Social media sites are designed to act like ‘behavioral cocaine’

In an interesting turn of events, new reports suggest that social media companies actually work on things to let users stay addicted to it like ‘behavioral cocaine’.

Silicon Valley insiders informed BBC Panorama that social media firms, including Facebook, Snapchat and Twitter, work to make users addicted to their services with the help of various features. These include infinite scrolling that keeps people hooked to their phone for longer than necessary, as if it were a digital form of cocaine.

“It is as if they’re taking behavioral cocaine and just sprinkling it all over your interface and that’s the thing that keeps you like coming back and back and back. Behind every screen on your phone, there are generally like literally a thousand engineers that have worked on this thing to try to make it maximally addicting,” said former employee of Mozilla, Aza Raskon.

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Raskon introduced infinite scrolling back in 2006 to scroll through content endless without the need of clicking. He said, “If you don’t give your brain time to catch up with your impulses, you just keep scrolling.”

He admitted that he didn’t want to get people addicted and feels guilt about the impact of something he created. The co-creator of Facebook’s ‘Like’ button, Leah Pearlman also admitted that she too got addicted to the service as she sought likes on her post, wrote CNET.

“When I need validation - I go to check Facebook. I’m feeling lonely, ‘Let me check my phone.’ I’m feeling insecure, ‘Let me check my phone’,” she said.

Facebook, however, refused all the allegations. A spokesperson for Facebook and Instagram told Business Insider, “The allegations that have arisen during BBC Panorama’s production process are inaccurate. Facebook and Instagram were designed to bring people closer to their friends, family, and the things that they care about.

“This purpose sits at the center of every design decision we make and at no stage does wanting something to be addictive factor into that process.”

On the other hand, Snapchat didn’t immediately respond to a request for a comment, whereas Twitter declined to comment.