User:Tytracy/sandbox

Social Media Ethics
Ty, Benny, and Marc

Social Media Addiction
Companies who design social media platforms are purposefully designing them to be more addictive. Due to this, many people feel that this addiction design is exploiting and harming users. In terms of specifics to the harm inflicted upon the users, "The individual’s familial and other face-to-face social relationships will atrophy, leading one to become more isolated ... the greater the amount of time the addicted person spends on the internet, the more that person will feel anxious and depressed. Moreover, even when the addicted person is not on social media, the addiction continues to put demands on their time” . When someone becomes addicted to a specific social media, they will constantly keep returning to refresh and check their feeds. What this means is that a person's attention is being shifted away from important tasks/opportunities elsewhere in their lives. So, the person who has become addicted is losing more time in their day without even realizing it. A good example of this is the popular platform YouTube, "Users may look for different advantages and personal benefits from online use. Content gratification is concerned with data conveyed by the medium. Access to information is the most important among the various forms of gratifications that clients seek on the web. When information is the main expectation of users, it is called content gratification (Stafford, Stafford, & Schkade, 2004). Content in social media may be of any mode (e.g., text, pictures, emoticons, quizzes, videos, etc.), which can contribute to content gratification. Regardless of the medium, content exploration has risen as a vital gratification among the users (Lin, 1999). YouTube content has been recognized to render useful information and valuable engagement to the users" (Acar et al., 2016; Sumiala & Tikka, 2015) . The content gratification that is a main design in the platform is addictive in nature, so users are sucked in to continuously viewing different topics that appeal to them. YouTube utilizes a "Home Page" which is comparable to a "For You" page, and the use of content gratification keeps users engaged longer as the recommended videos are more appealing to what they like.

One of the proposed solutions from the article was related to a recent example from Apple, where features have been added to update users on how much screen time they have been using. The connection made was that if users are able to be notified or see statistics on their personal time, they would possibly be incentivized to change their habits.