A Sociological Study of Social Media’s Hidden Influence: An Analytical, PRISMA-ScR-Informed Synthesis of Evidence on Attention, Identity, Relationships and Public Life

Abstract

Background. Social media platforms now mediate the everyday communication of more than five billion user identities, yet much of their sociological influence is exerted through design, ranking and measurement rather than through explicit persuasion. Objective. This study examines, analytically and comparatively, how such hidden influence is produced, how large and how consistent it appears in the empirical record, and how competing theoretical perspectives interpret the same evidence. Methods. A structured synthesis informed by the PRISMA-ScR reporting guidance was undertaken. Sources published on or before 31 December 2024 were identified through purposive landmark searching, citation chaining and screening of a supplied corpus of 117 entries; eligibility criteria were applied, and sources were charted by design, sample, domain and headline result. Results. 105 sources were retained (5 from the supplied corpus and 100 external). The evidence converges on five interlocking mechanisms: attention architecture, affective and moral amplification, identity and self-presentation, relational restructuring, and an altered epistemic environment, all resting on a substrate of commercial datafication. Large field and natural experiments show that platform design can shift emotional expression, political mobilisation and informational exposure, but usually with small individual-level effects. The best-identified causal evidence on mental health points to adverse effects for particular groups and mechanisms, whereas population-wide average associations remain weak. Conclusions. Hidden influence is better understood as cumulative, infrastructural and unequally distributed than as mass mind control. The paper proposes a five-layer analytical model and eight testable propositions, and argues for algorithmic transparency, guaranteed researcher access to platform data and context-sensitive research in the Global South.