Facebook knows Instagram is toxic for teen girls, company documents show
wsj.com
wsj.com
“The research that we’ve seen is that using social apps to connect with other people can have positive mental-health benefits,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at a congressional hearing...
“We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls,” said one slide from 2019, summarizing research about teen girls who experience the issues. “Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression,” said another slide. “This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups.”
From what researchers said in a March 2020 slide presentation posted to Facebook’s internal message board.
Yes 1/3 are effected badly but we just say that it can have positive effects. Just omitting the fact that it often has a detrimental effect…
Why? Why is this socially acceptable? Is this different from the past, or are we just more aware of it?
Second, it's possible to objective demonstrate whether a factual statement is correct or not. But whether a statement is disingenuous or misleading cannot be proven with the same level of certainty (absent evidence of intent). So bad-faith actors can always guarantee that disputing that contention will end in an "agree to disagree" draw at worst.
It's only "much harder if not impossible" for lack of trying. And while yes, there are some out there that simply don't have such options, we also have people that need to cut down a tree but can't afford the work, and so simply hope it won't fall on their house the next time it gets windy.
Email lists and chat servers are just Facebook with extra steps. The only difference ends up being the fact that Facebook-like social networks suggest you people and content you might like from a giant pool, whereas the alternatives have rather limited pools and the signal to noise ratio is pathetic because you get literally everything that is posted and have to filter through it manually.
Don't get me wrong, I hate Facebook and only use it on maybe a handful of occasions per year, but you can't tell me that it didn't enable things that weren't possible for many before it was invented.
I do not have any accounts in my real name, and I had no problems finding others via our pseudonym's when I wanted to share them with people in the physical world.
In all discussions I've heard that mention "exclusive value" or a similar concept, the agreed-upon definition was always something like "where all others are orders of magnitude worse".
> Over everything—up through the wreckage of the city, in gutters, along the riverbanks, tangled among tiles and tin roofing, climbing on charred tree trunks—was a blanket of fresh, vivid, lush, optimistic green; the verdancy rose even from the foundations of ruined houses. Weeds already hid the ashes, and wild flowers were in bloom among the city’s bones. The bomb had not only left the underground organs of plants intact; it had stimulated them. Everywhere were bluets and Spanish bayonets, goosefoot, morning glories and day lilies, the hairy-fruited bean, purslane and clotbur and sesame and panic grass and feverfew. Especially in a circle at the center, sickle senna grew in extraordinary regeneration, not only standing among the charred remnants of the same plant but pushing up in new places, among bricks and through cracks in the asphalt. It actually seemed as if a load of sickle-senna seed had been dropped along with the bomb.
Never mind that the rest of the article will probably elicit a few spontaneous sobs from an empathetic reader.
It's reasonable that if one gender is developing self esteem issue from a social network, then the other gender _probably_ is too.
[1]https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/su/su6901a6.htm?s_cid=su...
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/12/the-sil...
> students who reported having sex with persons of the same sex or with both sexes (30.3%); and students who identified as lesbian, gay, or bisexual (23.4%)
Assuming that most people who have sex with others of the same sex do so because they are gay (rather than e.g. because they are experimenting), this indicates that people who are in denial about being gay are more prone to suicide.
In 2018 "obesity prevalence was [...] 21.2% among 12- to 19-year-olds." [0] according to the CDC. That's one out of 5 being obese, not overweight. And it has more than tripled since the 70's [1].
And then we start blaming the "evil screens" for people not finding themselves attractive.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/childhood.html
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/obesity_child_15_16/obe...
it just seems really silly to me to walk into this thread about how Facebook internally believes they're doing harm, and reply to a statement about how the harmed demographic feels they're being harmed, in the context of well-documented ways that harm occurs and what kind of effects it has, with a statement doubting the harm actually exists and questioning the self-reported experience of harm
It’s like asking why studies using self-reported survey numbers on penis sizes cannot be treated as the ultimate truth, despite adults surely being able to use a measurement tape or a ruler. There is a reason for why the average numbers on all those studies using self-reported numbers are always at least one standard deviation larger than the average numbers obtained from a study that wasn’t just a self-reported survey.
Move fast and break Zuckerberg!
They reach a point where they're fundamentally unable to honestly ask themselves whether their "good thing" is actually good. I have a fairly respectable social graph on Facebook and Twitter, but far fewer actual friends than I did in the pre-social network days. A row in a database isn't connection, and it isn't good.
Is it the mission statement itself which is dangerous? Or is it possible to come up with a "good" one?
(I was joking with the comment, but I'm not so sure now.)
https://venturebeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/amzn_shar...
> It’s All About the Long Term
> We believe that a fundamental measure of our success will be the shareholder value we create over the long term. This value will be a direct result of our ability to extend and solidify our current market leadership position.
> The stronger our market leadership, the more powerful our economic model. Market leadership can translate directly to higher revenue, higher profitability, greater capital velocity, and correspondingly stronger returns on invested capital.
> Our decisions have consistently reflected this focus. We first measure ourselves in terms of the metrics most indicative of our market leadership: customer and revenue growth, the degree to which our customers continue to purchase from us on a repeat basis, and the strength of our brand. We have invested and will continue to invest aggressively to expand and leverage our customer base, brand, and infrastructure as we move to establish an enduring franchise.
> Because of our emphasis on the long term, we may make decisions and weigh tradeoffs differently than some companies. Accordingly, we want to share with you our fundamental management and decision-making approach so that you, our shareholders, may confirm that it is consistent with your investment philosophy: (...)
You don't have to operate your company in a way that makes your shareholders maximum profit from quarter to quarter. You do have a responsibility to them, but that responsibility can be met by following your mission statement. If you believe your company should only (e.g.) use sustainable energy sources because it's important for the planet, or that you're going to invest for long term growth, not short term profit, you can disclose that to your shareholders and meet your obligations. Company directors have considerable leeway in the way in which they meet their fiduciary responsibilities, and the idea people have that companies "must maximize profit at all cost" is incorrect.
Now, if your company is failing, the stock is falling, products failing in the market, then your shareholders may pressure for a variety of things: a change in mission, direction, the resignation of leaders; or they may buy enough of the company to own enough board seats to take control and out and replace current leadership. But if you're successful at executing on your mission and have investors who are onboard with it, and you're also making money (or growing, which is just as good or better), then you don't need to worry about that.
If your goal does not include making money for shareholders at any point, then you probably shouldn't organize as a for-profit corporation, though.
The fix here is that you must balance that mission statement with a well-defined set of Values as well. The mission is what you want to accomplish in the world, and the Values are the principles you plan to adhere to while doing so. The values can't just be some afterthought "check the box" exercise - they have to have significant decision-making weight in practice.
A set of (imperfect, I'm sure!) examples from the Wikimedia Foundation:
Mission: https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/mission/ Values: https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/values/
Have a mission statement, just don't go crazy with it.
1. I remember that while growing up fashion magazines, actors/actresses and I want to say peer pressure (but am fearful its incorrect) were a big source of body image issues.
2. Maybe it's a side effect of our society or "normal" to have security issues while growing up. We've been having good childhoods for how long - 100 years? Maybe there are some feelings that we never had the option of expressing or feeling.
I remember reading somewhere, can't remember where, something that addressed this point.
Broadly speaking, the idea was that "people in magazines" weren't perceived as "peers", so you wouldn't compare yourself to them in the same way as you'd compare with a classmate, or some other "regular person", "just like yourself".
Instagram is an easy target like Video games, TV, Cell Phones, and Internet were before it. But like those things I don't think there's much causation going on.
For example, take some 13 year old girl, probably a poor farmer, from Ireland in 1800. She will have seen almost no examples of the female body except her own, her peers rarely, and her familial elders. Then plop her down into today's world, and she'll definitely be barraged by all the most ridiculous images of flat stomachs, huge anatomical parts and tiny anatomical parts, immaculately photoshopped forms: she'll be made to feel less than them.
From the article it seems that young girls know about the toxicity in the application, why they keep using it? if their parents are aware too, why do they let their daughters use it?
They may know that it's bad for you, just as I expect most smokers to know smoking is bad for you.
But the "badness" isn't direct, it grows, and they could think "maybe I'll be able to control it / I can quit whenever I want", whereas if you don't follow current trends (or whatever it is people follow on instagram), you're left out immediately.
Of course, by the time you realize you can't quit, it's already too late.
But I'll not get in to that. :)
Facebook and Instagram are drug dealers. Sure, they're not physically distributing a substance, but the social interactions they provide are every bit as addictive. In time, society will abolish or tightly constrain them in the same way society has banned other highly addictive substances.
And this is why I don't blame the users.
There is no need to have any grudge against me (I hope). I get it. I never said being a parent is an easy job. I acknowledge how hard it is but...
> Facebook and Instagram are drug dealers
If you teach your kids not to consume drugs, why Instagram should be any different?
Imagine if all the other kids at school used drugs on a daily basis, that there was advertising plastered everywhere telling you that drugs are cool, that successful people use drugs and that your worth in this world can be directly tied to successful use of drugs.
I don't mean to sound mean here, but are you a parent? If not I suspect you're not really aware of the realities of parenting, particularly once a child becomes teenage. You can only do so much. And you certainly can't win against a multi-billion dollar enterprise determined to make your rebellion-inclined teenager do something.
With this I just want to say that I know it's a difficult task but presenting it as a lost battle/impossible seems to me wrong.
The thing is, we made headway in the battle against smoking by disallowing people from doing all those things. You're not allowed to market to kids, you're not allowed to depict smoking in most TV that kids are likely to watch, you're not allowed to smoke in or near schools and teachers who do are frowned upon. Cigarettes themselves are taxed heavily specifically to price young people out of getting into the habit, vendors are required to card, and the cigarette makers are even required to pay into a fund that promotes anti-smoking messaging.
So yes it is definitely not an impossible task. But the things that make it possible require taking it seriously as a danger and addressing it collectively.
> But I was taught not to do it and never did it.
So not all young people in your time were taught similarly. Or if they were, those teachings didn't stick.
Ideally the number of minors smoking would be zero. I don't think that's a radical idea, and I hope it's something that everyone can agree on. "Teachings from parents" obviously didn't achieve that goal, from your own experience.
"Peers’ smoking is the strongest predictor of adolescent smoking."[1]
[1] Gecková, A.M., Stewart, R., van Dijk, J.P., Orosová, O.G., Groothoff, J.W. and Post, D., 2005. Influence of socio-economic status, parents and peers on smoking behaviour of adolescents. European addiction research, 11(4), pp.204-209.
In many high schools this isn't far off the truth.
