Zuckerberg’s pigeons. The research behind social media addiction

On 4 February 2004, a red-haired young man of Jewish origin, a student at Harvard and the son of a dentist and a psychiatrist, founded a website he would call Facebook. The idea, developed together with a group of his friends, was an immediate and overwhelming success. Essentially, the platform was designed to bring people together, facilitate communication between them, share information about their activities, create promotional mechanisms with no apparent profit motive, reconnect with old friends whom life had scattered to the four winds, spark curiosity about others’ lives, upload video clips and much more besides. Today, Facebook has around three billion users worldwide, all connected within a month, and over the years has become an extremely wealthy company that makes money from the ‘likes’ that people give to the various profiles they visit. However, recently, 29 US states have filed a lawsuit against Meta – which includes Instagram and WhatsApp – owned by its founder Mark Zuckerberg, accusing the company of being aware of the potential harm caused to users by its algorithms and social networks, and of failing to do enough to limit this harm, prioritising profits over the wellbeing of underage users. The case, which is now widely known, has concluded with the accused company agreeing to pay $18 billion in compensation to the various states. So much for the legal proceedings. But the real question regarding Facebook’s widespread adoption is this: what has driven its global success? We might say its ease of use, the sense of belonging to a group, and the promotion of personal expression through sharing photos, places visited, dishes ordered in a restaurant, a book read and greatly enjoyed, birthday wishes, news stories, pictures of dogs and cats, snakes and birds, sunsets and memorable monuments, anniversaries and the faces of the deceased, and poems.

So far, this is the obvious side of something within everyone’s reach, including the illiterate, the mentally challenged, fanatics, pranksters and highly cultured individuals. It is a platform where everyone can have a say, even if only for a moment. One might think this is a triumph of democracy. But behind this extraordinary phenomenon, two decades after its inception, we are beginning to understand—without necessarily being scientists—exactly where the reason for its overwhelming success lies. At this point a mechanism of the human mind comes into play which, through millions of years of evolution, governs the dimension of pleasure – or, to put it more accurately, the reward system – through which a group of brain structures regulates motivation, pleasure and learning via associative connections. This highly sophisticated system is what has brought glory to historical figures such as Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, Marco Polo, Michelangelo Buonarroti and Napoleon Bonaparte. In practice, behind this mechanism lies a substance produced by our brain called dopamine. We shall therefore try to explain how it all works: when we have a pleasurable experience, the brain circuit releases dopamine, which is the main neurotransmitter associated with well-being. The release of dopamine creates a feeling of gratification that drives us to repeat the rewarding behaviour – a process known as reinforcement – as happens, for example, with cocaine use. From an evolutionary perspective, this mechanism has helped human beings to remember and learn the activities necessary for survival, as Abraham Maslow clearly explained when he introduced the concept of the pyramid to describe motivated adaptive behaviour. This means that, through motivation, human beings naturally seek to satisfy needs at different levels of the hierarchy. According to Maslow (1943), the most basic needs, such as survival, must be met before a person seeks to satisfy higher-level needs, such as self-actualisation. This hierarchy of needs can directly influence addictive behaviours, in which substances or activities become means of satisfying immediate physiological or emotional needs, whilst neglecting other substantial long-term needs. This insight, although dated, is of fundamental importance if we are to understand how Facebook and other social media platforms have achieved global success.

This platform is popular because, first and foremost, it is easy to use; it provides a space for apparent leisure that also satisfies psychological and social needs through a combination of connection, habit and instant gratification. Indeed, it helps users stay in touch with friends, old acquaintances and family members. It also allows them to share thoughts, feelings, important moments in their personal lives – even intimate ones, one might say – and photographs, reinforcing a sense of belonging through the sharing of passions and a wide variety of specific interests ranging from literature to spiritualism, from classic car collectors to breeders of Etna cirnechi dogs, from motorcyclists to esoteric pages, from real-time news updates to the latest Maranza-style melodrama filmed in the streets of Milan, Naples or Palermo, from far-right marches to the latest migrant shipwreck. Consequently, when a user shares personal content, the numerous ‘likes’ trigger a sense of immediate gratification in the brain (through the release of dopamine), providing the individual with a tangible sense of existence, accompanied by the awareness—more or less evident—that somewhere on earth someone is taking an interest in them and their posts. Thus, to borrow from Descartes, we might say ‘like ergo sum’. Indeed, the more ‘likes’ there are, the more self-esteem rears its head even in the most remote corners, in run-down suburbs, on the top floor of a multinational corporation or at a restaurant table. Ultimately, this dynamic reflects age-old human habits and behaviours which, in basic terms, can be summarised in a simple thought: the more I feel appreciated, the more important I will feel; the more friends I have on my profile, the more I will belong to this virtual community, very often failing to recognise the difference between communicating – in real and present terms – and merely transmitting, essentially ignoring who is actually on the other end of that active smartphone.

