A study of a hybrid Fogg-Hook based social media addictive algorithm from the perspective of Kuwait Society

Abstract

Social media applications are widely used by human population for general and special purposes. As any emerging computing technology, social media applications’ users tend to heavily use these applications in a way that they can be considered as addicted. Human behavioural studies indicate that a behaviour can be turned into a habit and end with addiction. We study two existing social media addiction algorithms and propose a hybrid algorithm that contains the metrics of both algorithms. We test the validity of our proposed algorithm on Kuwait society through a survey that measures the implementation level of each proposed metric from Kuwait society perspective. We choose four popular social media applications in Kuwait for our tests, namely, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, and Tiktok. Our findings confirm the validity of the proposed metrics, and show interesting facts related to the usage level of the social media applications for different groups of Kuwaiti society users, which can be further used in many social media based services in Kuwait.