Mi-August, British actor Tom Holland took his fans by surprise by telling them to “take a break” on social networks. The actor, who embodies the character of Spider-Man on the big screen and has more than 68 million followers on Instagram and nearly 7.5 million subscribers on Twitter, indicated that his decision was motivated by the desire to “preserve” his mental health. “I find Instagram and Twitter too stimulating, too overwhelming,” the 26-year-old actor then declared, not without noting, with a touch of irony, that he had to go back to it several times to save this post precisely on Instagram.
“When I read things about myself online, I get overwhelmed and I can’t get away from it. In the end, it is very detrimental to my mental state. So I decided to backtrack and delete the apps,” he said by way of justification. At the Venice Film Festival on September 2, where he presented his latest film, Bones and Allby Italian director Luca Guadagnino, Franco-American actor Timothée Chalamet expressed the same reservations about these digital tools.
“A Decline of Civilization”
“To be young today […] means to be judged permanently. I can’t imagine what it’s like to grow up under the ax of social media. It was a relief to interpret characters struggling with their dilemmas without having to go to Reddit, Twitter or TikTok to see how they fit into society, ”expressed the actor revealed by Woody Allen but also and above all Dennis Villeneuve. The actor said he feared that these tools would cause “a decline in civilization”, as evidenced by a video extract, published on these same social networks by Kyle Buchanan, a film critic from the New York Times.
These criticisms join those issued in 2015 by Jean Twenge and Jonathan Haidt, two American professors of social psychology, who denounced the damage caused by these platforms mentally locking their users in information bubbles. The growing feeling of isolation of young subscribers to these networks and the race for the “like” would, according to them, cause the worsening of the mental state of adolescents… Brought to testify before the American Congress, in October 2021, Frances Haugen, former engineer at Facebook, denounced, in equally strong terms, the toxicity of these tools whose economic model is based precisely on maximizing connection time in order to collect as much personal data as possible.
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Like them, the young singer Selena Gomez, the actors of the series Stranger Things, Millie Bobby Brown and Joe Keery, but also Ed Sheeran, Ariana Grande, Elizabeth Olsen or even Kristen Stewart have expressed their reluctance to expose their lives on the Web and made them the adage “to live happily, live hidden”. What to sound the death knell of these websites? No way ! The number of active users on social networks, across the planet, exceeded 5 billion in 2022. And this virtual universe has more than 500 million new users each year worldwide.Still, the number of subscribers of the giants Facebook, Instagram and Twitter has been trampling for two years. Faced with the success of new players like TikTok, Twitch, Discord or even ClubHouse, social networks seem, in reality, to have a bright future ahead of them. “Especially since we can consider making them more virtuous,” says Pierre-François d’Haese, who is developing the YouWho platform with Ariane Lambropoulos. The two partners are trying to unite Internet users around less deleterious discussion channels by driving out “haters” but also “fake news”.
“To do this, we are developing more effective moderation of content by first ensuring the identity of the participants in the debates, which is verified by facial recognition. But also by allowing users to publicly express the credibility they recognize in their interlocutors”, expresses the young founder of this company, wishing to moralize the profession of “influencer”. There are many initiatives to try to make these digital environments more virtuous: some by preventing photos from being retouched (BeReal or Poparazzi), others by guaranteeing the spontaneity of exchanges, which involves exclusively live dialogues (Yubo) . The last, finally, by highlighting the benevolence of the exchanges (LinkMe).