Bini Dahal

Despite not feeling the need to publicise my personal life in social media, circumstances have forced me to become a heavy social media user. For every task possible, be it a little interaction or a major academic project completion, social media has been my go-to destination. So, when the whole Facebook went through a global outage recently, my brain here was going through a shock of its own.

Maybe it was the second dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, but ironically I was unable to sleep the whole night. And damn! Facebook, Whatsapp, Messenger and Instagram together were not working. Ironic as it may sound, I was always a heavy YouTube user. But that day I felt YouTube was not doing anything helpful to distract my pained left arm. And thus I was continuously using Google search and refresh as to why social media was not working.

My empty brain went through a lot of thinking. I thought about how Facebook was invented for the purpose to strengthen connections and ensure socialisation. Then the current position of this social media giant made me realise that over the years they have expanded so much. Socialising is just a small scene of the show but the real show stealers are flourishing online businesses and the enormous financial growth of Facebook’s founders like Mark Zuckerberg and his company. Through the proper use of users’ data, social media like Facebook has been successful in earning billions of dollars within seconds. That’s when I couldn't help but be appreciative of this kind of innovation.

The six hours long global outage had left people worldwide to find alternatives to communicate with one another. Everyone was flocking to Twitter to understand what was going on. Memes were being made, frustrations were immense. Social media influencers and marketing individuals had temporarily lost their jobs. Business wise, FB was not doing any good either. Its stocks had fallen down and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg had faced a loss of as much as 6 billion dollars. This fall is not just because of the social media being down but an incident concerning whistleblowing by one of the former FB staffs. The whistleblower has highlighted the company prioritising profit above everything, showing the need for the company to be accountable and transparent in its activities.

Once people get the taste of financial success, there is no turning back. Everyone wants to keep growing whatever they earn. This is human nature and it is not a surprise that social media companies have taken up all sorts of step to grow themselves. This could mean both positive and negative ones.

The amount of mental health problems, including stress, anxiety and depression, has not come to people just out of nowhere. It is the various social media sites such as FB, Instagram that deliberately trigger these problems among people. Only few are able to survive the wrath while the majority becomes its slave and target. It may be time for us to move on a path of social media detox.
Will this even happen? Social media detox and switching to real life socialisation will require a combined effort from people and the government. Maybe it is time we control these innovative businesses for the greater good of mankind.