After sending me numerous fake video clips, clearly from TikTok, I told an old friend last year to get back to basics and read a newspaper.
The final nonsense clip was of two guys claiming Turkish Olympics pistol shooter Yusuf Dikec, famous for his nonchalant stance with his hand in his pocket, only took up shooting after getting divorced. It was patent misinformation.
“Stop getting your news on TikTok,” I told my friend, who really should know better. “Get it from reputable sources,” I added.
This week the jovial proprietor of a well-known breakfast establishment ranted about how angry he was that something had popped in his Instagram feed. “Why should I read about this at 4am?” he said of a post by Scott Galloway, the respected NYU Stern professor, and was proud to have called him a “poes” in a comment.
The Instagram post in question was about Galloway’s approach to money and why he doesn’t want to be a billionaire. I watched it later, and what he said about a decades-long career of hard work and eventual riches seemed reasonable, and great advice.
Why was the proprietor so angry? Because the algorithm showed it to him and he was offended at Galloway’s assertion that he was happy with his success and didn’t want to stay on the treadmill and get richer. Here he was, up at 4am opening his restaurant, and he was confronted with this unbidden advice. He did what most people seem to do — he shot the messenger.
Even though he doesn’t follow Galloway, it’s something the Instagram algorithm threw up. But whose fault is it, I asked him, as I have for the past decade or so when I’ve discussed responsibility for getting angry or outraged by something on social media.
Who installed the app, who opened it, who followed the people, and who now uses the algorithmic entertainment? You can’t be angry at someone else because they showed up in your timeline, is the simplest way of putting it.
Yet this friend, a successful businessman who survived Covid and having kids, was behaving like a cyberbully because of what the algorithm showed him in the app he chose to open and scroll through. “It’s an addiction, he admitted. “An addiction.”
Who installed the app, who opened it, who followed the people, and who now uses the algorithmic entertainment? You can’t be angry at someone else because they showed up in your timeline, is the simplest way of putting it.
Of course it is, and that’s why I don’t have social media apps on my mobile. That’s the way I got away from it. But I’m just as addicted as everyone else. Instead of doomscrolling social media posts, I doom scroll the news.
I read the rugby for something more lighthearted. About the only saving grace for me right now, in a world that has seemingly lost its mind, is that the Springboks are the most innovative rugby team in the world. There’s always a silver lining if you look hard enough.
I haven’t had Facebook and Instagram on my phone since my son was born eight years ago, and this year I deleted the last of them, Twitter. It has become a toxic environment filled with right-wing trolls, misogyny, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and rampant misinformation.
My wife’s solution has also been to delete social apps from her phone, but she looks at them on her iPad. It’s a more structured and controlled way to access something we all know is addictive.
I’ve gone back to the old-fashioned way to read the news. I go directly to the publications or broadcasters I know I can rely on. Locally I read Business Day, News24, Daily Maverick and Scrolla.Africa, while I subscribe to the New York Times, Guardian and Wired and use the BBC and CNN apps a lot.
As I told the frustrated proprietor, choose reputable news sources and go directly to them. If you want a right-leaning foreign paper, read The Telegraph.
Where you get your news is as important now as it has ever been, but probably more so because of all of the different ways you can find news in the era of social media and the new era of rampant algorithms whose only function is to keep you staring at the screen for longer.
These are not the early days of serendipitous discovery that Twitter opened up in finding other interesting smart and funny people. Twitter was the front page of news for many years, deservedly so. We saw revolutions unfolding in the Middle East, and #BlackLivesMatter and other movements being formed and gaining strength on social media.
Now Twitter literally no longer exists. It was rebranded X and is a far cry from that early triumphant sharing of ideas and connections.
My mental health gift to myself at the beginning of last year was to read only the headlines of subjects that aren’t my core interests. I probably reduced the amount of news I read by half. That allowed me to do other things, like read more. I listen to Audible, which I think of as the 21st century way of reading, and have reread many of my favourite books.
If the jovial proprietor’s anxious cry about us being addicted is true, I wonder if I am trading down from one form of digital addiction to another. I console myself that it’s reading, and that has to be a lesser drug than any form of social media. Right?
• Shapshak is editor-in-chief of Stuff.co.za.
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