However, for several years now, psychologists have regarded social media as a highly ambivalent tool, capable of offering great opportunities for connection but also of triggering addiction, anxiety and distortions of identity. It is no coincidence that, as early as 1995, Ivan Goldberg and Kimberly Young coined the acronym IAD, standing for Internet Addiction Disorder. In practice, this is a disorder characterised by excessive and uncontrolled use of the internet and social media, with compulsive traits that can interfere with work, school, social relationships and daily life. In reality, it is a genuine addiction, as people spend more and more time online in order to experience a constant sense of fulfilment. When they are unable to use the internet, many of these individuals experience clear signs of withdrawal, including restlessness, bad moods, anxiety and boredom. To borrow from Ovid, we might say "nec sine te nec tecum vivere possum"; we must inevitably admit that, unfortunately, there is no going back, as technology – and everything behind it – is experiencing exponential growth, paradoxically fostering isolation, a reduction in social relationships, sport and hobbies in general, compounded by the inability to stop using the internet even in the face of obvious, objective problems. We know, in fact – thanks in part to scholars such as Cal Newport and Bruno Patino – that manufacturers of both smartphones and apps (e.g. Facebook) have been working for years to create ‘lures’ designed to prevent users from ever putting their devices down, employing dedicated ‘attention engineers’ with the specific aim of diverting users’ attention from what they are doing and drawing them into viewing social media content. Technically speaking, this dynamic constitutes the ‘attention capital’ that every company seeks to acquire. It is therefore, with some justification, referred to as the ‘attention economy’.

Thus, dopamine returns as the undisputed queen of our brain regions – collectively known as the ‘emotional brain’ – located in the limbic system, the midbrain, the prefrontal cortex, the nucleus accumbens and the amygdala, powerfully driving its specific functions of pleasure, satisfaction, curiosity, attention, addiction, euphoria, fleeting contentment and the compulsion to repeat, within the great symphony of reward. This means that we have all become like the pigeons of Burrhus Frederic Skinner, an expert in behaviourism who, by exploiting the mechanism of gratification, demonstrated how his pigeons became dependent on that specific mechanism. We have thus become consumers of rudimentary individualism, without ever achieving the magnificent feats (always fuelled by dopamine) carried out by figures such as Alexander the Great, Michelangelo Buonarroti and Napoleon Bonaparte. Indeed, we might say that the situation is quite the opposite. Excessive use of social media, relative to the time devoted to it—particularly among the younger generations—produces the devastating effect of cognitive flattening, with the predictable consequence of heightened suggestibility and a decline in fundamental critical and judgmental abilities. In essence, it is a successful global experiment in producing multitudes of digital zombies. It is no coincidence, in fact, that in one of the most technologically advanced countries, such as Japan, the term ‘Hikikomori syndrome’ was coined, describing a condition in which a great many young people withdraw completely from social life, shutting themselves away in their rooms and communicating only via the internet – isolated, irritable, with disrupted sleep-wake cycles, and gripped by the fear of being cut off from the virtual world (Fear of Missing Out).

At this point, after all this description, it is necessary to make a few clarifications. Whilst it is true that there is no going back, it is equally true that there may be variations through which what is considered certain and predictable – with all its statistical marvels – can be called into question, without invoking a collective rebirth. It is understood that humankind is part of nature and can still be enchanted by a woodland, a sunset, a first kiss, an academic achievement, a journey on foot, or when individuals discover they can even swim, despite being born bipedal. His greatest assets, compared with the rest of the living world, are his imagination, his emotions, his willingness to take on challenges, his capacity to suffer and to endure, and his ability to adapt to extreme conditions. A notable book published a few years ago, with the Italian title "Il cigno nero" ("The Black Swan"), by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a philosopher and mathematician, introduces the concept of how the improbable governs our lives. Thus it remains possible to imagine, albeit romantically, a future world where, thanks to unknown variables, the cards can still be shuffled, technological constraints and habits, in which people can once again smile together, feel each other’s breath, drink a glass of wine, be enchanted by a tree frog with its unique green colouring, gaze at the Summer Triangle and the constellation of Orion in the sky, smell the scent of freshly harvested wheat and walk to the sacred cross at Pastonello in Sicily.