Zuckerberg’s Dilemma: When Facebook’s Success Is Bad for Society

Facebook’s chief has signaled he will do what it takes to curb the social network’s negative effects—but how far will he go?

 .. In the face of pressure brought by a growing roster of Facebook investors and former executives, many of whom have publicly stated that Facebook is both psychologically addictive and harmful to democracy, the Facebook founder and chief executive has pledged to “fix” Facebook by doing several things, including “making sure that time spent on Facebook is time well spent.”
.. he wants his company “to encourage meaningful social interactions,” adding that “time spent is not a goal by itself.”
.. So here’s the multibillion-dollar question: Is he willing to sacrifice revenue for the well-being of Facebook’s two-billion-plus users?
.. In June, he changed the company’s mission from “connecting” the world to bringing the world closer together. He said he used to think giving people a voice would make the world better on its own, “but our society is still divided. Now I believe we have a responsibility to do even more.”
.. Facebook researchers surveyed the scientific literature and their own workand publicly acknowledged that while direct communication and sharing between individuals and small groups on Facebook can have positive effects, merely lurking and scrolling through others’ status updates makes people unhappy.
.. the U.K.-based Royal Society for Public Health asked 1,500 young people to evaluate the five biggest social networks, to measure whether they are good or bad for mental health. The results showed all but one service had a negative effect on mental health. 
.. Facebook, Twitter , Snapchat and the Facebook-owned Instagram all pushed survey participants to contrast their lives with others, a phenomenon known as social comparison. The exception was YouTube, in part because the dynamic is usually one-to-many communication, with person-to-person socializing happening in comments.
.. Facebook can cause people to feel their own lives don’t measure up to those of others. 
..  the effect is especially pronounced in young people, but diminishes with age: It was virtually nonexistent in those over age 30
.. Social networks can also make us miserable by convincing us that whenever we’re away from our friends, we’re missing out on social bonding occurring among them, says Jacqueline Rifkin, a Ph.D. candidate at Duke University who collaborated on a study of the fear of missing out, or FOMO. The misery can kick in even if what we are experiencing—an awesome vacation, perhaps—is objectively better than what our friends are up to.
.. Ms. Rifkin’s work indicates that FOMO isn’t about envy but something far more primal: If our kith and kin are bonding without us, we might soon find ourselves left out of the tribe.
.. how much you use social media is at least as significant as how you use it. 
.. steps include things that Facebook itself believes will reduce engagement on the service, including hiding clickbait and fake news and promoting posts from friends.
.. the social network is pushing them to join and use its Groups function. 
.. Facebook is built on the idea of bringing the world closer together, as its mission statement so boldly pronounces. The irony that Mr. Zuckerberg must confront is that the very means of that connection—what the company euphemistically calls engagement, but which experts say is more accurately described as addiction—appears to be detrimental to the humans whose thriving he seems earnestly to want to promote.