根据 Opinium Research 的调查结果，只有 7% 的英国人认为社交媒体具有积极的作用；大约三分之一的受访者认为，如果所有社交媒体平台明天从互联网上消失，人们的生活会变得更好。该机构自称为一家“战略洞察机构”，并于 5 月对 2,000 名成年人和 1,100 名家长进行了调查。令人意外的是，实际上有更多人并不希望社交媒体被彻底淘汰。
Just 7 percent of Brits think social media is a force for good and around one in three suspect that life would get better if all these sites were erased from the internet tomorrow. Or so claims Opinium Research, which describes itself as a “strategic insight agency.”It polled 2,000 adults and 1,100 parents in May and The’s major surprise is that more people of Britland didn’t want to see social media rubbed out.
42% 的受访者认为社交媒体具有成瘾性，一半的人认为它对社会的负面影响比 2010 年更大——因为社交媒体上充斥着虚假或误导性的信息，而且算法决定了用户看到的内容，从而加剧了社会分歧。超过一半的受访者认为社交媒体的问题源于商业化；不过仍有十分之一的人承认在过去一年中每天通过这些平台购买商品，约五分之一的人每周都会这样做，还有 12% 的人表示每天通过社交媒体发现新的品牌。
Some 42 percent surveyed said these networks are addictive, and half think they are worse for society now than they were in 2010 as they contain false or misleading information and the algorithms dictate what they see, making public debate more divisive. More than half reckon the rot set in due to commercialization, yet one in ten admitted buying products every day via the platforms in the last year with around a fifth doing so every week and 12 percent claiming they discover new brands via their feeds daily.
尽管人们对社交媒体的看法普遍负面，但仍有 49% 的人表示现在的使用频率比 16 年前更高，其中三分之一的人使用社交媒体的频率大幅增加。如今，大多数人使用社交媒体的主要目的是查看内容，而非发布自己的信息。面对大量虚假信息和政治宣传，谁还有时间去上传猫咪的照片或自己做的饭菜呢？更值得注意的是，七成受访者支持对那些向 16 岁以下青少年传播有害内容的社交媒体平台处以罚款。
Irrespective of the negative sentiments, 49 percent use social media more now than they did 16 years ago, and a third use it a lot more. 31 percent are more using it to view content than post themselves. When there’s so much bot slop and political propaganda to chew through, who has time to upload pictures of, er, cats or the meals they made for themselves? More emphatically, seven in ten people surveyed support fines for social media businesses whose platforms expose under-16s to harmful content.
英国已经尝试采取措施来解决这一问题，针对这一年龄段的社交媒体禁令也即将出台。Opinium 表示，这项调查并非由任何商业或政府机构委托进行的，而是作为一篇“思想引领类文章”而开展的。这项调查发布的时间恰逢电影《The Social Reckoning》上映的前一周——这部由亚伦·索金执导的续集《The Social Network》将马克·扎克伯格描绘成了一个负面形象。
Britain has tried to tackle this and a social media ban for that age group is in the offing. The research was not commissioned by any commercial or government entity, Opinium told The it was designed as a “thought leadership piece.”It lands a week before The Social Reckoning hits the cinemas, Aaron Sorkin’s sequel to his critically acclaimed The Social Network, a film that cast Mark Zuckerberg in a less than favorable light.
自埃隆·马斯克收购推特以来（推特本身也被用作传播不满情绪的工具），过去五年里社交媒体的负面影响进一步扩大了。
The digital ditch has widened in the past five years since Elon Musk bought Twitter - a tool used by a tool to sow seeds of discontent.
一些社交媒体帝国的辉煌领袖也向美国总统唐纳德·特朗普卑躬屈膝，这助长了那些持有某些人可能视为种族主义或性别歧视观点者的气焰。特朗普曾威胁说，如果他再次当选，将把扎克伯格送进监狱，并给他贴上所谓“选举欺诈者”的标签。特朗普输掉了2020年的大选，而且没有证据表明他是因舞弊而落败的。令人沮丧的事实是，越来越多的英国人正将社交媒体塞进自己的鼻孔。
Some of the glorious leaders of social media empires have also kowtowed to US President Donald Trump, emboldening those with opinions some may consider racist or sexist. Trump threatened to send Zuck to prison if he was re-elected, branding him a so-called “election fraudster.”Trump lost the 2020 election and there is no evidence he lost it due to fraud. The depressing fact is that more Brits are shovelling social media up their nose than ever before.
根据Statista的数据，目前注册用户达5550万，而2010年仅为2940万。尽管人们明知社交媒体具有成瘾性，已经摧毁了公共讨论的质量，并破坏了隐私——我们都知道这些平台并非真正免费，用户是以自己的数据作为代价的。这位秃鹫在X平台上的账号几乎处于闲置状态，不过他正在试用Bluesky，这似乎是一个比那位曾名推特、如今改名的艺术家更温和、更友善的版本。
According to Statista, 55.5 million are signed up, compared to 29.4 million in 2010. This is despite people knowing it is addictive, has ruined the quality of public discourse, and wrecked privacy - we all know none of these platforms are truly free; users pay with their data. This vulture’s account on X is mostly unused, though he is testing out Bluesky, which seems to be a gentler and kinder version of the artist formerly known as Twitter.
他多年前就删除了Facebook，且从未回头（是的，包括其数据中心中存储的数据）。你也无法在Instagram、Snapchat或其他用于“社交”或与人类争辩的平台上找到他。英国最新的首相——十年内的第七位——上周宣布成立一个打击错误信息的中心。如果早在2016年脱欧公投前夕就设立了这样的机构，也许该国本可以应对所谓的俄罗斯干预。
He deleted Facebook years ago and never looked back (yes, including the data it held in its datacenter). And you can’t find him on Instagram or Snapchat or anything else used to “socialize” or argue with other humans. The UK’s latest Prime Minister – the seventh in ten years – last week announced a center to fight misinformation. If that had been in place around the time leading up to the Brexit vote in 2016, maybe the country could have countered alleged Russian interference.
或许英国政治中其他分裂势力也会缩回岩石之下。不过话说回来，特朗普确实实现了“二进宫”。那么该怎么办呢？除了《观察家报》的读者以及他们为我们的文章添加的评论质量之外，互联网是否应该成为一种只读媒介？终结社交媒体可能是迈向正确方向的第一步。®
Perhaps other divisive forces in British politics would have crawled back under a rock. Then again, Trump did enjoy a second coming. So what to do? Apart from Reg readers and the quality of the comments they add to our articles, should the internet should become a read-only medium? Terminating social media might be a first step in the right direction. ®