FOMO by Design: How Social Media Is Hacking Our Brains
Understanding how algorithms manipulate our behavior and what to do about it
On my recent birthday, only four of my 711 Facebook “friends” wrote on my wall. It was tempting to assume that people scrolling their news feeds saw it was my birthday and thought “Nah, not interested.”
My rational brain, however, knew it wasn’t my friends who lacked basic decency, but the algorithms that ran their online social behavior. Being an occasional user of Facebook, the algorithm doesn’t freely grant me visibility to others — part-timers like me have to work for it. So I played ball and posted a photo of me enjoying my birthday. My motivations for doing this were mixed — part of me wanted to see how the algorithm would respond, but a bigger part of me irrationally feared I was being shunned and needed validation that this was not the case. Having met the algorithm’s demands, within an hour I was granted visibility on others’ news feeds — now people wouldn’t stop writing on my wall.
Being an occasional user of Facebook, the algorithm doesn’t freely grant me visibility to others — part-timers like me have to work for it.
