What are we doing on social media?

I have a confession to make – I think I have become even more of a social media resident than I used to be ever since leaving Nigeria. Perhaps because I am now deprived of physical contact with most of my friends and family, I now spend entire weeks indoors doing nothing but scrolling through my Twitter feed when I am not writing or researching. I think this is a bad habit because unlike in Lagos, there is no friend to show up unannounced at TPDC Estate and drag me to the Island for a weekend jolly when I have been working too much. There is only so much distance that WhatsApp calls can bridge after all.

However, like all self-respecting writers, I do have an excuse for each of my bad habits. My excuse for this one is that social media – Twitter in particular – is central to my work as a journalist and as a writer who is 2 months behind on his agreed book milestone deadlines. Twitter I argue, is my number one distribution channel and also provides an invaluable pipeline of real-time, crowd sourced information as well as a surprisingly rich archive for research purposes. Even at its worst, the razor sharp barbs and angry exchanges provide an opportunity to sharpen my skills as a comedy writer and satirist.

But enough about me, because this article is also about you, the reader. Is social media helping us both achieve our personal and collective goals? Is it a monster that is making us cruel, impersonal, performative humans as some have said? Is our time on these various platforms – estimated at roughly 3 hours per day for 16-24 year-olds – making us better or worse people? Do I even have the answers or am I throwing these questions into the great universal void and spinning the silence of God into a column because I miss home and I’m thinking too much?

Well for one thing, I identify as atheist, so the “silence of God” is more a writing device than anything else. As for missing home? Let’s just say that every time I look at the light bulbs in my flat giving out that wondrous glow of electric light sans the corresponding howl of a crude, fossil-fuel-emitting internal combustion device near my window, I smile internally. So take the entire preceding paragraph with a huge pinch of Himalayan pink salt. But seriously-

Is social media making us smarter? The answer will (not) surprise you

A July 2020 report by Pew Research revealed that Americans who rely primarily on social media to obtain their news are in fact less informed than those who also watch television news, listen to the radio and read news websites. Now I know what you’re thinking at this point – here comes the article that bashes social media written by the guy who everyone knows as a heavy social media user and a free speech advocate. I promise you however, it is not that simple, so stay with me on this.

What the research breakdown shows is that the “social media” spotlighted in the study skewed significantly toward Facebook. In other words – in what comes as a surprise to all of approximately 3 people – Facebook makes people, how do you say it politely…‘less informed’…ahem. The report does not really measure the specific impact of a platform like Twitter, which is better optimised for factual news sharing, instant fact-checking and uniform real time accessibility. There are things that Twitter has done that have not been mapped or measured, yet we know for fact that they happened.

For example, in line with the clear and outsized influence of America’s “Black Twitter” user demographic on African Twitter users, have African Twitter users also adopted more liberal, global-facing social norms from their cousins across the Atlantic alongside the ‘Ebonics’ and pop culture? Nobody can say because such research has not been carried out yet. What we do know is that no other platform in the history of humanity has given such vast, immediate and intimate mutual real-time access to over 145 million active daily users across 6 continents.

There is a vast amount of cultural and intellectual exchange happening at a rate unprecedented in human history but there is as yet no way to measure the impact of all this. In the absence of any real measures for how social media – Twitter in particular – makes an impact on information and enlightenment levels outside the USA, we are shooting in the dark. Which is to say that, the answer to the question raised in the subhead is quite simply, “We don’t know, Jeff.”

So what is social media good for?

This brings us to the topic of #EndSARS and the unique conundrum of social media and politics in Africa’s most populous country. We are regularly inundated with messages informing us that “elections are not won on social media,” often spoken – or tweeted – by gleeful party flunkies after their party wins another election where “Did Not Vote” was actually the candidate that won by an 85 percent landslide. On the one hand, this sentiment is true, because clearly the vociferous social media opposition never seems to manifest on election day.

On the other hand, #EndSARS as the name implies, literally started as a Twitter hashtag 5 years ago. Jack Robinson, a pseudonymous Twitter user is credited with creating the hashtag before it later snowballed and took on several lives of its own. In October 2020, this “social media furore” took the unprecedented leap from Twitter to street, starting off as a rather polite street protest at Lekki Toll Gate. I was physically present on the first day and I loudly dismissed it as “a group of people who are incapable of being serious.” Rarely have I been so hilariously, utterly wrong about something.

Suffice to say, social media does in fact have a tremendous amount of power, even in a country where elections are decided on 20 percent turnout. The question then is where is this power and how can it be harnessed? The answer lies in another important Pew study from 2019, which determined that 80 percent of tweets from American users are generated by just 10 percent of them. Extrapolating this to Nigeria, this means that the key to permanently unbottling the #EndSARS genie is to shift Nigeria’s 10 percent away from the Lagos crowd toward the upcountry crowd – which is where elections are won and lost in Nigeria.

Apart from being used as a tool for political aggregation and information sharing, what else is social media good for? The simple answer is that social media does nothing other than amplify existing human nature and human societal dynamics. It is not in and of itself a ‘thing’ – it merely puts a megaphone to everything that is human. The cooing over cute baby photos and videos, the segmentation into tribes and cliques, the conflicts, the hypocrisies, the acts of great kindness from random strangers, the delusions of grandeur from Little Napoleons, the anointing of people into Eternal Kings and Queens – all these things are not in fact, social media creations.

They are merely human.