Do you have any comments on the tactics used by cigarette companies -- specifically in the United States -- before the 1998 "Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement"? When I was a kid, the amount of advertising by tobacco was incredible. It was unavoidable and everywhere... and any cool or famous seemed associated with cigarette companies.
Even if you ignore smoking cigarettes, the topic of smoking marijuana will surely be a major issue for current and next gen parents. How would you parent around this issue? It is so complex.
The tactics worked? Rates of smoking used to be way higher in the past.
https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2014/images/p0612-YRBS.pd...
One thing that does some "obvious" for this generation of parents: Work hard to educate your children on the dangers of traditional cigarette smoking. That is a seriously terrible habit for your health and well-being. I feel much less so about vaping (e-cigarettes), as the health effects of nicotine addiction are still far lower than traditional cigarette smoke inhaled into the lungs.
I think there's a certain nuance there. Drugs (which ones?) can (should?) be legal - or at least their consumption decriminalized. We've made good progress already and yet much more is to be made.
But all this is not saying that drugs should be pushed hand over fist down people's throat and that billions should be spent on studying the ways people can be more encouraged to become drug users.
And this is what Facebook et al are doing. They are spending untold resources on devising the most efficient ways of making people addicted and ensuring that no other way exist of satisfying the cravings. They create echo chambers and push specifically topics that get the most response out of people.
And this is completely legal (currently). Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok etc... are allowed to be cool, hip, desirable and consumed in ways that the tobacco industry couldn't imagine in their wildest dreams during their heydays.
These companies can tap into the deepest secrets and desires of vast swathes of people in ways that is unprecedented.
I feel that the vices of the old world, like drugs, are chickenshit compared to the power that the new vices can wield over their captives.
getting off soapbox
I certainly think the internet gave me access to many more humans, ideas, and tribes than my parents' generation had access to, and it would be hard for me to see how it would have been possible for my parents to have as much influence on me as their parents had on them.
I would even say it is indisputable there are forces beyond parents’ control unless the parents opt to live an Amish lifestyle, such as using devices connected to the internet and various social networks. If you do not give it to your kid, someone at school will, and even more, you probably need to teach your kid how to play the game rather than have them start it blind while the other players have experience.
And not all parents realize, or can realize, everything that goes on in their childrens' lives.
That’s not true in any western country :)
I don't work in behavioral science, but this isn't my understanding. I was under the impression that research indicates peers are the larger influence, which can be tempered somewhat by parents. For an easy example, whether or not peers smoke is a better predictor than whether parents smoke.
Those are their peers.
They aren’t their friends. Kids make their own friends, but it’s unusual for them to be able to make lifestyle choices like where they live before adulthood.
To note, your peers aren’t people on Instagram per se. I’d guess a study on the issue would say that a peer group they associate with on daily basis like in school would have more of an effect on their choices than Instagram influencers.
True, but for most people this is only available within a subset of constrained choices. Parents in rural Appalachia or the rust belt probably aren’t going to have a lot of Phillips Academies to choose from
You might say that, but you would be wrong. Parents of teens have been the most influential people in their lives up to them becoming teens. Part of the process into adulthood is to break away from that pattern, to explore and build connections outside the family sphere. That's why teens are the most vulnerable demographic for a lot of things -- their brains are in the process of rewiring themselves for more personal responsibility and less parental oversight. So they're actively seeking to avoid parental control, but haven't yet learned to correctly weigh and assess long-term effects of their decisions.
I hope not, the War on Drugs is one of the biggest disasters in modern history, directly linked to untold problems in society
"I got it all, buddy. Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook...I can hook you up."
Not even a little? Users aren't brainless, as much as they'd want to make you believe.
“We” certainly blamed the users of addictive substances and vilified or at least looked down on them. That is until it was heavily white and middle class or above people with opoids. Even then it was slow, but some things were done. Far more than what was done with other highly addictive substances. It’s a disgrace.
I shutter to think any drug banning history happen in any other context.
I know, because like most children, I was exposed to online porn at a young age and was addicted to it well into my adult life. These companies need regulation, because they are bad actors.
Nah. That's been studied heavily. Here's an overview from the National Institutes of Health.[1] Wikipedia has an overview.[2] The overall conclusion is that most of the research is of terrible quality and there's no big measurable effect.
>The proposed DSM-5, slated to publish in May of 2014, contains in this new addition the diagnosis of Hypersexual Disorder, which includes problematic, compulsive pornography use. Bostwick and Bucci, in their report out of the Mayo Clinic on treating Internet pornography addiction with naltrexone, wrote “…cellular adaptations in the (pornography) addict’s PFC result in increased salience of drug-associated stimuli, decreased salience of non-drug stimuli, and decreased interest in pursuing goal-directed activities central to survival.”
Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3050060/
[1] https://www.mayoclinicproceedings.org/article/S0025-6196(11)...
No, nothing needs regulation. Stop making the internet fucking worse. Can we go back to 2000 now (not that it was good then either since the internet was fundamentally broken already)? This is like the bat shit insane morons who think having a popup about cookies on every page is solving the """privacy""" issue.
Literally every single political issue on HN is bogus. Take the ad blocking issue for instance, nothing that has ads actually matters. Your "solutions" like Brave are pure garbage.
The "privacy" issue doesn't exist because if we were using sane tech instead of webshit, there wouldn't be any tracking since it wouldn't be conceptually possible. Why the hell can tech even track you in the first place for reading static documents? This is a poor analog that cannot even compete with paper newspapers (which are also much more legible because they are not on LCDs).
Net neutrality doesn't matter because nobody can ELI5 why I should care about it. Since the internet is all garbage, it shouldn't be an issue that it's expensive. Just don't use it. Make a free replacement. Cuban citizens have already done it.
Now let me try and list CURRENT_YEAR.addictions:
- Games
- Working out
- Porn
- Social media
- TV (youtube or whatever you use now)
- HN (muh dunning kruger syndrome, imposter, et al)
- Eating
- Lotto tickets
- Stock market
- Programming
- Working
- Drugs
- Things that are sort of drugs but not
- Any substance what so ever
- Benchmarking
- Politics
- Literally any hobby
Oh look guys, HN needs to be regulated because I can come up with a person who has problems because of it.
Guys we need to regulate fat and high calorie food. Oh wait it grows on trees.
People who see a problem and immediately go "we need regulation to solve this" (and even proceed to come up with some ad-hoc hypothesis of how it solves the problem after it's proven that it doesn't solve it in a substantial way) are morons. There is actually something wrong with their brain. They hold back progress. Every new law is a potential stumbling block for progress and thus why new legislation should be avoided at all costs. See MECHANISM NOT POLICY article on wikipedia to see how people already knew about this 70 years ago in tech.
This is a hyperbolic statement. Even if you are just talking about internet regulation.
Let's imagine for a moment that someone invented a hypnosis algorithm and hosted it on a website. Anyone going to this website went into spasms and died in front of their screen. Would we seek protection for our children and for the general public from such a website from internet browser companies, ISPs and the government? Yes we would. This is an extreme example but it illustrates a point. You can say the same thing about websites that prey on children, or the elderly.
I'm not advocating for the banning of pornography altogether. I am making the simple proposition that it be better regulated. People who distribute porn know full well that their content is seen by minors. Having a child check a box that says that they are over 18 is not good enough. If I hadn't seen porn as a minor, I might have had a better chance of avoiding the extremely negative impacts that it can carry with it. Don't believe me? Visit a support page like r/NoFap and read the hundreds of thousands of stories there.
I'm not going to touch any of the other subjects you raised because I'm not arguing for any of the things you listed.
I didn't say it did.
> You being unable to control yourself does not justify undue restrictions on other people.
I'm not talking about myself, I'm talking about minors. Protecting children from products that require an adult brain to ascertain harm is a positive function of government.
> The internet should not be ceded to nanny staters and morality police.
This is not about morality. Please don't read intentions where there are none.
1 - mandate disclaimers in front of all videos describing the possible negative effects of porn (there are concrete, well-studied effects). cigarettes and tobacco have the same mandates and they do have an overall positive effect on educating the public
2 - hold video hosting sites liable if content is shown to minors. there is a reason why a bar can get closed down or a gas station attendee can lose his or her job if alcohol and tobacco is served to minors. the same rules need to apply for sexually explicit material that is turbocharged to reach children
Why would you think this will work? My parents, school, etc already gave you a million false warnings about porn and yet I looked at it. Did that even work for smoking? I think smoking only stopped once vape replaced it. Now I have to skip the intro logo as well as some stupid disclaimer, and producers have to waste more of their time on legal checkboxes, great.
> 2 - hold video hosting sites liable if content is shown to minors.
That's not a concrete plan. Do we need photo ID here? Some experimental crypto to disclose your government certified age to the website so it can decide not to kick you off? What about a forum where anyone can post any image? Does the forum have to be legally liable to block minors if it has no rule against porn?
The internet worked perfect in 2000. I got my porn when I was 13 and had no problem. There was not a single complaint aside from corporate scum trying to enforce DMCA crap (the multi billion dollar company was complaining, nobody else). Only when all you American idiots came in 2010 from faceberg all these pretend social problems started existing. The internet is literally just data transmission and this act could not be more harmless if you wanted it to be. Quite literally, the internet is the most harmless technology in existence. It cannot give you any disease, etc. It costs nothing, etc. What we are seeing here is the American art of being a professional victim. One should start by observing that almost every single complaint about the internet starts with "I read some text and now I am offended".
I envision the internet as community run, and free. The current internet is all obsolete garbage. The problem is, on this new internet we wont actually be able to make it because everything will be illegal by then. It will be illegal to run point to point to your neighbour because of some stupid porno law that has absolutely nothing to do with your application.
https://gizmodo.com/lawmakers-ask-zuckerberg-to-drop-instagr...
Literally every social issue on the web for the last 20 years follows this one simple formula:
> X causes Y. Yes it sounds stupid, but read this long winded reasoning or spend the next 70 hours of your life going down my trail of studies to back this up
And nobody actually invests their lives in rebuking them, and they get bored and stop talking about it 5 years later.
I'm not familiar with actual research in this space, but i would imagine that its similarly addictive to being with friends IRL?
(To me) social media is a great tool to connect with friends and stay present even after we move away and work and pandemic quarantine. Its a suppliment for IRL relationships. I used to live with friends in college, and i used to go out and get food or drinks or whatever almost daily to get my "fix" of socialization.
Are social networks really that different? I recognize that some (teen girl?) people might wish they looked like a supermodel on social media or get jealousy of the lives of influences, but is that different from old magazine and movie stars? Is the mixture of "social" and "influences" to one news feed detrimental? Is there more exposure? What makes social networking more "addictive" (and therefore dangerous) than actual socialization?
