Influencers Beware…
Written by: Drs. Bruce Freeman & Gedaliah Farber
Just because you have a camera does not make you a filmmaker. I always ask students if they would want to watch what they posted on a big screen while sitting next to their mother in a court of law. When I have a new mentee, I ask if they are public figures. Nobody says yes. “My Insta is private,” I am often told. I asked a student recently how many followers they have, and they answered, “just a few hundred.” I then probed further and inquired if they knew all of them. “Nope,” was the response. As healthcare professionals, we represent our profession, our schools, and our places of work. Like it or not, we are in the public eye.
I am writing this post with a young physician I mentor, who is presently a surgical resident. With the amount of Instagram reels and TikToks he sends me, I feel it’s fair to call him a “local expert” on the topic. This allows for two distinct generations to be represented in this discussion and hopefully mitigates the risk of people saying, “He’s old; what did you expect him to say?”
Let’s look back at an actual cinematic triumph, the 1950s classic Sunset Boulevard, the story of an aging silent film star struggling to make sense of the era’s new technology, the talking film. In the movie’s indelible final scene, where she is about to be arrested for murder, the delusional Norma Desmond instead thinks she is about to film with one of the era’s great directors. Staring straight at the camera, she says, “All right Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up.” She most certainly was not. Are you?
As any actor will tell you when discussing a role, comedy is hard; dying is easy. It is very difficult to understand what the public will find funny at any given moment. Sometimes a joke lands; often it is a swing and a miss. You may think your post is hilarious and cannot understand why everyone does not get the joke, and they should “just get over it.” As the old adage reminds us, “…you can’t please all of the people all of the time.” I regularly ask patients to “imagine if,” when they are deciding the potential consequences of opting for a particular treatment. Through the lens of social media, imagine if the dream of your career transforms into your worst nightmare. Will a momentary endorphin rush of likes be worth it if you lose your livelihood? The court of public opinion is made up of countless millions of jurors who are not following the law—as there isn’t one; it is the Wild West out there. Viewers do not know you, your intent, how hard you have studied, or that you are a kind soul who visits their grandmother every Sunday. Posting comes with immense risk, and you need to be prepared for the judgment that will swiftly come, both good and bad. This is not about arguing about the right to free speech or whether someone being expelled from school is just or not. It is about the risk involved when you put yourself out into the world-wide web and having to weather the storm of consequences.
As medical education teaches us, the art of reflection is a powerful tool—not just for introspection, but also to self-evaluate and think critically about our actions and behaviors. It helps build self-awareness. Applying those skills to posting on social media, one should reflect on their activities (hopefully before hitting “post”), if they feel their content is in some way insensitive, the commentary too harsh, or the information unfounded or misleading. Unfortunately, by the time you realize this and a clearer head prevails, your post has already been shared, reshared, and so on.
Not to date ourselves here, but for those who still use Facebook, how often have you seen a “memory” from years past and caught sight of your haircut or that outfit you thought was oh-so-flattering but now makes you cringe? In the fast-moving world of social media, we’re not necessarily what we posted 10 minutes ago, let alone 10 years ago. Regardless, look where we are today: people being canceled for thoughts shared online, perhaps taken out of context, at a time in their life when their prefrontal cortex was possibly still underdeveloped, impacting the life choices they made. The internet is your permanent digital record. This is not about arguing the righteousness of the public’s judgment of your actions. Your viewers will act and react as they choose, and the lack of regulation of this environment is a whole other discussion altogether.
In a recent blog post by psychologist Dr. Laurie Santos, she discusses the work of legal scholar Cass Sunstein. In the World Happiness Report, Sunstein talks about social media as a “product trap”; people will buy something because there is some negative consequence if they’re not the ones buying it. This leads people to sometimes buy goods whose existence they deplore. Let that sink in. He adds that when asked how much people would pay for social media, the answer was “close to nothing,” yet they would demand about $100.00 if someone willing to pay asked to buy it. Santos writes of a Nobel Prize-winning theorem that says the numbers should be the same, not off by a factor of twenty. As Sunstein then summarizes, social media is a product most would not even spend a dime to buy, yet they are spending (wasting?) a good part of their life using it.
As healthcare professionals, we must always be mindful to “do no harm.” It is important to always ask yourself if what you are posting is a service or disservice to not only the public but to yourself.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Dr. Bruce Freeman graduated from the University of Toronto, completing the AEGD program at the Eastman Dental Center and his diploma in orthodontics/MSc in orofacial pain at U of T, where he is Assistant Professor. He is Co-Director of the Hospital Dental Residency Program and Facial Pain Unit at Mt. Sinai Hospital and a pain consultant in the Department of Neurosurgery at Toronto Western Hospital and the Wasser Pain Centre at Mt. Sinai Hospital.
Dr. Gedaliah Farber is a Canadian surgical resident. He previously completed his undergraduate medical training at the University of Toronto as well as a concurrent graduate degree in health research. He also holds a Master’s of Science and Honours Bachelor of Health Science degree from the University of Ottawa.
FEATURED IMAGE CREDIT: Gerd Altmann from Pixabay.