Social Media Can Be Used To Create Positive Change

It is an increasingly common thought these days that social media has become a divisive and negative presence in our increasingly virtual lives and has been deemed bad for our mental wellbeing. It is not just because of the hours spent scrolling through newsfeeds, but because of the social media storm of abuse that someone can be privy to at any time.

A survey conducted by the Pew Research Center found that 40% of American adults have personally experienced online abuse. It can be easy to inadvertently become abusive yourself because of the disassociated nature of conversation and because of a lack of reputational risk or punishment for bad online behaviour. This kind of freedom can carry consequences that can be harmful. However, with a little more understanding and some considered intervention, we may be able to create a more co-operative online community.

Steven Pinker, Harvard Psychology professor, author and expert on human progress, writes about how, as complex humans, we inevitably have good and bad within us. He suggests that it is up to the social institutions to bring out “the better angels of our nature” to help bring about social and human progress.

The same could be said for online behaviour. The interventions explored by Nicholas Christakis, director of Yale’s Human Nature Lab, and Christian Danescu-Niulescu-Mizil at Cornell University’s Department of Information Science, do not restrict our freedom of speech but they provide a subtle structure that can too help bring out “the better angels of our nature” for the benefit of us personally and as a society.