Period
Their business model is poisoning the well of society, and strip-mining its value by breaking the bonds that hold it together.
The very best that can be concluded about it's entire leadership is that they entirely lack any hint of moral compass or sense of responsibility to the society from which they extract their wealth.
The more I observe their behavior, the more it looks like worse conclusions are supported by the data.
Just stop justifying things on technical bases. It is what FB is doing the the top post above
Yeah, it is difficult for people to admit they're at fault.
Blame is justified only when someone is forcing you to do something or keeping you from something.
If FB/Instagram use is damaging a substantial percentage of your population, it's your problem, regardless of whatever moral frame you decide to put around it.
If you are not using it, uninformed people will laugh about you (peer pressure, network effect). Furthermore, because so many people use FB, many people will use FB to organize events, which one does not even know about, because of not being on FB. In the end, they will spin it, because they do not know better themselves, that it is you, who isolated yourself from the rest of "society".
I have experienced it many times. I have missed out on probably many things over time. Yet I refuse to be a part of FB and stuff like that. However, I am only one person. The peer pressure probably works on most people, because most are not as informed about FB (and Instagram and whatever else they own) and what it does, as the crowd on HN is for example. That means, that the argument of "no one is forcing anyone" is a bad one, because you would need to add "but they will make your life worse, if you do not join!". It is kind of an extortion, which an uninformed society unknowingly is excerting on the individual, put in motion by dark patterns, privacy-hostility and bad practices on the side of FB.
This is a disheartening take.
For instance, I'm not sure becoming a social outcast is great for anxiety and depression issues.
Unless telling people to take responsibility for themselves is an effective systemic intervention (it might be!) then it's not very useful, except as a PR strategy to deflect blame from Facebook.
And every time somebody else must do something about it in a way that affects everybody.
About #1: From my childhood experience, this is accurate. Youth fashion magazines and network TV from 7PM to 10PM played and outsized role to influence our (small) world view. However, I find it interesting that as social media has exploded, there is parellel movement to reduce digital post processing on models photographs. It is still a moving target, but the trend is less and less processing of photographs in fashion magazines and adverts. (Note: This "commitment" varies wildly by region!)
About #2: This comment is so deep. I remember reading the novel "Orphan Train" a few years ago, and the author spent considerable time pulling you into the world within which these young people lived. Granted, the events occur about 100 years ago, but they help us the understand the pressures of youth from four generations ago. By the end, you felt like a movie director, peering into their fractured lives. Generally speaking, I think about a "generation" as being 25 years. If we look back 100 years, someone born in 1921, then each 25 years is a new generation. Assuming these people lived in relatively free and prosperous places... I dunno, pick Belgium or Argentina or Australia... each 25 years, children's lives would be hugely different than their parents due to major social advances, improved education, and new media outlets. In my generation, one of the biggest concerns was "peer pressure" and "too much TV or video games". Some of that still exists, but it has morphed more towards bullying (including early-age homophobia and transphobia) and too much Internet / social media. An exciting question: What comes after this generation? Too much AR / VR!?
In some cases, it's justified, but the vast majority of time it's just avoiding responsibility.
However, if you are looking at a large percentage of people experiencing something, it isn't helpful to just say all those people need personal responsibility. You can point to individual failings when you talk about an individual, but if 75% of people are having individual failings it is symptomatic of something structural.
There's always going to be some of this kind of thing in everything. I'd accept the concentration of it in social media (TikTok is probably the worst of them) is not healthy, but the issues themselves are independent of the medium of the time imo.
That statement cannot be false because it is devoid of any content, being a mere hypothetical. The fact that it is surrounded by "research" is meaningless as well, as the aforementioned sentence is like saying "the elements of the empty set fulfil all properties"...
So no, they are not contradicting themselves. They are simply and wantonly misleading people.
"Regular smoking use is associated with lower BMI, which is shown to correlate with improved heart health and lower mortality rates."
"Use of fossil fuels powers a number of ecology-preserving tasks, allowing us to care for the environment in a way we could not without this amazing source of Earth-loving fuel."
It still needs a name. Here let me try:
Disproportionate benefit insinuation error: Implying (without explicitly stating that it has more benefits than disadvantages because that would be a disprovable lie) that because something has some benefit, it is overall helpful.
Or just "plausible deniability"- factually stating the existence of a beneficial tree, but omitting mention of the harmful forest
Or just "cherry-picking"
Or to cover cases where a harm is insinuated/emphasized in the same way in order to discredit something (see: literally all the antivax data, antiscience, antimedicine... "trust doctors, you mean like the ones who prescribed thalidomide?")... "Misrepresenting the forest"
The rest I would truly contest.
Prom is not an every single morning, universe commenting event no matter how the teenage brain may attempt to blow it up.
Cosmo and Vogue do not have the same continuous feedback loop and clearly have 100x (1000x? 1mnx?) less content being created, repeated, refreshed, etc. Its a magazine. If you want to invoke their IG handles honestly I could find 100s of influencers with more reach and engagement
How did you pull this from a rather benign statement about high school prom and magazines?
I believe other social phenomena are responsible for this, mainly forms of peer pressur. The stories influencers use to lure their audiences often invokes the threat of sexism and that naturally increases fears that might lead to a feedback loop.
I make $BILLIONS from this drink.
(fill in whatever value of X, Y and Z makes this all ok)
A lot of pharmaceutical advertisements do this to: this might help you, it might also kill you, you choose(!) but please ask your doctor about us anyways and throw us some money.
Therefore, if they say "may help against X", then it doesn't really, because if they had substantial evidence of that, they would state that.
I think the problem is most people probably read the statement and don't realize just how weak the evidence required to make it true is.
There's a conspiracy theory stating that he's wearing AR contact lenses such as those (https://www.wired.com/story/mojo-vision-smart-contact-lens/) and we know he's been working on this since 2017 (https://www.dezeen.com/2017/04/20/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-e...).
Running a company in today's environment feels very different than 20 years ago, and to make it clear - it's better for the world this way. Any employee - no matter how low or high ranking - has the ability to erase a significant amount of enterprise value from any business, no matter how large or small. This is driven by improved moral standards, but also extreme connectivity that we have in terms of obtaining information internally (slack, notion, google drive and thousands of other software solutions that have increased everyone's access to documents) and sharing it with the outside world (social media, easy access to journalists, readers' interest in holding companies accountable).
I would be surprised if we don't experience some type of a push back from the companies. At the very least, I imagine access to info will be reduced (already happened at Google), and also that we'll increasingly start seeing new ways of how employees are connected with each other (both in terms of policy as well as actual barriers that will prohibit anyone from reaching too many people). I imagine that companies will also start researching new candidates' propensity for activism by analyzing their social media content. For example, if you post "tax the rich!" on Facebook, I imagine that in the not so distant future that will have a negative impact on your market value.
If there's one thing that I've learned, it's that every action triggers a reaction (which is time-delayed in the sense that it arrives late and also overshoots the original target), and the constant yo-yoing between those two forces is what explains much of the irrational behavior in the world.
One thing could be to hire fewer people. Oddly large software companies is an evergreen topic on HN. Every middle manager wants to empire-build, but if each new hire is a potential leak, then that could be a brake on Google's relentless goal of hitting 1M employees by 2030: https://image.cnbcfm.com/api/v1/image/106318886-157800431271...
Not that it really matters, I don't think either would help you find a fix that doesn't involve destroying the whole thing.
I don't think the former scales, whereas the latter lends itself to amplification. Authenticity and community require much more complexity to uphold than anger, anxiety, and resentment.
I do take your point, and think that un-nuanced conversations about the evils of Social Media are unhelpful, but I think the scaling problem is the real danger. Negativity scales globally, positive sentiment and experience is limited to the individual or local level.
What do you think of any of this?
Probably, but because of salience asymmetry, we don't realise it. Like the good stuff is often more local as you say, and more distributed, while the bad stuff makes the news.
But anyway, I think the reason that facebook is aware of the problem but doing nothing is not that they are cynically exploiting people, and it's rather that they don't know how to solve it.
Does society value beauty? Sure. Do models set "unrealistic expectations"? Sure. Are some high school girls assholes to other girls? Absolutely. But once upon a time kids would go home and those people would be gone. Now it's a 24/7 feedback loop and it's completely unhealthy.
This is pretty much an internet problem, not a Facebook problem. The things people say to each other on forums or Twitter or Facebook, especially when anonymous (but not always), are quite often horrendous.
You are correct however, that Twitter is also toxic; like all social media.
The problem with social media, then, is that it allows -- indeed encourages, because "engagement" -- all that toxicity to spread so much more widely and rapidly than ever before.
This post is about FB suppressing their own research, which showed that Instagram and its algorithm are toxic to teenage girls.
> We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls,”
> Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression,”
> “This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups.”
"They came to the conclusion that some of the problems were specific to Instagram, and not social media more broadly. That is especially true concerning so-called social comparison, which is when people assess their own value in relation to the attractiveness, wealth and success of others."
"'Social comparison is worse on Instagram,' states Facebook's deep dive into teen girl body-image issues in 2020, noting that TikTok, a short-video app, is grounded in performance, while users on Snapchat, a rival photo and video-sharing app, are sheltered by jokey filters that 'keep the focus on the face.' In contrast, Instagram focuses heavily on the body and lifestyle."
So I suspect that their understanding of the problem is better than yours, and that there is something about Instagram that makes it worse than generic social media.
But a very small minority that doesn't have morals, is causing the illusion that it's most people that don't have them.
Right now we have a large percentage of people that refuse to get a vaccine to protect their neighbors.
Everyone might have morals, but the bar is low.
I don't know many such morally-absent folks. Perhaps the perverse incentives in our system mean a bunch of CEOs are quite sociopathic, but on the whole, people seem rather good intentioned to me. The internet certainly serves as a platform for many that would be otherwise shunned IRL, but I don't think they're the general majority...just the majority that decide to voice their opinions. The rest aren't even paying attention - only a small fraction of people have a Twitter account, for example.
Even reddit, which can be anonymous, is filled with good discourse, assuming you avoid certain subreddits, and sort by top. Moderation goes a long way to mimicking our more natural IRL tendencies to turn down the assholes. Twitter and Instagram generally lack those tools, so the assholes can be louder and _seem_ more prominent than they are.
Given how profitable that’s been it seems reasonable to expect them to be involved in fixing it.
Or they’re paid massive salaries not to do that.
And yes we need regulatory help. Tens of millions in this country are experiencing mental health issues as a result of these platforms. When we understood that other industries were causing a health crisis we regulated them, the same needs to occur here.
