"Don’t Count On Me" campaign

Info

Summary

Raise awareness on the role of metrics (n. of followers/friends/likes/ ..) in social media, and take action to have them removed.

Goals

  • Raise awareness with the public how metrics in social media are unnecessary and only serve to increase their dependency on them.

  • Force social media companies to acknowledge that users are against counters in social media profiles and feeds.

  • Organize frivolous actions for social media users to participate in, to send clear signals to the platform operators and apply public pressure to change.

Audience

  • All people that use social media as they are now or would use them if they were more human and metrics-free.

Success criteria

  • Design actions that are continuated by social media users without the need for community attention
  • Other success criteria should be defined based on the deliverables we create.

Retrospective

  • No retrospective has been held yet. The first retrospective is planned at [retrospective date].

Description

No more n. of followers, n. of likes and so on. It’s a simple but powerful change. it’s the core of the addiction: we see numbers, our brain makes automatic comparisons, we ultimately suffer and strive for more dopamine when the counter increments. In the ideal scenario envisioned by this campaign, social media users would continue to see if someone likes or follows, but no aggregation on users’ actions would be made (how many users did something). That’s where masses of strangers weirdly affect our expectations and our rewards.

Deliverables

[Picture]: Infographics

Some infographics about what a social media without counters would be like.

[Video]: Video about social media with no counters

A video about what interactions on such a social media would be like.

[Social media campaign]: Don’t count on me hour (or day)

Plan a boycott (one hour, a whole day?), in which all people adhering don’t like any new post nor follow any new member on their preferred social media, so that they don’t make any counter increase. This could be the only way to really make a little damage to social media companies and perhaps let them notice us…

Strategy

  • This is a complex campaign. Besides the (not too long) description, provide a link to a separate strategy document.

  • Additionally you can point to general strategy resources in the /strategy folder.

Funding

  • No funding is required to execute this campaign.

Milestones

Resources

  • Cognitive and behavioural science pattern that are implemented in social media (see forum listing)

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