Thanks to gearing up for last month’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) deadline, everyone’s heads are now fully in the data privacy zone. Companies must now treat their customers’ personal data with extra special care (or risk a hefty fine!). In other words, this is topic is even more serious than it already was.

On the plus side, we are more informed than ever before. People are increasingly aware of security risks that come with sharing their personal data; mostly because we’re hearing more about data breaches in the news.

Social media channels are under a new level of scrutiny since the scandal surrounding Facebook and Cambridge Analytica hit the headlines back in March.

In an age where personal data is more precious than ever, people who previously wouldn’t usually have thought twice began questioning the security and levels of trust they should place on social media. For months, news outlets closely reported every detail of the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica case as it unfolded. But how much did people trust social media anyway; and have the revelations had any impact on this?

We collated some of the studies out there (of which there are quite a few!) to provide an informed viewpoint on whether social media is really losing its shine.

Trust in social media has always been low, but is now falling further
Edelman’s 18^th annual trust & credibility survey was published in January. They questioned respondents from 28 countries. 3,413 people from the UK shared their views.

Less than a quarter of those questioned claim to trust social media as a source of information. These low levels of trust are nothing new; it’s consistently been ranked as the least trustworthy source in the Edelman report for the past three years (vs. traditional media, search engines, online-only media, owned media, and media as an institution). However, social is now falling even further behind, while trust in traditional media sources (now at 61%) has increased since the previous study in January 2017.

Distrust in social media is driven by inaction on some key issues:

Furthermore, over a third of people think social media is no longer a force for good. Prominent areas of concern for over half of respondents link to fears of being exposed to ‘fake news’ and the view that the average person isn’t accurately able to tell good journalism from rumour. Alongside this, people are demanding a greater level of responsibility from social media companies: regulation, transparency, and the sharing of personal data are all hot topics! Below are some of the key stats that show how severe these concerns are:

Social media channels also seem to be losing connection with their audiences
We’re also increasingly seeing a lower level of engagement with social media platforms (especially among young people):

As much as most of us enjoy using social media to stay connected, there is an increasing acknowledgement that an over-reliance on it can have a very negative impact. As a result, active rejection is becoming more common. Detox camps and advice on how to adjust to life without a dependence on social have been popping up here, there & everywhere!

A survey of 5,000 students, commissioned by Digital Awareness UK and the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference last year found that 63% claimed they wouldn’t care if social media no longer existed, and a huge 71% had already taken a break from social media in some form.

What about Facebook specifically?
Unsurprisingly, Facebook is the main company in the firing line, and there is evidence of the Cambridge Analytica scandal impacting usage of the network. The forecast is not overly rosy: Emarketer estimates that 2 million users under the age of 25 will stop using the social network this year.

Populus ran an Omnibus survey on the topic in March. While 73% of people reported that their Facebook usage hadn’t changed since the story broke, 1 in 5 people stated they used it less, and 30% had considered deleting their account altogether. They also asked people to evaluate Facebook against some important criteria. It was rated an average of 4.28 out of 10 on the favourability scale and only 3.64 in terms of trustworthiness. While we don’t have direct figures to compare this to, these are not exactly positive scores from a company set for world domination.

It should be no surprise that there are people struggling to believe that Facebook take their data seriously, with only 17% agreeing with the statement ‘I trust Facebook to hold data about its users securely’.

So, what does this all mean?
Users are becoming more savvy about the value that their data holds – and how companies use the data that they share. Social media channels have widened the trust gap, falling further behind traditional news channels as a source of information. Levels of engagement & over-reliance on these channels seem to be dwindling against many users. It’s clear that although we are a long way from breaking away from the strong grip social media has over us, over time (and especially in the light of a heightened focus on data privacy), users are becoming more cautious and starting to question the dominant role it plays in their everyday lives. Brand that prioritise digital should think carefully about how they use these channels to promote themselves and to build relationships with their ‘customers’.

When I first told people I planned to get my master’s in social anthropology, the most common reaction I got was a blank – at best quizzical – stare. From my dad (who, it should be mentioned, does want what’s best for me but is absolutely positive that what’s best for me is an MBA) it was a “that’s great, Ashley!”, in a voice multiple octaves higher than his normal one. He then began to send me National Geographic articles about excavations of ancient sites which, while vaguely interesting, had nothing to do with anything as far as I was concerned.

It is a common mix-up, anthropology and archaeology. But I wanted to end up in a different kind of field than the ones archeologists find themselves digging through. Rather than dusty artefacts, I imagined working with people, interviewing them, observing them participantly, discussing things collectively; in short, doing ethnographic fieldwork.

I say this as though anthropology is obviously a more logical and relevant career choice than archeology, but we did learn some very niche things in the master’s program that makes the degree an even tougher sell to people like my father. Recently at Razor, I thought maybe I had been given an opportunity to prove anthropology’s pertinence to real life and work. I was assisting in a fact-finding mission for a potential project with regards to a topic that is endlessly fascinating to anthropologists: menstruation.

We had spent a week on this theme in my kinship, sex, and gender course, and, consequently, I had done a lot of reading on the subject. I enthusiastically began to tell some of the other Razors about an ethnography I had read in which epidemics of mass hysteria were inexplicably erupting on Japanese-owned factory floors in Malaysia. The Japanese managers had no idea how to explain this phenomenon or treat the women – it took an anthropologist and some on-the-ground research to determine that the women thought they were falling prey to spirit possessions because of cultural beliefs about crossing spatial boundaries from rural areas to urban ones while having their period. It’s a gripping image – spirit-possessed women in hysterics on factory floors – and captured the imagination of other Razors who asked me to send along the article.

That was when I realised that it had been written in the early 1980’s.

Anthropological content is absolutely fascinating, if potentially outdated and esoteric. In my course I learned about things ranging from the affective nature of fake-official documents in North Cyprus; the strategies enacted by patient activist groups to draw attention and funds to racialised diseases like sickle cell anaemia; little houses in Tanzania, and modern polyandry in Russia. I got to write my dissertation about the intersection between DIY biologists, the punk movement, and ethical democracy.

While the content is admittedly arcane, anthropology’s methods and theories are extremely valuable. In the early 1900s, Bronislaw Malinowski, the founding father of the discipline, noted the importance of distinguishing between what people say they do versus what they actually do. Now researchers in all capacities, not just academic ones, must engage with this distinction. In fact, it is what distinguishes market and design researchers (who focus primarily on attitudes) from user-experience researchers (who focus primarily on behaviours).

There are even times when someone in the Razor office mentions some kind of social pattern that is emerging from fieldwork we are conducting, and I think to myself, ‘Ah, another example of Foucault’s technologies of the self!’ or, ‘No wonder Bruno Latour interrogates cultural understandings of what is ‘natural’!’. In these moments, anthropology is incredibly relevant to my work and my life, and opens up insights and ideas I may never have made the connection to, had I not studied it.

Then again, there is a reason I keep those thoughts to myself; even I roll my eyes at how pretentious I sound in my head.