Note. I don't know what the regulatory solution should be, but we should be having that discussion.
It's absurd to absolve a company as wealthy as facebook who optimizes for "engagement" from their externalities on children.
Is there something on the internet that isn't designed as such?
Maybe weather apps... Everything else, from wikipedia to github to stackoverflow to the site you're on now is yet another automated massively multiplayer kudo ranking system. The only meaningful difference appears to be demographic; Facebook is one of the places 'teen girls' spend their time. All I see here is evidence that clicks can still be had by ascribing some concern to the fate of young women[1].
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_white_woman_syndrome
Gamification is benign compared to an interactive news feed developed to drive ad sales. I find pointing at especially wikipedia, but also github as being designed to maximize engagement comparable to social networks as silly. Neither has much to gain from having addicted users, the same can't be said for facebook, IG, or Reddit.
All three have various feed mechanisms. They all have various ranking systems. Every one of them have people employed (even if mere 'volunteers') to 'maximize engagement.' And every one of these systems have people obsessed with their profile. Every. Single. One.
They're just mostly not 'teen girls' and so the 'problem' makes for poor headline material.
"especially wikipedia"
Wikipedia is rife with obsessed 'editors' climbing the rungs of the interweb status ladder. They're easy to find. Look at their profile pages; filled with achievement badges (gamification) and vast profiles of their lives. Does Facebook have 'campaigns' for 'elections' that grant power on the platform? I honestly don't know because I spend no time there, but I know Wikipedia does, and we can only imagine the anxiety involved for these 'candidates.' Thankfully though, they're mostly not 'teen girls' so we're not going to worry about them.
Speaking to your point more directly, the massive, massive difference is the primary user of Instagram and typical social media vs the primary user of these other platforms. The primary user of Instagram is shown addictive feeds non-stop. It’s really not possible or enjoyable to use Instagram without interacting with designs deliberately and literally trying to get you addicted to the platform. This isn’t true for something like Wikipedia or Stack Overflow. The primary user is going to come across a few articles now and then or search something. But they are rarely going to be interacting with an algorithm or design trying to get you addicted for hours a day.
Think about it like gambling. The only way to use Instagram or Tiktok or Facebook or anything like that is by pulling the lever on a slot machine, trying to get a dopamine hit.
The inherent design and purpose of social media platforms is to addict people so they spend as much time on the platform as possible, and then show them ads. That’s not true for Wikipedia or stack overflow. Those examples are more about policies that encourage toxic behavior or just crappy people on the internet, not a critique of the inherent platform design.
Also for all of the women I've seen flown out from Alabama, Mississippi, etc to NY, LA & Miami by the more affluent men in my social circles, I haven't seen a single long term relationship develop out of it. The wider net isn't leading to better outcomes.
I honestly can't tell if you're joking or not, but study after study has shown that dating was far more mentally healthy in 1995 than it is today. Online dating falls into almost the exact same category of causing anxiety and making it more difficult for younger generations to form meaningful relationships - just like instagram and facebook.
It's a genuine problem, in that it is fully exploitative of men, but not related to this imo.
If anything I'd argue that more than ever both women and men are searching for authenticity in a partner. Something increasingly difficult to come by in our social media fueled world.
Sure, there is a subset on both sides that has been completely sucked in by this culture and measures each others worth by the number of followers on their instagram, but I'd actually view this as a positive. It's really convenient to be able to identify and filter out these vain individuals early on in the dating process.
Keep your head up nodejs_rulez_1, there are still plenty of good women and men out there.
Simply put, any man or woman with a lot of choices would be less invested in any of the options presented.
An individual girl in 1995 had enough shows on TV and enough magazines to tell her she is not looking good.
And that's just some of the content. The algorithm is also just as happy to feed you a continuous stream of outraging, extremist "punditry", manufactured drama, fake "crafting" videos, conspiracies, and paranoid, depressing "news" - anything to keep you engaged.
I'm not really sure about it. When highschool girls wore the same clothes the Spice Girls wore, had the same haircut they had and replicated their dances, for me that's a lot of connection.
I'm sure Facebook/Instagram have a lot to be blamed for but we (not just young girls; parents, teachers, etc) need to be responsible of our actions to some degree.
I agree with the 2nd part of your comment. But this part is just dishonest, and sounds like a startup pitch about addressable market. Do you honestly believe that each teen girl is being followed by hundreds of millions, who comment on every single photo of her? Almost everyone still lives in their social bubbles, and yes, it's easier to to communicate and say mean things to each other (totally 24/7 feedback loop), but they almost exclusively come from people you know, not hundreds of millions of internet randos.
Doesn't matter if it reaches 10 or 10000 people.
Those girls in 1995 got their media fix through magazines geared at women and teenaged girls, where they'd find an impossibly thin model on every other page. The Kardashians wouldn't have been well-received in the 90s, because all of them would have been considered fat by those standards.
It was created much longer ago than that. We've had beauty standards for as long as humans have created art, and probably for as long as humans have existed. It's probably biological to a large degree, although the manifestation has changed over time. As with many of social media's deleterious effects, they hijack, amplify, and distort our natural inclinations for their own purposes.
Ironically it seems a totalitarian country like China is better equipped to deal with these things (see how they simply banned teens from gaming lately). The liberal democracies number one value is individual freedom; well it works out great most of the time but other times we are not that great ourselves in handling our lives and using our time constructively. Some of us get bored, addicted and obsessed under certain circumstances and I don't actually see an easy solution for that. Maybe social media should be age restricted like porn?
PS: Where is the people that use to proudly say "with great power comes great responsibility"?
You are right that there will always be a different “drug” that exposes the same underlying societal issues. But given that FB+Insta are /algorithmically/ pushing these posts to users to increase engagement, it is their problem too.
Nobody is saying that this is not a general social media problem, just that this article is reporting on FB hiding crucial information.
> “They came to the conclusion that some of the problems were specific to Instagram, and not social media more broadly. That is especially true concerning so-called social comparison, which is when people assess their own value in relation to the attractiveness, wealth and success of others." "'Social comparison is worse on Instagram,' states Facebook's deep dive into teen girl body-image issues in 2020, noting that TikTok, a short-video app, is grounded in performance, while users on Snapchat, a rival photo and video-sharing app, are sheltered by jokey filters that 'keep the focus on the face.' In contrast, Instagram focuses heavily on the body and lifestyle."
That's needlessly rude and doesn't add anything to the conversation. Lets try and be nice :) You do have some valid points.
Yes.
Facebook/YouTube/Twitter all exploit the dark side of human nature. They've been doing it for so many years, that it's difficult to imagine that it's unintentional.
>in Google’s effort to keep people on its video platform as long as possible, “its algorithm seems to have concluded that people are drawn to content that is more extreme than what they started with—or to incendiary content in general,” and adds, “It is also possible that YouTube’s recommender algorithm has a bias toward inflammatory content.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/03/youtube...
In corporate america, it's hard for me to see any private owned corporation doing what's in best interest for the public versus their own pockets.
Kind of like how we said that the answer to alcohol & tobacco was to show self-control, not restrict sales and advertising? Expecting people to go one on one against enormous companies’ profit motives is a recipe for failures.
There are some things which you could try regulating: for example, a lot of what drives the dubious aspects comes back to algorithmic promotion maximizing time on site and advertising views. Legislators could ban algorithmic promotion for children, require companies to identify and curb addictive levels of consumption, or require companies to put more effort into moderation on the posts & comments which they promote.
Similarly, I believe at least some countries are exploring requirements to clearly indicate photos which have been modified or retouched.
There are tons of great examples where algorithmic feed is useful, particularly when your feed is related to activities such as cooking, music and exercise.
In theory I think the concept of forcing the companies to behave a certain way is ideal but I'm still unsure of what type of legislation could be put in place to address the problem in the article.
I definitely agree that there isn't a proven solution for this problem — that's normal for major technological changes. We saw the same thing with printed books, magazines, and newspapers; radio; TV; the internet; etc. — not to mention things like cars which weren't communications technologies but definitely had major impacts on society. I think the best thing we can get right now is more of the data companies like Facebook and Google tend to avoid sharing, especially after various governments experiment with rules and it becomes possible to see what does and doesn't work.
"Some people feel bad about their bodies after viewing social media" doesn't nearly meet the threshold of measurable harm that tobacco does. And algorithmic promotion can be positive, unlike the universally health-corrosive effects of cigarettes.
Where the impact of cigarettes is relevant is in the discussion of how _strong_ a particular regulation should be. A deadly threat certainly warrants stricter rules than something minor, just as we do not enforce zoning violations with the death penalty.
If there's a specific policy proposal you could talk about whether you think it'd be effective or overkill but instead you appear to be arguing that there's no need to even consider the range of policy options.
https://media.gettyimages.com/photos/todd-matthews-and-emily...
https://www.bestuscasinos.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/slo...
https://ak.picdn.net/shutterstock/videos/1023380611/thumb/1....
If people didn't want to see it, they wouldn't click on it. Banning it or regulating it is not going to change that, it's just going to cause it to shift elsewhere. It's human nature.
Regulations come in flavors other than draconian. Do you have a specific policy proposal which you're referring to? Otherwise it seems somewhat disingenuous to predict the failure of something which we don't even have enough detail to discuss.
I agree that this is a test of our society.
> ... and are capable of discipline and self-control
These organizations have enormous resources dedicated to exploiting our frailties and overcoming an individual's discipline and self-control. One option is to continue to expect every man, woman, and child to fight this battle alone in their own head every day.
But we'd probably achieve better results more efficiently by organizing ourselves as well. Then we can combat it collectively as a community and a society like we have done for other human frailties. This would mean things like education, societal pressure, and regulation.
I think it's a losing game.
For as long as big social is allowed to be “free” with its paying customers being advertisers, it will keep benefitting from trolling and other unhealthy behaviours (narcissism?) that happen to drive up engagement and ad revenue. With user lock-in, full control over UI and algorithms at its disposal, big social has way too many tricks up its sleeve for your average tired-after-work-or-school, running-out-of-willpower, vulnerable user to consciously compensate for.
Normalising paid social (forcing interoperability, downgrading platforms to pipes) is probably the most straightforward way for us to finally gain the ability to vote with our wallet and to choose client software crafted with our needs in mind. (I’m not a proponent of regulation bloat or special rules for select big companies; I think a small but strategically focused general requirement could be enough for such a change to happen.)
The idea that this is just a lack of willpower on our end is total bs
These companies are already amplifying content they think will hold our attention, by leaning into people's worst instincts.
