Why Your Addiction To Social Media Is No Accident

The Right Gambling Eliminates The Gamble

When it comes to online casinos, those administering them understand they’re facing an uphill climb in terms of users. Everybody knows the house always wins. Anybody with half a brain realizes online gambling doesn’t have the element of chance being in a physical casino may render, because it simply can’t. Even a game of poker isn’t safe, though it’s likely going to be closer to true “fairness” than playing a digital slot machine.

It turns out that in the universe, certain concepts we hold dear aren’t actually physically observable—chief among them the concept of randomness. There is no true randomness observed anywhere in space/time. So the idea that any casino, physical or otherwise, can be truly “random”, providing players a “fair game”, is untenable scientifically.

But online casinos know something else about human beings: they’re susceptible to addiction, and they’re likewise susceptible to positive reinforcement. In a Vice.com article published May, 2017, it’s pointed out that one of the reasons social media is so addictive pertains to lessons learned from websites offering digital gambling.

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Where Social Media Sites Borrow From Online Casinos

One of the things social media sites like Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, Gab, Minds, and others have learned from online casinos is how to simulate the same kind of psychological “reward” programming as that which is available via online slot machines.

Because online sites understand how nearly-futile that which they produce truly is, they often deign to the use of psychological tricks that are designed to keep users. Well, with social media, one of these tricks is the “like” button. Whenever you receive a “like”, that’s positive reinforcement, which in turn roots you to the social media platform, as you naturally want to get more “likes”—it feels good.

Whether or not any of this is ethical has famously not been a concern among many social media outlets. They understand one thing—or, rather, until the recent hearing where Mark Zuckerberg’s tactics were called into question, they understood one thing: money.

Social media platforms act as data harvesting apparatuses. Think of your online data as krill in the deep ocean, and a given social media outlet as a whale. Their filter-like mouth collects all that krill and digests it, making profit for those who pay social media sites for the data, like Cambridge Analytica. This is the whale’s digestion, which allows it to get bigger.

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A Global Phenomenon

Now, social media platforms are a worldwide phenomenon that currently encapsulates 2.34 billion users worldwide, and is expected to reach 2.95 billion by 2020. There are less than eight billion people on the planet. Social media covers over 25% of them, and will likely jump past the 50% mark by the mid 2020s.

Social engineering results from much of the data which is collected on social media users, creating more effective protocols for both monitoring and managing people across the globe. Here’s the most intriguing—and perhaps frightening—thing about this new digital climate: there doesn’t seem to be any stopping it.

Many people live and work through tools provided via social media. In terms of advertisement, marketing, coding, games, contact, and data, social media is a major economic mover and shaker across the globe. Making it illegal would steal legitimate work—and the accompanying pay which comes with that work—from millions of people.

The Good Side Of The Issue

However despite all these considerations, there is a silver lining. Even though casinos aren’t truly random, there are often high payouts. Since they aren’t random, patterns of some variety or other surfeit those payouts, and they are knowable.

In the same vein, though social media outlets use tactics gleaned from online casinos to facilitate addiction, this data also exposes aspects of human nature previously unknowable, allowing us to learn more about ourselves and the world we live in.