Sam Vaknin: the TRUE toxicity of social media revealed 1:32:14

Sam Vaknin: 2:40: If social media are like viruses and if we can use technologies from I mean, then it means that we are coming right now to a stage of self-limiting. It means that the growth coefficient, the growth of social media will now stop and we will then the world will then be divided to two groups. The group of people who do not use social media and the group of people who use social media.

And they are not geographical groups and they are not socio-economic groups and there, so we can't say for example the rich world will use social media but not India and China. We cannot say rich people will use social media but not poor people, we cannot say highly educated people will use social media. We can't say this, because the profile of social media users, about two billion by now, is totally universal man. Is nothing distinguishing, no distinguishing facet.

The only thing that will distinguish these two groups, absolutely the only thing, is not gender not income not education nothing, only are you using social media or not. This is a revolutionary thought because social media has a massive effect on psychology, in other words there will be one group of people about two billion, with one type of human psychology, in another group of people of about five billion with a totally different type of human psychology and this is the first time I think that there there is such a massive reengineering of human psychology in between groups which count in the billions. (4:15)

4:34: So one thing I would like to I think, one thing that's neglected when we consider social media is by whom social media was created. Consider for example the fashion industry, the fashion industry was created by homosexual men. Homosexual men who had a liking to boys, they created an ideal female figure, which was boy like (yes) which was and to this very day, this is the ideal female Figure. Females, women all over the world makes a mistake it's utter mistake by, we have numerous studies that show that it's a mistake it's wrong it's not true. Women think that men like thin anorectic slim women, because that's what the fashion magazines are telling them. but the fashion magazines are telling them that because most of the founders of the fashion houses and fashion magazines were homosexual men.

Richard Grennan: And are not interest, they're only interested in how they make the clothes look, they want clothes horses that's it. Sam Vaknin: They want but, yeah but the ideal female form is actually male, young male, teenage male. (so they're like androgenised women.) Right androgenised, and women adopted this and they believe this is what men want, but actually we have numerous studies that showed that men prefer fuller women curvaceous women women with love handles and so on and women refused to accept these studies this is not true. Women like I mean men like, why am I telling you this?

Because social media was created by a very well defined profile it was, all social media were invented by men, there was not a single woman involved. All social media were invented by schizoids people who, recluses, people, hermits. people who were socially inept. All social media were invented by nerds. Most of these men later on when we read biographies and so on, we realized that they were asexual or with very low sexual activity.

We so, the profile of the men who invented social media and we are talking about all these men, it is very very very narrowly defined. They created social media in their own image of course, since they were asexual asocial schizoid white men, they created a tool which was geared towards asexual asocial schizoid white men.

And then what happened to this tool, to their utter surprise, for example you can read Zuckerberg articles and so on, to the utter shock it took off and it started to cater to black men and black women and very sexual people and asexual people and social people.

It started to cater to population groups which were totally out of sync with the nature and character of the of the technology (right) and I think we are we're witnessing this conflict. The technology is designed for highly specific psychological profile and yet it is being used abused and misused by other psychological profile and this creates dissonance. The technology is has inbuilt dissonance and I think we are feeling this dissonance a lot. We know that exposure to social medias and to more precisely exposure to screen time but not all screen time but exposure to screen time and in social media, we know that it tends to encourage depression anxiety suicidal and so on, some numbers.

Anxiety anxiety among teens increased by 20% since 2007, 17% of all things with anxiety are today with severe anxiety, life-threatening anxiety, 17% compared to 3 from about 10 years ago. We know that screen time decreases happiness, decreases life satisfaction, everything I'm mentioning has a study of attached to it or studies attached to it, so it decreases happiness life satisfaction and decreases self-esteem we know that. We know that it increases enhances anxiety and depression.

