Notifications are a pain and distracting. But in a way, they’re only a symptom of the larger problem: Social media.

Social media lives on attention. Without attention, social media does not exist. So social media platforms are, of course, optimized to draw as much attention as possible. Their algorithms are designed to keep you in the app. Their notifications are designed to pull you back as quickly as possible if you close it. This happens at the cost of everything else, and it’s a problem — and this former Facebook exec says social media is ripping apart society.

Since they care most about your attention, it also removes most of the buffers that mostly keep harmful social effects at bay. Rumors can quickly spread much farther than through word-of-mouth alone, and the more vicious a rumor is, the faster and wider it spreads. Hoaxes can get people killed, as the lynching of 7 innocent people in India showed.

This can, and is, exploited. The more benign version is exploiting algorithms to get advertising payouts. This can happen for a long time before it gets noticed by the wider public, and only then is it fixed. YouTube Kids has been a problem since 2015, but only now YouTube has taken action, and only because of the backlash, and probably because advertisers threatened to pull their ads.

The worse version is exploiting the dynamics of social media to influence political discourse, to normalize sexual abuse and racism, and just trolling people “for the lulz”. How Sex Perps Use Deny, Attack, and Reverse explains how abusers can deflect blame and avoid the consequences of their actions. Social media gives them a platform to directly speak to people, unfiltered.

We don’t yet know the consequences of social media. People who are sensitive to social information do suffer more, and social media tends to widen gaps in political discourse and public discussion, not close them. Simply put, Social Media Is a Denial-of-Service Attack on Your Mind, and it’s yours to deal with. The companies will only try to get more of your attention.

In that sense: Reboot Your Phone with Mindfulness.

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