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37 | O akville B eaver | T hursday,A pril 28,2022 insidehalton.com VISIT OUR WEBSITE AT metrolandparcelservices.ca IS YOUR BUSINESS GROWING? Growing your ecommerce business might seem overwhelming at first. And the last thing you want to worry about is getting your product into the hands of new customers. Metroland Parcel Services can help with timely, reliable shipping at competitive rates. Visit our website to learn more about how MPS can ease your growing pains. SCAN FOR MORE INFORMATION Cut out paying more Your only destination for more coupons, more flyers, more savings. #SavingWithSave $1.00 Off any Green & Black's Chocolate save.ca/couponsScan to get coupons ing for the potential harms of screen addiction on brain development now had to contend with life and work activities moving online. PANDEMIC REVERSAL In March 2020, our re- search team used the oc- casion of the pandemic to explore whether social media causes or relieves stress. We asked respon- dents about the change in their patterns of different media usage as a result of the pandemic. One year later, we repeated the same question. What we found was a significant change in the nature of people's interactions with social media -- users avoided what was per- ceived as sensational and political content, but gravitated towards build- ing community. We observed this trend in another independent analysis of how older adults used social media and communications tech- nology to cope with public health measures in re- sponse to the COVID-19 pandemic. We found that, for them, social media and new platforms such as Zoom were important only in as far as they connected them to their own families and communities. The pandemic made so- cial media and communi- cation platforms the inevi- table extension of us. But by bringing us into this forced global embrace, it may have also forced us to split along tribal divisions -- what anthropologist Gregory Bateson refers to as schismogenesis. These divisions occur because of, and are exacerbated by, in- creasing conflict in com- munications about conten- tious topics such as lock- downs and mandatory vac- cinations. CHATROOM REVIVAL COVID-19 revealed that social media companies are neither neutral nor be- nevolent. They pick their own tribes too. And when this happened, users react- ed. Research by the Pew Re- search Center found that more than 40 per cent of Facebook users had begun abandoning the social net- work before the pandemic. This followed a chain of controversies involving selling data to Cambridge Analytica to gathering da- ta about the psychological profile of American voters and allowing the Russians to interfere with an Amer- ican election. When Facebook was ac- cused of profiting from the spread of misinformation, they used the same type of data-mining methods to monitor and censor posts on their platform. Users could no longer ignore the fact that Facebook gath- ered and capitalized on their information for cor- porations that would pay for the data. As a result of this accel- erated exodus, the compa- ny's shares dropped by 25 per cent. But Facebook ac- quired the end-to-end en- crypted group chat app WhatsApp and launched private chatrooms unregu- lated by censoring algo- rithms. Both of these platforms represented a revival of chatrooms. TRIBAL PLATFORMS Donald Trump's use of Twitter as his personal propaganda machine, es- pecially in relation to his public health disinforma- tion, pushed social media to a new edge. When Twit- ter blocked Trump's ac- count, it illustrated the power of social media in political interference. Me- dia commentators sounded the alarm, concerned that a corporation's meddling in determining the legiti- macy of narratives sets a dangerous precedence and threatens the right to the freedom of expression. When cultural and ideo- logical schismogenesis surfaced in different narra- tives of health and safety, Twitter decisively took a position. In response, Trump created his own me- dia platform: Truth Social. There might still be a silver lining in changing our habits with regards to tribalized media usage. An- thropologist Heidi Larson, director of The Vaccine Confidence Project, warns that centralized "censor- ship" of information runs a greater risk in creating conspiratorial forms of in- formation communica- tions. Larson suggests that targeted social media is better suited to promote trust and serve public safe- ty. It is not surprising that over the past two decades of globalized social media, we are now returning to the controlled-access cha- trooms for people with proven ties and loyalties to each other. Whether this 'tribalization' is an effec- tive response to how we cope with the stress of a world in which social me- dia can be weaponized in times of war remains to be seen. Najmeh Khalili-Maha- ni, Researcher, Director of Media-Health/Game-Clin- ic laboratory at Concordia University, Concordia Uni- versity This article is repub- lished from The Conversa- tion under a Creative Com- mons licence. OPINION Continued from page 36 DISCLOSURE STATEMENT Najmeh Khalili-Mahani is a research associate at McGill University (McGill Centre for Integrative Neuroscience) and Concordia University (engAGE Centre for Studies in Aging). For her research, she has received funding from FRQSC-AUDACE. She is the founding director of Media Health Laboratory and the Game Clinic, which are dedicated to examining the implications of new media technologies in public health.