>In the fall of 2018, Jonah Peretti, chief executive of online publisher BuzzFeed, emailed a top official at Facebook Inc. The most divisive content that publishers produced was going viral on the platform, he said, creating an incentive to produce more of it.
Mr. Peretti blamed a major overhaul Facebook had given to its News Feed algorithm earlier that year to boost “meaningful social interactions,” or MSI, between friends and family, according to internal Facebook documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal that quote the email.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-algorithm-change-zucke...
“Just”? I would say this is plenty enough. And this is done willingly. So is it their fault ? Yes (not exclusively though)
That doesn't mean giant corporations should allowed to exploit these mechanisms for profit.
Do we take the approach we take with opiates, and ban companies from allowing users to upload images?
Or do we take the approach we take with nicotine, and force companies to disclose the possible harms that can come from social interactions online?
Or is there another approach you'd propose?
Hopefully this doesn't come across too confrontational - I genuinely am curious as to what solutions are viable, and I do recognize the harm social media can cause. But it seems to me that as long as there exists any platform where we can freely post photos, we'll have toxic comparisons, and I don't see more education changing this - I don't think it's a rational choice that we make, to choose to compare ourselves to others.
Tackling this issue in a sustainable way is something I believe most companies are capable of with the right guidance.
Why "should" FB do so? It is doing the "right thing" for its stake holders. Of course, Ideally they should, but realistically not going to happen.
It is us who need to protect our families because we are incentivized to do so. We have failed in protecting our own interests.
It is no different from the drug dealers in our town, we warn our children of the dangers, take steps within our means to reduce our children's interactions, etc.
Species, not culture.
The evolutionary explanations for such are not hard to come up with just with a bit of thought, and not hard to confirm in the literature either. Which also means the species isn't about to stop admiring those things any time soon.
Which means, rather than the "boil the ocean, then boil it a few more times again" plan of trying to somehow "fix" the species not to admire those things, one needs to pursue a plan of figuring out how to live within the existing constraints.
Which takes you right back to old idea of one's rationality being a small human trying to corral the crazy elephant that it is riding to go where we want it to go. The trick is to learn how to prevent the crazy elephant from even seeing the undesirable stimuli, rather than trying to deal with what happens if it does after the fact.
Unfortunately, explaining that to teenagers is a tough sell, especially when the alternative is tuning you out and going back to the highly-addictive social media.... even explaining it to adults can be a tough sell.
If we figured too much TV was bad for people, "social" media is 100 times worse. How is it even possible to still feel good about yourself after spending time there? I don't use any of these services because I see them as obviously bad for our mental health.
The message of the Web isn't looking so great, all around, I'd say.
"They came to the conclusion that some of the problems were specific to Instagram, and not social media more broadly. That is especially true concerning so-called social comparison, which is when people assess their own value in relation to the attractiveness, wealth and success of others."
"'Social comparison is worse on Instagram,' states Facebook's deep dive into teen girl body-image issues in 2020, noting that TikTok, a short-video app, is grounded in performance, while users on Snapchat, a rival photo and video-sharing app, are sheltered by jokey filters that 'keep the focus on the face.' In contrast, Instagram focuses heavily on the body and lifestyle."
So maybe they understand the dangers of Instagram better than you do?
It's one and the same.
Most users benefit from social media and you can't condemn them for not questioning other aspects.
Nevertheless, it is essential to question the intentions and procedures of the company behind it. I believe that external observers and institutions are required for this to happen and to spread awareness of things running afoul.
However, like so many things, software can be used for good, as well as for evil purposes. The difficult task is to define that boundary without compromising the utility for most users.
Related topics: Games, app stores, default browsers, etc.... How far does the state have to intervene? How much responsible behaviour can be expected from the user themselves?
What evidence supports this? The story is about evidence that this is in fact not true.
The software we are talking about is not dropped from the heavens. It is created by extremely large, powerful companies in pursuit of profit. If this software harms people, these companies are not neutral actors merely swept along with the tide of technology.
> How far does the state have to intervene? How much responsible behaviour can be expected from the user themselves?
Surely the most relevant question is how much responsible behavior can be expected from the companies themselves? They are the ones armed with research departments actually studying the effects of how their software affects people.
Sometimes people are seeking something that is beneficial, and maximizing that is fine. Lots more times, people are mostly responding to angry posts, or falling down a conspiracy rabbit hole that they cannot critically think their way out of. Maximizing the attention of those people is clearly negative.
So does society share some blame? Sure. Does an algorithm that maximizes some people into very bad places share some blame? Absolutely.
A great example is the girl who searched for exercise tips once and then her feed was algorithmically focused on weight loss tips and the like afterwards, which is not a cultural issue.
Don't you mean "as a species"?
Culture is one of the few tools we have to overcome these natural inclinations. Religion, too.
FTFY
Most issues are human issues. Just because it is a human issue does not make it alright to exploit it at scale with such invasiveness. Especially since they know that is it harmful. Sounds like cigarettes marketed to children. It's not a cigarette company issue it's a human issue after all! We are not liable.
Yes it is Facebook's or Instagram's fault. We are endowed with our natural desires (which are even more fundamentally biological than cultural in this case), that we have no choice over, but we have the choice to remove bad technologies from our societies.
This is in fact the only choice we have. You can't cure people of their desire for power or beauty, but you can destroy the tools that amplify the worst instincts we have.
Now, thanks to the internet, there exists inclusive and positive communities for people of every type of background and experience. This simply did not exist for most people just a few decades ago, but now it's accessible to almost every young person in the country.
I don't mind bashing the bad about social media and the internet, but I am kind of sick of people overlooking the good.
If we trade 10 good things for 10 000 terrible, then is it worth?
I haven't found the original material to verify, but if this is accurate, seems like the net outcome argument works in Instagram's favor.
Social media was helpful for me to connect with lost acquaintances (which was novel at first, but now I barely continue to converse with them if at all).
I'm honestly curious, because I'm probably biased when I think about medieval inquisitions or 1930 Race theories. Was, say, a black person in Rome treated bad because of racism? Were Jews hated in ancient early Muslim cities? Were there no same sex couples in, say, a 1500 village at the swedish coast? I can imagine many 'queer' were just accepted as such in many communities throughout the world, throughout the ages. But I can just as well imagine it being literally deadly to be even a little out of line, just as well.
It does seem like the US took a step backwards. But from like a tiny percent. If queerness was say at 5%, it goes to 1%. and now we're at like 70% type of analogy.
It used to be that if you were queer - in any sense of
the word - and lived in one of the countless small,
conservative, traditional communities in this country,
you were shit out of luck.
Today, if your social media trail renders you unemployable (or the target of persecution) there's no longer any corner of the planet to which you can escape.
Edit: People seem to be misinterpreting my meaning entirely. By 'unemployable' I was thinking of, for example, racy photos. By 'persecution' I mean actual IRL stalking/assault etc. The kind of example I had in mind was, say, a racy photo from Pride Parade following someone around for the rest of their living days, preventing them from working at certain lawfirms, or attracting the attention of some violent psycho.
Political correctness has reached such extremes that we were expected to make contributions to a gift for one of my straight colleagues after he announced to the whole team that his opposite sex partner was pregnant. I really wish people would keep their sexual predilections to themselves.
the mere existence of us queer people is not flaunting anything. the expression of our true selfs does not 'flaunt' and thinking it's some kind of attack on 'professionalism' is just backwards.
my life is not distracting, just as your life is not.
what about workplaces or spaces that simply 'tolerate' people of color? it puts that word in that context into a different light that more here might understand.
that language & context is so tinged it reveals real problems that still exist despite the mainstreaming of queer culture and appropriation that exists now - good or bad.
1. That assumes you have the money to move, can land in a new city and find housing, and then find a job. Pre-internet this was absolutely nontrivial.
2. It's not 380,000 towns on this planet, in the 80's/90's it was just a handful of cities that were more evolved, like San Francisco or P Town. There's a reason those cities are so LGBTQ heavy.
Now we play it safe. We save money. We find an apartment, a job and then we move. We live comfortably now and we don't want to lose that when moving. You can even see it today with people from certain parts of the world. They leave with nothing else than maybe a 20 dollar phone hoping they'll be able to call their family once they get somewhere.
RuPaul is correct when she says queer people create their own family. Even today.
I gave an example of how some people move to another country with only a 20 dollar phone. I could've said with 20 dollars in their pockets or with a couple t-shirts in a bag.
You're supposed to be smart people and...nevermind, I deleted what I wrote because it's not worth it. It's increasingly difficult to talk to leftists on the internet, they take the most meaningless comment as an attack or a literal fact and they they try to downvote you or argue stupid things. Not worth my time.
The history of drag balls and specially the category of business executive is a great example of how the only access to so many professions was performative art and impersonation (& still is especially for POC, non normative gender, trans etc)
(1) is true, but I was thinking more about the persecution aspect than the community aspect. If being gay made life unbearable in a particular town, it was at least physically possible, if expensive, for a person to cross state-lines and start life fresh. Today people leave a trail that follows them globally and for a lifetime.
In terms of community, (2) is a little more bleak than the reality. I'm guessing in the 1980s, most college towns had at least a gay bar (or cafe, bookshop, whatever), and community formed around it.
In the 1980s? Only the major metros really.
But you want me to shed a tear for who exactly? People who wrote hateful things and chose to share them with the public? Those are the very people dishing out the humiliation and shame and abuse. I for one am very happy that those behaviors are no longer tolerated like they were for so many generations.
I find it bewildering and worrisome, the way people think that this little monster won't grow and will stay on their leash.
So, now the people who are getting the pointy end of the stick are the people who used to do the poking. I for one prefer the new paradigm to the old.
The anti-cancel-culture people make it sound like they are being horribly oppressed. But for what? The color of their skin? Their gender or sexuality? No, simply for the dumb words they insist on uttering. Say what you what, when you want, to whomever you want, but don't tell me you realistically expect there to be no consequences.
At work last week, our "diversity and equity" team announced that our company is "obviously" not diverse enough.
This is a company in the US with employees across North America and Europe, with some employees in South America, Australia, India, and even Africa, and not just South Africa, either.
The company does have more employees in Europe and North America than elsewhere, and those employees share one thing in common: skin color. They do not share a nationality, a language, a cuisine, or a mindset.
The only possible interpretation of the D&I&E officer is that there is too much white skin at our company.
Is that horrible oppression? No, but it is racist and prejudiced AF and I would 100% lose my job of I said a single word.