The Royal Society of Public Health published a study in June this year June 2018 which found out that sixty three sixty three percent of all Instagram users are unhappy. Now we don't know whether unhappy people gravitate to Instagram or where the Instagram made them unhappy (yeah) but since we have similar statistics for other social media, it would stand to reason that it's the platform that made them unhappy, not the other way. We know that anxiety and depression among the young as a young between 15 and 24 increased by 70% over the last thirty years (that's a huge) it's double, simply double and we know that since 2010 teen suicide climbed by 31%, so teen suicide is rampant and today it is the first time in human history that the leading cause of death among teens up to the age of 24 is suicide not any disease or not even accidents, used to be accidents, today suicide that's the leading cause of death and this is intimately connected to social media.

So it raises the question, why is that. Well I mentioned before that social media is is conditioning tool not an addictive tool but a conditioning tool and that it uses a relative positioning but what are the emotions that are attached to relative positioning, well the first one is envy of course. So social media are constructed around envy pathological envy, they are purveyors of pathological envy and amplifiers of pathological envy. And they quantify via various ranking algorithms they quantify envy with likes with retweets with. So they quantify envy and then they leverage envy to to motivate you, in other words they use envy to cause you to adopt some course of action, so they weaponize envy, but not only env but I think even more so aggression. Of course pathological envy is a form of aggression. People confuse jealousy with envy and here's the difference, jealousy is when I look at you and I say I want to be Richard Grennan.

So I will study hard I will buy the right glasses and so on developed muscles, so it will motivate me to positive action jealousy is constructive, it motivates me to act but in a positive way to emulate you. Pathological envy means that I regard you as a source of frustration that I can't be like you so I would seek to destroy you (yes) or to make you me. For instance by forcing you to wear white shirts, which you will never do. So pathological envy is a form of aggression and when we look at social media we see this, all social media encourage aggression via their algorithms and via the way they foster interactions. So they encourage for example peer aggression, they encourage bullying they encourage mobbing, gang stalking they encourage black humour, they encourage brutal brutal honesty and so on so forth. You could say what do you mean encouraged, it's an empty space, I mean you can put, in this empty space you can put brutal honesty or you can put compassion, it's not like they are forcing you, it's your choice how to abuse this empty blank space. Well of course it's not true (yeah). It's not true because the these platforms have been designed to condition, or as as the founders and constructors of these platform now are attesting, they were conditioned to become addictive. But it's wrong it's not addiction nevermind, we know what they try to say.

These platforms encourage repeat use, repeat compulsive use and now we know from psychology that only these kind of emotions aggression envy hatred, only these kind of emotions encourage repeated use and repeated, so there is no way that they have designed these platforms without being aware that they must leverage these emotions to create addiction.

Richard Grennan: You're saying that in order to guarantee that there will be eyeballs on the screen for longer and more eyeballs on the screen they've deliberately fostered negative emotions in that arena, anger (there was the other way) envy (yes) resentment.

Sam Vaknin: Yes and they cannot come out and say you're wrong, we similarly encourage love because all psychological studies show that love does not motivate does not create or motivate repeat usage, repeat action repeat, does not foster addiction. We have forms of love which are addictive but then we are talking stalking eroticmania stalking, infatuation, these are pathological states, so pathologies. These platforms were designed with pathology in mind, it's not what I am saying. Some of the founders of Facebook and the main engineer of Facebook, in the first few years, have now have now gone public and admitted that they have built addiction into the platform and how do you do that. The only way to build addiction into the platform is to foster and engender and enhance exactly these emotions, there is no other way (yes). You can't encourage volunteerism or love and expect repeat usage, simply there's no studies that support this. So it's no wonder that these platforms ended up being platforms for hate speech, for fake news, for bullying cyberbullying for, no wonder at all they were built for this. (yes) they were absolutely built for this.

Consider for example Twitter, Twitter limited the number of characters until recently 140 now they increase to 260, but never mind 140. What is, what we know is that aggressive speech acts are much shorter, I'm serious completely, there are psychological studies from the 60s 70s Princeton studies and so on that have demonstrated that aggressive speech acts are much shorter than then non-aggressive speech acts. (It makes sense, if I'm going to have road rage I'm gonna say fuck you, I'm not gonna say listen I'm very disappointed with the way that you drove du du du for a hundred characters) (15:49)