JUST AS the proliferation of fast food produced the “slow food” movement in the

1980s, and the spread of reality television inspired “slow TV” in the early 2000s,
the constant buzzing of smartphones with notifications, messages, tweets and
posts will, in 2019, give rise to “slow social”. It has started already. Where once
social networks did everything possible to make their services “frictionless”,
making it easy to share or forward posts and messages, they have begun, gingerly,
to apply the brakes.

In July WhatsApp put a limit on the number of people or groups to whom a single
message can be forwarded in one go. Instagram, a photo-sharing app, introduced a
“You’re all caught up” feature, which reminds users that they have “seen all new
posts from the past two days” and should really go and do something else.
Facebook launched a feature that allows people to check how much time they are
wasting on the social network, and to snooze notifications for a period.

And in September Twitter announced that it would allow its users to go back to its
older timeline, in which tweets are visible in simple reverse chronological order,
rather than curated by an algorithm to maximise the time spent using the service.
If these changes work, and as others follow, social networks will find that their
holy metric of “engagement”—how much time people spend on their services—
may decline. But slowing things down, even if it also means slowing their own
growth, is a good way to keep users happy in the longer term and avoid blame for
viral misinformation and hate speech.

Twitter’s algorithmic timeline helped things go viral more easily. So did

WhatsApp’s easy-forwarding features. Erecting barriers to virality is perhaps the
fairest way for social networks to deal with the problem of misinformation without
having to become arbiters of truth. Anecdotal evidence from India, where Whats-
App’s controls on forwarding are tighter than elsewhere owing to a series of
lynchings caused by viral (and unfounded) rumours, suggests that the speed
bumps are indeed having the desired effect.

Facebook, which owns Instagram and WhatsApp, says it wants the time people
spend on its networks to be “intentional, positive and inspiring”. That is an
acknowledgment that constant screen time is having a detrimental effect on users.
Facebook would rather its users moderated their intake of polarising opinions and
holiday snaps than burn out and quit.

The new time-counting features are akin to road signs and rest stops on the
information superhighway. Expect to see more signs, and speed bumps, in 2019.