I'll readily concede that many companies do this for image reasons alone, though I'm sure some do it out of a genuine belief that diversity can lead to better business outcomes, or create a more desirable workplace for attracting new talent. But in the end, this is the decision of a private company and they are not being coerced to make these decisions by any authority, nor does it sound like they are breaking any laws.
Same as it ever was.
What has changed is you are part of the group punching down but you think you are punching up.
It always happens this way. That other group is always: wrong, dangerous, not like us and any action against them is justified.
Seen it, heard it before. The interesting part is when the groups switch and people still think they are an underdog.
But you want me to shed a tear for who exactly?
Ugh, does everyone think the people to whom I was referring were the bigots?
>
> Edit: People seem to be misinterpreting my meaning entirely ...
I had a nice chuckle of that edit; In some instances your social media profile/trail may be "fine" in your eyes, but this edit demonstrates that a lot is left up to the interpretation of readers, further demonstrating the plausible risk one faces.
I think though that this 1:many culture e.g. the mainstreaming and appropriating of queer culture has had a positive affect of allowing kids to have way more freedom of expression to be themselves. Like looking back growing up only 15 years ago in a liberal area the progress is insane. Gay marriage was illegal & Obama was against it! that's crazy to think about.
Time has flown by (not fast enough especially for gender) and my point is I don't think we can ignore the role of social media & traditional media in those positive changes. Which is a 1:many broadcast like you mention.
It's an interesting balance though I think OP makes a good point in looking both the bad and the good.
In the worse case, companies like Facebook and Instagram can point to improvements in the treatment of a small number of people to provide cover for activities that hurt the majority. After being excoriated in the 2000s for destroying people’s livelihoods, Wall Street refocused the narrative by publicly backing various social justice issues. Without detracting from the value of those issues themselves—the finesse with which these companies changed the conversation should give everyone pause.
Doesn't stop at the country's border: Social Media has been a gift to the whole world.
And it's not just queers either: just look at the 2011 Arab Spring. Suddenly, people could just get news from their peers, see live videos of what was really happening and not just the curated content allowed by the local warlord. They could see how westerners lived and wonder: "Why do I have to bribe everyone around me?" "Why can they just go to school and not me?" "Why are woman able to have jobs and walk down the streets without a man?" and "Why are they allowed multiple sources of information?"
There's a wonder some countries are trying hard to restrict internet access, and western social media. The great Firewall, Cuban Intranet, Egypt cutting out the countries network during protests...
In addition, Arab spring isn’t even a positive example. What have the aftermaths of that been?
If you banned all accounts from these countries you know what they would do? Switch to something else and keep doing the same thing. It's a cultural problem.
> In addition, Arab spring isn’t even a positive example. What have the aftermaths of that been?
Before the people had dictatorships and a rotten culture. Now they only have a rotten culture. Social networking can't fix every issues...
In Syria, 494,438–606,000 died a violent death, 6.6 million became refugees and 6.7 million became internally displaced -- and Syria still has the same dictator.
Are you sure you don't want to concede that the Arab Spring's negative effects outweigh its positive effects?
Tunisia.
I think this thread is at the very least offtopic; at the most, it's intentional whataboutism. This could well be your honest reaction, but maybe consider carefully before shifting focus like this.
Large tech companies would like the conversation to shift in exactly this way. They want us to choose between "the internet" and no internet, but the real choice is between their internet and other possible internets.
I mean, sure, but this also goes for flat earthers, incels, fatphobia activists, dreamsexuals, etc. In other words, it normalized selfish individualism over collective conformism. Looking at it in aggregate, I'm not sure I can agree on whether that was a good thing or not. Personally, it strikes me as the pendulum shifting too far to the other side.
This seems to be a common misdirection seen with defending Facebook. (Not to mention other Big Tech companies.)
Facebook == "the internet"
Criticism of Facebook == criticism of "the internet"
Threat to Facebook == threat to "the internet"
EDIT: One insidious implication is to create or reinforce a false belief that we cant derive any benefits from the internet unless we support Big Tech and their mass-scale, popularity-driven, advertising-based "business model". This helps Big Tech to stifle competition and new and/or different ideas not under their control.
The internet isnt the web, nor is the web a small collection of popular websites, or a small collection of popular web browsers.
I'm sure people smoking cigarettes throughout the years have had very nice conversations and maybe even made friends. That doesn't absolve the manufacturers from responsibility for knowingly selling poison.
The same is true here.
"The internet" is not Instagram.
There were a fuckton of websites and forums devoted to gay issues and emotional support before Zuck ever got horny in his dorm room.
We can only blame scale. Some things are much more scalable than others, and "beauty" scales. And the "occurrence of beauty" does, too.
Before the advent of scale on almost every aspect of our lives, a local musician or theatre group found easy income.
Now, since after the invention of gramophones, more people can listen to less and less musicians, i.e. numerically.
One movie is seen across the world and then millions of times on streaming services, while your local theatre group starves.
Just like that, before, some people were considered more beautiful than others as it is done now. But one beautiful girl could only make, say, 20 girls jealous and anxious.
Now, with the advent of Instagram, and internet-driven scale in general, one beautiful girl makes 20,000 girls jealous. So the anxiety and jealousy is numeracally widespread. This is where beauty scales.
Also, before, one average looking girl felt threatened by the beauty of one beautiful girl in her area. Now, there is the "feed", where she sees hundred girls more beautiful than her. This would not have been statistically possible in earlier times. This is where "occurrence of beauty" scales. Where, hundred years ago, a girl would see maybe 3-4 girls better looking than her, now she sees 300.
____
- I don't believe in a set standard of beauty. I don't believe that beauty is objective either. In this comment, I use "beauty", "beautiful", etc. as a short and logistically convenient way to represent "perceived beauty", "seemingly beautiful", etc. I hope this won't be an issue.
- I am also aware of other sources of anxiety, one simply being money- money buys new clothes more frequently, and people in new clothes and/or makeup look more pretty. Cosmetic surgery is in similar line. Here what scales is display of wealth.
- Filters, editing, etc. also might play a big part. People know this. Hence the popularity of the "Instagram vs. Real Life" meme format.
I am not advocating for any stance here, but your argument reads a bit like "I don't blame gun manufacturers for gun deaths, I blame sharp solid metal objects travelling through brains at 3000 km/h"
We can see geography invariance, viz. WeChat, TikTok existing in China where facebook, twitter are not allowed to exist. If these didn't exist, something else would.
Scale might have begun with printed books. One author writes something, that is printed as many times as the market demands it. She does not have to lift her pen again. And with her grand success, other authors have to find jobs being private tutors of children of barons and dukes and such or finding adjuct roles in community colleges in modern times. Hell, there is even competition with dead people in this trade.
But accountants, devs, barbers don't have to face this.
And, I am not supporting this. I know that these girls should not have to face this. But eliminating social media is not the answer, but having better interests is. (This reeks of snobbery and privilege, I know.)
Almost all teenager girls I know or knew, did not feel this way for social media. Because they have/had better things to do in life. They were busy with ballet, prep school, volunteering, math clubs, music class, etc. So, there is also a socio-economic aspect to it.
As a heterosexual male, I never conformed with the mainstream beauty standards. I, and hence my potential and past partners did not have to face the bad side of scale.
I also actively, regularly listen to young pianists on Twitch and donate to them, rather than some decades old recordings (better, too) I could find for free on YouTube or Spotify.
I see it this way- scale is inevitable, and even desirable (one girl makes 3000 girls jealous instead of 30; one Physics teacher teaches 300 girls instead of 30- who otherwise would not have access to one- scale is not evil in itself), but you can bypass its effects if you properly want.
Unrealistic and manipulated portraits of models in media (as well as treatment of said models) leading to body imaging issues already was a problem in my teens, way before FB/Instagram.
If there is one company and product to blame, it's Adobe Photoshop.
> We can only blame scale. Some things are much more scalable than others, and "beauty" scales. And the "occurrence of beauty" does, too.
I think over the next few generations we're going to see humankind adapting to what it means to live with near-infinite scale on all things digital. I don't know what that will look like, but I do hope it works out for the better.
That's very convenient for the execs and shareholders at Facebook and Twitter.
Remove this metric and you remove the major gamification/psychological element.
The newspapers regularly printed pictures of women considered beautiful according to the beauty standards of that time.
That propagated that standard even more widely.
And people could easily compare those traits with the traits they saw in the women they knew, and women did feel bad about not looking like the woman in the newspaper.
This is old.
So, even if we make non-algorithmic, time-based feeds, this problem cannot be fully gotten rid of.
Perhaps I would agree with you that I don't blame Facebook for the root problem here. After all, it's been around a lot longer than Facebook.
However, Facebook is actively providing the scale you're talking about. They are an accelerant. Not only that, they're making absolutely wild amounts of money while they do so. So, they have an opportunity and the resources to offset the damage done by the scale they profit from. But they have zero interest in doing so. I most definitely blame them for that.
Everyone makes money by pulling a magic lever that hurts other people. Apple pulls their slave labor lever to make a new iPhone, Facebook holds down their 'moderate content' key until their employees start falling apart, and Microsoft occasionally pulls the 'fuck it, ship it' lever to the chagrin of millions of Windows users. There's always a bigger fish, and sometimes that fish is more shareholders, not more consumers.
I despise Facebook, and they're almost certainly the most evil FAANG member. But at this point, it's nothing more than par for the course. Facebook is in glib obedience of every 3-letter-agency in every country, everywhere. Blaming Facebook for the behavior that everyone practices in the Fortune 500 is a little misguided.
You think Facebook specifically crafts algorithms to make teen girls self-conscious...?
Much like tobacco companies knew that their product was doing exceptional damage to their users lungs, and clearly didn't care either.
[1]: They know that because they are quoted in the original article saying that- that Instagram seems to be worse than Snapchat and Tik-Tok for the psyche's of their users. They seem to be taking steps to try and rectify that, but they seem very small, in proportion to the damage that they are inflicting.
Here's a theory that's nearly guaranteed to land me in hot water:
Why are young girls so awful to each other? I don't think it's unreasonable to suspect that is has to do with "hormones," new emotions, and new social awareness, etc. But, it's also the case that from a strictly evolutionary perspective, young girls are are the most fertile and therefore the most desirable. This will decline over time, and sharply as women enter their 30s, 40s, and 50s. Perhaps there's an evolutionary reason why young girls work so hard to identity and sideline any competition? If this is the period of their life where they are the most desirable, there might be an evolutionary benefit to be the most cut-throat when it comes to vying for the best mating opportunities.
A few caveats:
- Hopefully I don't have to explain that evolutionary impulses are not the same as desirable or positive social values.
- Nor are evolutionary impulses immutable, or always expressed in the same way. (for example, sports are often observed as a peaceful replacement for warring city states.)
