ISGlobal joins OFF February and limits social media use

At ISGlobal's Communications Department, we are joining OFF February: reducing social media use to protect our health and regain time and cognitive well-being.

At ISGlobal’s Communications Department, we have decided to join the OFF February initiative.

What is OFF February?

It is a global initiative that encourages setting limits on social media in favour of wellbeing, with the aim of helping people regain control over their time.

What are we going to do?

As proposed by this campaign, the communications team has uninstalled all social media apps from our corporate and personal phones, as we have also agreed to take part on an individual basis.

This is not about deleting social media altogether, but rather about removing it from our pockets as a response to hyperconnectivity and the compulsive use of tools that increasingly rely on addictive design patterns.

This does not mean that we will stop publishing on these channels. As OFF February proposes, during the month of February we will access them exclusively through web browsers and, in addition, we will reduce the volume and frequency of posts across all our social media channels.

Why are we doing this?

Because social media are increasingly less social and becoming more like spiderwebs. Because since we opened our first account in 2011, we have seen increasingly clearly the phenomenon that Cory Doctorow coined as “enshittification”, whereby platforms and their algorithms have progressively degraded to a stage where profit and data extraction are prioritised above all else, pushing people and their health to the very bottom of the list.

Gone are the days when we turned to social media to stay connected with friends and contacts or to be better informed. The diversification of platforms has also faded away. Now, it seems that almost all of them serve the same slurry of superficial, extreme and often toxic content, produced by people you have probably never spoken to and whom you likely never intended to follow.

The ISGlobal paradox

Those of us in the Communications team are aware that we live in a constant contradiction in pursuing ISGlobal’s goals, as a centre for research and translation in global health. Our role corresponds to the second of these pillars: translating to society the knowledge generated by the approximately 400 scientists who work alongside us.

This task, already challenging in itself, has become even more difficult at a time when fewer and fewer people turn to the news media for information, and more and more do so—at least they believe they do—via social media. In other words, there are entire segments of the population we will never reach unless we engage through social media.

However, the mission of ISGlobal is “to improve global health and promote health equity”. And this is where the paradox becomes evident. We know—better than anyone—that science is slow in building consensus and always lags decades behind industry. But there is already evidence that social media are not exactly good for health: studies have directly or indirectly linked them to mental health problems, problematic or addictive use, sleep disruption, and overweight and obesity, among other outcomes.

Moreover, infinite scrolling and other addictive design patterns used by major tech companies that own social media platforms exploit vulnerabilities in our brains and push us towards compulsive consumption of fast food for the intellect, with potentially catastrophic consequences for our attention span and our capacity for deep thinking. Some authors are already talking about post-literacy. We leave for another day the debate on how this dangerous cocktail may be affecting the health of democracies.

Knowing all this, how is it possible that an institution dedicated to improving global health and promoting health equity makes use of these tools? That is the question we ask ourselves. And the truth is that no one forces us to use these platforms. As professors Cristina Fernández and Santiago Giraldo so eloquently argue in their latest book, we are held hostage by social media and, we would add, we also suffer from Stockholm syndrome.

A lose–lose dilemma

Given the hand we have been dealt, it does not seem possible to win in the short term. If we truly want to reach people, we have to go where they are. And although we like it less and less, social media as a whole are currently estimated to have more than 5.6 billion users, equivalent to almost 70% of the world’s population. There is a great deal of work to be done there to act as an anchor against disinformation and to try to establish ourselves as a reliable source, especially for younger and less educated audiences. Leaving now would mean abandoning them to their fate and perhaps condemning ourselves to irrelevance.

Staying, however, means walking the tightrope of contradiction.

For now, and in the absence of comprehensive solutions, we are joining OFF February and welcoming the month with the intention of following a diet rich in cognitive nutrients and low in scroll.