According to Facebook’s creation myth, as told by Aaron Sorkin’s film The Social Network and Ben Mezrich’s book The Accidental Billionaires, the idea for the social platform was stolen from the class snobbery of Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, two Harvard rowers and scions from a wealthy family who envisioned it as a way of bringing exclusive eating clubs to the digital world. Fellow Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg, asked by the Winklevii to work on their project, took the idea for himself and launched “the Facebook” as an easy way for fellow co-eds to assess each other’s hotness, availability, and cache. The world’s leading social networking platform began as a way for Cambridge elites to promote themselves and compare each other. The new platform expanded to other exclusive colleges, and then to the rest of the world.

Several recent studies have shown that Facebook use correlates with lower levels of happiness. There are many potential explanations for this result, including the social-media platform’s connection to Internet addiction, more sedentary lifestyles, and less real-world, face-to-face contact with friends. But as a Facebook user who has a dysfunctional relationship with the app, I have found one factor to be especially weighty: how it magnifies feelings of inadequacy and self-doubt.

Facebook is as much about self-presentation as about connecting with others. Our profile typically includes a headshot, current employment status, education, and relationship status. Posts often record the best happenings in our lives: career milestones, anniversaries, the brilliance of our children, vacation highlights, smart conferences, hip parties we attended, the exquisite plating of a meal you ate or cooked. We expect lots of likes for our posts on these happenings, and we dutifully like similar posts by others. And these may indeed be likable when they come from close friends, but they can also often lead to ruminations about your own career, your own relationship, your own children (or lack thereof), the parties and conferences you miss, the meals you don’t have or can’t even afford. And this can be magnified by the circle of “friends” you keep on Facebook, which may include non-friends who are professional contacts, distant relatives, acquaintances from social media, or high school classmates. We live in a deeply unequal world, and on Facebook that world is seen in all its vivid glory but not truly shared in the way we share in the success of close friends and family.

Not all posts offer self-affirming highlights. In fact, another style of post offers the opposite. It expresses how awfully things are going in your life: debilitating disease, ugly divorce, awful family members, extended unemployment, and dysfunctional relationships. These are genuine calls for sympathy, but I also tend to see them as cries of dissent against the dominant mode of happy self-promotion.

Apart from social connections, I also use Facebook to comment on the news and to learn what news other people find interesting. But even here there is competition afoot in finding the most interesting content, crafting the most clever riposte, and smarting when your comment doesn’t net any likes. The whole experience is similar to going to a snobby cocktail party and anxiously trying to seem witty.

Facebook likes to promote its platform as “bringing us closer together” and providing a more powerful means of social connection—one that transcends the limits of distance and time of day. But in many respects it undermines the salutary effects we get from traditional ways of connecting with peers and forming associations. Whereas these ordinary means of connecting minimize the differences between how our lives are going and emphasize our shared concerns, Facebook magnifies differences in status.

In A Theory of Justice, John Rawls envisions a special role for what he calls “noncomparing groups” in smoothing over the ill effects of inequality on self-respect. Rawls argues that an ideally fair society will tolerate some inequality in the distribution of income, wealth, and position, which has the potential to make those less well-off feel badly about their own status vis-à-vis the better off. This is all the more true in the real world, in which larger disparities exist; people can feel resentful about the unjust enrichment of others and suffer lower self-esteem. Fortunately for us, Rawls argues, we have the freedom to form groups with peers who have shared interests, interact with them roughly as equals in those shared interests, and have our self-worth publicly affirmed. Think of softball leagues, church groups, neighborhood associations, labor unions, and so on. Even though such groups may admit of wide disparities in income or status (although many of them don’t), the very activities that participants engage in minimize those differences in favor of collective action as equals around a shared goal or purpose and based in mutual affection. In losing ourselves in the joint activity, we lose sight of differences that threaten our self-respect.

If I am right about Facebook, then it has the opposite effect of Rawls’ noncomparing groups. It is a social interaction that highlights our differences in wealth, income, status, and prosperity, whereas real (i.e. real world) social networks (groups, associations, clubs) function to minimize them in favor of shared activity. And if Rawls is right about non-comparing groups, he would offer an explanation for why Facebook makes us feel unhappy. And insofar as Facebook and other social media contributes to taking time away from real-world social interactions that smooth over the ravages of inequality on self-respect (think Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone), it can deepen our unhappiness.

Does this line of thinking demand that we #DeleteFacebook? CEO Mark Zuckerberg is aware of the growing public unease and promised reform, but I have long since stopped trusting him or the company. Besides, the Rawlsian comparing problem is a basic feature of Facebook, not a bug. I have removed the app from my iPhone and deactivated from time to time, but I have yet to take the permanent step of deleting my account. I still find it useful as an address book, an events calendar, a news and commentary blog, and as a means of keeping in touch with distant friends. But with a clearer focus on what’s problematic about the platform, we can better protect ourselves from its negative effects.

David V. Johnson is the public philosophy editor of the APA Blog and deputy editor of Stanford Social Innovation Review. He is a former philosophy professor turned journalist with more than a decade of experience as an editor and writer. Previously, he was senior opinion editor at Al Jazeera America, where he edited the op-ed section of the news channel’s website. Earlier in his career, he served as online editor at Boston Review and research editor at San Francisco magazine the year it won a National Magazine Award for general excellence. He has written for The New York Times, USA Today, The New Republic, Bookforum, Aeon, Dissent, and The Baffler, among other publications.

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