- Further, I'm definitely aware that evolutionary psychology can sound very reasonable while being perfectly rubbish and unscientific. There are plenty of people who say things like "because hunter-gathers experienced X," that explains "dubious trend which I have anecdotally observed." Even in the case where an evolutionary psychology explanation may happen to be correct, it remains difficult to prove or test.
There are elements of addiction at work here, too, but if social media was a net negative it wouldn't be as sticky as it is now. People are obviously getting something they want from it.
[1] - Guanlin Wang, Minxuan Cao, Justina Sauciuvenaite, Ruth Bissland, Megan Hacker, Catherine Hambly, Lobke M. Vaanholt, Chaoqun Niu, Mark D. Faries, & John R. Speakman (2018). Different impacts of resources on opposite sex ratings of physical attractiveness by males and females. Evolution and Human Behavior, 39(2), 220-225. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10905...
First, young boys are certainly competitive with each other. Bullying is largely about social status, and social status is the main predictor for mate choice.
Second, male attractiveness does not follow the same pattern. Yes, sperm quality does degrade with age, but that decline is nowhere near as sharp as the decline in a woman's reproductive health. Not only will their eggs run out, but their chance of surviving childbirth drops sharply with age. Remember, we're not talking about western societies with modern medicine, but evolutionary imperatives which would have developed prior to any sort of antibiotics, pain killers, C-sections, etc.
Third, male attractiveness is strongly correlated with access to status and resources. Which young men almost universally don't have. (although young men may show traits which indicate potential future access to status and resources: intelligence, drive, assertiveness, popularity, etc.) However, an older man (30s-40s) still has very healthy sperm, and may have proven access to status and resources, which is nearly universally considered attractive.
So, I don't think it's fair to claim that male attractiveness declines over time an sort of the same way as female attractiveness. (Once again, from a strictly evolutionary perspective.)
Maestripieri, Dario et al. "A greater decline in female facial attractiveness during middle age reflects women’s loss of reproductive value". Frontiers in Psychology 5. (2014): 179. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.0017...
I never knew (and still, don't know) to what degree this trait is actually universal. (ie, perhaps it's just a weird quirk of teen magazines in the last 30 years) Do you have links to that study or anything like it? I'd like to check it out.
Teenage girls are predisposed to behave in the way described, and Facebook/Instagram is profiting by exploiting that. Nothing about the explanation above is blaming them. If anything the comment makes a stronger case for Facebook's actions being immoral.
Has this been studied, or are we taking an arbitrary thought experiment as a foundational axiom?
Facebook is immorally exploiting that stress.
In all societies across time? Or just in American High schools and on Instagram?
Observer expectations can be really strong.
For example, does sugar make kids hyperactive? No real evidence for it (last I checked). But widely believed as fact.
I sometimes wonder how these people would have survived at parties or social gatherings before the Internet when you couldn't just whip out your phone, spend 2 minutes not talking to anyone, click on the first Google search result, and then proclaiming "um acksually..."
That said, the error I see more commonly is that the observation is perfectly valid, (or at least roughly valid) but the explanation is poor. People believe in the explanation because they feel so strongly about the observation. This is a fallacy I see over and over again. (and is often something I've seen leveraged in scams: "You've all experienced X. Here are some emotional stories about X. Now let me tell you how I have all the answers to X.")
I've tried to make it clear that my idea is not proven, but is something that I think is reasonable, and will hopefully lead to an interesting discussion. I'm definitely not suggesting that I have access to the truth, or that my idea is fact simply because I've explained something using scientific terms.
How could the words "I don't think it's unreasonable to suspect..." not be considered blaming them? There is definitely some nuance here (I don't think the parent comment is hard-lining to say that the victims here are 100% to blame), but they are most certainly associating some level of blame to teens and their inherent "predisposed" behavior as you say.
And it's really pretty clear that Facebook didn't create any of these problems and that removing it won't solve them. Facebook makes it easier for girls to bully each other in the same way that relaxed gun laws make it easier for criminals to shoot people. Or, as Londoners will tell you: "you can't solve knife crime by taking away people's knives".
The fact that Facebook profits from the issue doesn't make it their fault unless you can prove that they actively seek to make it worse. And even then, they can only carry the blame proportional to how much they made it worse.
A little O/T, but this trope needs to please stop.
The places with the highest gun crimes are also the places with the toughest gun laws. It should go without saying that criminals without definition would not care about laws.
It's not about criminals not caring about the law. Shooting people is already illegal. It's about making it more difficult to access and acquire these weapons. If you can't access something, it is much more difficult to use.
the link you posted does not oppose it as the other comment pointed out.
I hope you will keep an open mind as you look into this, setting aside the agendas of the NRA or the anti-gun groups.
When there is an item (gun, in this instance) which has both good and bad uses ( what they are, we are reasonably argue) -- there needs to be a balance in how the item is procured.
Nowhere in the country does one just go and pick one up. There are (again, we can argue on what is reasonable) checks and balances - checking the person's track history etc.
All this goes out the window when it is possible to skirt the law, or in the case of London, use knives instead of guns for the crimes.
We need to solve the problem at the right level of abstraction.
We need to focus on why the society today sees more shootings in the past decades when the guns have been existing for much longer.
Only in America. Other western nations have tough gun laws and also low gun crime, because you can't hop in your car and pick up a gun in a neighbouring state.
And actually the correlation is only seen in parts of America. New York City has tough gun laws, comparatively low gun crime and a lower homicide rate per capita than the rest of the country.
Time and time again people say "tough gun laws lead to more gun crime" but really they mean "in a country where it's really really easy to buy guns, we mostly see the negative impact of gun ownership in high-density poor neighbourhoods".
You can’t do this in America either. You can only buy guns legally in your state of residence.
If someone is willing to buy a gun illegally, they don’t need to go out of state.
The claim that this is because people can drive to others states is false.
For everyone else, how available they are depends on where you live.
For the law abiding, that’s not true in places where you need a license just to buy one such as NYC, or in CA where most handguns and many rifles are not available.
Big claims require some big evidence. In the UK there are strict controls on gun ownership and we have virtually no crimes carried out with legal guns, and more but still very few with illegal ones. Can you give some counter examples?
And I can't really agree with your assertion either. See stats in [0] and a gun law map in [1]. At best it's a correlation without causation, but the correlation certainly isn't the inverse as you suggest.
I also don't see how it's not a relevant example - it's Thing A making Thing B worse, but Thing B would still happen without Thing A and so Thing A can't be blamed for Thing B. Regardless of whether the underlying assertion is correct (less gun control leading to more gun crime), the logic is valid.
[0] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/gun-death... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overview_of_gun_laws_by_nation
That is, tough gun laws are enacted exactly because of a high rate of gun crime?
And of course those tougher laws can have at best a mild moderating effect when guns can freely enter that area with the tougher gun laws from other areas that do not have them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-r...
Anyone, at any time, can stop using Facebook or Instagram with 0 repercussions.
This has been ingrained in us for millions of years yet people act like a few decades of social upheaval will change this.
yea this random comment on a random tech site about evolutionary biology passes the smell test why? oh is it because of preconceived notions and biases rather than rigorous argumentation (i.e. well cited and published research)? hmmm
For the record - I believe in capitalism generally, I just think the incarnation of capitalism on social media is particularly damaging. The free market has produced a product like big Tobacco did.
Visual and maybe hormonal attractiveness may change over time with other mammals too, but not actual numeric quantity of eggs. (I'm not sure if there is broad enough data on egg viability across all mammals though, but the fixed quantity and therefore approximate time period of fertility is more easily seen)
Given that this variable is the different one, the differences in human populations (ie. the competition for being chosen) really should be evaluated with this aspect weighted more heavily.
Game theory.
And now that I think about it even more, I really have no idea of what I'm talking about. Most of the time that I've been mean to people, when I was younger, it was basically because I was an immature and confused jackass. And, as far as relationships go, who hasn't made a complete ass of theselves at one point or another?
I appreciate the approach, but I do think it is probably (as you yourself warned) a "just so" story.
Teenaged girls can be mean. Teenaged boys can be mean. Adults can be mean. Members of all of these groups can be nice, sometimes transcendently kind. These behaviors can be explained without reference to ancient drives to fertility and mating, I think.
We humans are apes and, so, teenaged girls are apes. Apes are obsessed with hierarchy, status and sex. That doesn't change because we communicate using abstract symbols over a ridiculously innovative invention.
Note: I am not arguing one way or the other here. Obviously there is competition for mates among human beings. What I'm suggesting is that we be careful when drawing on evolutionary explanations flippantly and simplistically. Lord knows that e.g. "evolutionary psychology" (which this would fall under) is packed with just-so stories.
I think this has to be admitted, and that any explanation based on evolutionary psychology should be viewed more skeptically than other arguments. However, I think it's absolutely true that genetics do influence our psychology to some degree. And so, there must be some evolutionary psychology claims which can be said to be true. At a very high, and very basic level, some are so self-evident that no one bothers to make them: ie, that sexual attraction exists, is a strong motivator for most people, and must have a basis in evolutionary fitness. Obviously things can get more murky when you want to discuss behaviors with more nuance or complexity. Further, even when a claim is probably true it's quite hard to actually test in a scientific manner. You can isolate the behavior, but not the explanation. How can you truly prove that a behavior is caused by evolution rather than social pressure?
That said, I don't think the whole field can be thrown out, despite your accurate claim that the field can be a bit of a mess.
Raspberry pis are computers and, so, raspberry pi picos are computers. Raspberry pis, and picos especially, are obsessed with computation related to hobby projects. This doesn't change because computers can technically compute anything.
Is what people are "horrified" by the dangerous facts you spill, or the fact that your analysis here completely misses the point when we talk about social media and interventions aimed at curbing their tremendously negative impact.
Also i don’t think most teenage girls act like “Mean Girls” in real life. I was once in school and I have a teenage sister. Many girls like to post instagrams and tiktoks to get likes and follows, but they’re not cutthroat about it and the girls are sympathetic to each other.
The places where girls are backstabbing each other, are probably the same places where guys are fighting each other.
Does this make it acceptable that a corporation like Facebook exploits this tendency for profit? Should we not recognize this vulnerability and protect our children against it?
Why does this conversation always have to exclusively revolve around how young girls treat each other? Young boys are awful to young girls. Women and men are awful to young girls. The question you should be asking is why do we as a society tolerate people (of any age and any gender!) being so awful to girls?
The article is about Facebook, the company. Facebook isn’t run by young girls. And yet many comments in this thread are focused not on Facebook’s responsibility to (and profiteering from the exploitation of) girls mental health and are instead focused on blaming the girls themselves.
