reacting positive, like you like it or you click it or you enjoy it.Speaker 1: The algorithm is basically collecting data about your preferences, what you like or engage with all the time. That's part of what makes social media so addicting, it's personalized and the algorithms get better at serving you up content you'll like over time. But there's more.Speaker 5: They have a very endless supply of novel information and novel stimulation on social media, not just content, but also networking aspect. The second is they have algorithm and doing better and better in terms of pushing or filtering the information down to the ones that you are most likely to pay attention to or kind of relevant.Speaker 1: Some of these apps may also be designed to keep you on platforms, not just by what they serve up, but how they deliver it to you.Speaker 5: Some apps are engineered to make it so easy for you to move from one piece of content to the next, so making stopping harder because the next one is already ready on the screen. I just look at the next one, right?Speaker 1: But most of these social media platforms aren't purely interested in learning about you for the sake of serving you better content. They also get something valuable by learning about how you interact with online content: your personal data.Speaker 5: How much of their data is being collected, that could be really shocking for anyone who are not working in the industry to really shock and discover that. So it's always a trade-off to see how much you are giving up versus how much you're getting.Speaker 1: Your personal data is not only good for improving social media algorithms, but it's super valuable to online marketers and advertisers. Take the ads you see online for example. Before a web page loads, there is a quiet and incredibly high-speed auction that takes place between companies called data brokers that buy and sell your personal data and advertisers that bid on showing you an ad. The winner of the auction gets to show you an addiction.Speaker 6: By the time you open the website, the ad that you see on the website went through the whole process that it went to the market and there was the bidding process and they decided who is going to show you the best ad for that specific target audience. The more you stay, the better it is going to be for them.Speaker 1: So, do we have a false sense of privacy online?Speaker 7: I believe that there's little to none security for me, because at this point, the moment I bought a phone, I signed away all my online security.Speaker 8: I feel like I'm kind of secure, but then once I start getting things I talked about yesterday at lunch and now I get ads for it, that's really creepy.Speaker 9: There has been a few times where I will go on a website and then I see a product or an ad advertised to me from something that I talk about or even think about, which is obviously no relation, but it's just weird.Speaker 10: Since you already know that's what it's doing, if you're aware of it, you don't really care.

United States

Northern Mariana Islands

Puerto Rico

American Samoa

Guam

U.S. Virgin Islands

U.S. Minor Outlying Islands

US & Territories

Colossal explosions shake a remote corner of the Siberian tundra, leaving behind massive craters. In Alaska, a huge lake erupts with bubbles of inflammable gas. Scientists are discovering that these mystifying phenomena add up to a ticking time bomb, as long-frozen permafrost melts and releases vast amounts of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. What are the implications of these dramatic developments in the Arctic? Scientists and local communities alike are struggling to grasp the scale of the methane threat and what it means for our climate future. (Premiered February 2, 2022)

In the Arctic, enormous releases of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, threaten the climate.

Arctic Sinkholes

The top half of Jupiter in blue and green against a night sky

A composite image of Jupiter using images captured by the James Webb Space Telescope. Image Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, Jupiter ERS Team; image processing by Judy Schmidt.

Explore the cosmos, delve into ancient history, and follow an extreme rescue with NOVA’s most-watched documentaries released in 2022.

NOVA’s most popular science documentaries of 2022

Four bright orange loops brand off of a dark blue blob

A transmission electron micrograph of HIV-1 virus particles (orange) replicating from the plasma membrane of an infected H9 T cell. Credit: NIAID, Flickr

Scientists have cured a handful of people of HIV by piggybacking on treatments they received for blood cancer. But does that bring a widespread cure any closer?

Are you Addicted to Social Media?

Support Provided By

Explore More

Is your phone listening to you?

Secrets in Your Data

A.I. Revolution

Transcript

Credits

Support Provided By

Explore More

Is your phone listening to you?

Secrets in Your Data

A.I. Revolution