Seems more than a little backwards to me.
Since this article is talking about young girls, the interest is in behaviors and interventions that would be more impactful for young girls, as a population, than other groups.
It’s not blaming young girls to develop interventions that work to help based on the common characteristics. Nor is it blaming African Americans to study and create specific diabetes interventions to address the specific risks of that subpopulation. It’s not African Americans fault that they have higher diabetes and different characteristics of the disease and they shouldn’t be blamed for this condition. But to help, creating customized interventions will be more effective.
I would think it bad if there were only specialized interventions and no one address other parts of the population.
But what I’m saying is this behavior isn’t “peculiar“ among these groups at all. It’s the same. Yet we only seem to talk about how it happens amongst young girls and ignore how the behavior is frequently directed towards them as well.
This was referenced in the article for how Facebook knew it’s stuff affected girls differently than boys.
I’ve read a lot [1] on how social media, in particular, disproportionately negatively impacts girls.
I don’t think we only talk about this, but because it is more significant it comes up more, I think.
Again, I don’t think this is a reason to blame girls or individual girls, since much of the bullying is not caused or targeted to girls. But it affects girls differently.
[0] https://www.pacer.org/bullying/info/stats.asp
[1] https://time.com/5650266/social-media-girls-mental-health/
Plus, Facebook is indeed a harmful product for society at large (like cigarettes), and often has bigger negative impacts on younger users (again like cigarettes).
The combination of these is obviously bad...but Facebook knowing it and hiding the fact is very much (again) like what tobacco companies did.
I don't see why this is relevant (if it's even true). The article barely talks about bullying or girls being awful to each other. It more broadly talks about people spending hours in their feeds comparing themselves to what they see and feeling bad about it, which seems like a very different problem.
I scoffed. I scoffed for a long time. But there is an uncomfortable kernel to her statement that I have seen again and again, long before social media, in young women and their constant status hierarchy struggles, and Mean Girls wasn't even the first time it was made too evident. I would point to Heathers and Carrie as even earlier examples. Teenage girls are vicious with one another's emotions and friendships, trusts and secrets, in a way that boys and men rarely get a glimpse of.
Heathers was a movie also about an abusive sociopathic male engineering the deaths of his classmates in an act of petty rebellion against his abusive sociopathic father who killed his mother.
Anyone that tells you that 'All {men,women} do is about {power,sex,men,women}'. is just telling on themselves and their social group specifically.
On the first and second statement, lesbians the world over would like a word.
If you want to ask about these things, you first should first ask to anthropology how teen girls behave in different cultures before jumping to biological explanations.
We'd want to measure things like "stress" or "anxiety" rather than simply meanness, it's possible this trend is not always expressed through cruelty. (notably, the facebook article suggests explicitly that it's not.)
I think in general the idea of leveraging sociology and anthropology in these cases is perfectly sound. If this only happened in America, I think there'd be a good argument that there is not a genetic component. (or perhaps, that there is a genetic component which is only activated in some contexts.)
One point I'd like to push back on is something I observed when studying anthropology in college. (and to be clear and fair, I am not suggesting that you have pushed this point of view.) Evidence of a single and rare outlier would be brought forward as proof that a set of behaviors did not have an evolutionary basis. Usually this was taken even further: if an outlier could be found, then the entire trait was completely socially constructed. Evolution affects behavior for certain, but these are experienced as drives an impulses which get filtered through the mind, the contextual social, and more. So, if a behavior is very broadly expressed cross-culturally, it is reasonable to suspect there is an evolutionary component to it. (of course this alone does not prove it.) If the outlier scenarios are sufficiently rare, this is likely proof that although there is an evolutionary basis for the behavior, they are not set in stone, and can be suppressed by the right circumstances.
What is the shape of evolution? Many believe the shape of evolution to be a line of deterministic "progress" with a forward and a backward movement that may be accelerated.
Maybe evolution is a process which we are unconsciously subject to and consciously participate in forming. It seems directors, managers, and other employees working for Facebook may be more conscious of the role the Facebook systems play in social, psychological, and evolutionary processes, and the outcomes the systems grow.
I don't think this is correct. At least this is not a definition of evolution that I've ever seen reproduced. If anything, biologists I've read point to views such as this a misconception which must be corrected.
Dawkins is mostly talking about evolution and creationism in "The Blind Watchmaker," (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blind_Watchmaker) but I think it applies here as well: evolution is not guided, and there is no progress in the human sense of the word. ie, people are not "more evolved" than our ancestors. We have different adaptations which might be better (or worse) suited for certain evolutionary challenges. If the evolutionary pressures lined up properly, we could easily evolve to be more similar to other mammals. (ie, some people would call that "devolve.")
We need fewer systems that put children (especially younger children) in situations where they are primarily interacting with and modeling the behavior of other children. This includes both our education and digital social systems.
Some children have active and involved home and family lives. This helps. Some get more favorable interactions and time with teachers, this can help. Some find positive models in media (books and movies) and can help, but media is often negative.
We already know this is a vulnerable group, and that teen girls have tendencies to compare themselves with peers. Putting a 24/7 stream of perfect, curated, retouched posts from friends in front of all of them seems obviously not ideal.
edit: I may be giving a gut reaction to seeing up-voted amateur evolutionary psychology
> Adolescent mothers (ages 10–19 years) face higher risks of eclampsia, puerperal endometritis, and systemic infections than women aged 20 to 24 years, and babies of adolescent mothers face higher risks of low birth weight, preterm delivery and severe neonatal conditions. (4)
And just because you might be in the "peak fertility" period doesn't mean you should rush to have children. If you are not ready for kids, they will suffer for it, and none of the girls I knew who got pregnant in high school were mature enough to handle a child and finish school (much less the fathers), so their parents and grandparents had to step in and do most of the parenting.
These kinds of discussions, especially combined with the evolutionary biology pseudoscience, really remind me of the way incel forums talk about women. Especially with the interesting absence of any mention of men's fertility, which also peaks around 30. [0]
[0]: https://www.bumc.bu.edu/busm/2013/07/02/fertility-peaks-arou...
[1]: https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/adolescent-...
You've based your analysis on a comedy you saw in the 2000s that in turn based itself on the experiences of white affluent American teenagers.
The second leg of your analysis is not grounded in an understanding of actual female biology.
The one 'fact' you cite is wrong, 'young girls' are not the most fertile, the range for peak fertility for women is from their very late teens (18-19) to late 20s. The majority peaks in their early to mid 20s (~24 years old).
If you want to comment about how women and men function 'evolutionarily', please at least understand a bit about how human biology works right now.
I like to think of it more as "presenting the details of my argument clearly so that they can be discredited if I've made an error.," rather than "navel gazing." Of course, there is nothing wrong with criticizing ideas, and so thank you for your response.
I don't know that I have a direct counterpoint to your claim, and it might be that my argument is irreparably harmed. I might still wonder that this is still wrapped up in evolutionary psychology, as it seems to be related to the onset of puberty. So, perhaps my idea still plays a role in what's going on here, even if it is not the primary role. (ie, perhaps it's one of many factors at play. Women could still be quite invested their sexual prospects shortly before they hit their peak fertility.)
I suppose my question for you would be, what do you think about all this? Do you believe that young girls are affected differently than young boys by social media? If so, do you believe this relies on a psychological tendency which existed prior to social media? If so, do you believe there's any evolutionary component to it, or do you believe there's some other explanation?
Yes.
Women are taught from a young age how they must act, dress, etc. What they should look like, that they should fit into a size 0, be <100 lbs, start counting calories when they hit puberty, etc.
Keep in mind that every attempt at a teenage boy's magazine has flopped, while teenage girl's magazines (at least until the decline of magazines and print media more generally) were quite popular. And this is in large part because there are a lot of expectations placed on girls that were never placed on guys, so these magazines helped guide a lot of young women through puberty (whether they guided them well is a matter for another discussion entirely, but they certainly did hold a lot of influence).
While there certainly are images of the ideal man that societies have held up over time, they don't have the same weight as expectations for women. If you have a dad bod, nobody is going to be glaring at you at the beach for showing it off, whispering about how "un-masculine" you look, that you need to show a little modesty, but a woman who goes to the beach with hairy legs will absolutely be subject to comments about how un-ladylike you are and that you look "masculine," even though body hair is entirely natural.
But it's not just when you're at the beach, and it's not just leg hair - it's everywhere, about everything, and it starts very early on. It's your parents telling you, advertisements and Hollywood reinforcing it, being told by your teachers you should be more feminine, your pastor saying that your outfit isn't "appropriate" for Sunday school (because it's not a dress), random men saying you should lose some weight... it never ends.
So while men are definitely having more body issues these days, it's nowhere near the same extent. Social media helps to reinforce societal beauty standards that have been taught to us all our lives.
> If so, do you believe this relies on a psychological tendency which existed prior to social media? If so, do you believe there's any evolutionary component to it, or do you believe there's some other explanation?
Not any innate tendency but just being beaten down until you conform. The advent of social media didn't magically erase the expectations we place on women, instead it became another place for reinforcing them.
> Women could still be quite invested their sexual prospects shortly before they hit their peak fertility.
I am single and have no desire to have kids despite being in "peak fertility." I am also not actively seeking out a partner. I'm not opposed to dating, it's just more convenient for me not to at the moment.
This is entirely anecdotal, but of my friends who do want kids, they don't really think about "oh god gotta find a mate and have kids I'm about to turn 26." They're more interested in finding the right person first, especially since we have so many fertility treatment options today (and having kids has gotten more expensive than ever). Having kids when you're not ready is generally a bad idea, and I hope I don't have to explain why.
"I might still wonder that this is still wrapped up in evolutionary psychology"
is a more useful frame of reference than, say, a model of addiction: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w28936/w289...
Do we gain any explanatory power by adding untestable hypotheses to the existing body of work about how society constructs /impossible to realize/ standards for both boys and girls.
To your question, yes, girls and boys are socialized differently in our culture, and thus they will be exposed to different social media, pressures, and expectations from the moment they are born. However, I don't think you need to immediately reach for evolutionary psychology to explain this.
The underlying pressure, in my view, is the pressure to sell objects that relieve the dissonance that 'influencers' and ad writers amplify.
Evolution certainly made us (regardless of gender) susceptible to this kind of influence, but culture determines which of our insecurities weaponized and how.
See also: brain pills, protein, and cars for predominantly male audiences.
Would these same kinds of pressures have existed in the tribal circumstances under which we evolved? Sure, but they'd have been way way way less potent.
I also don't think evo psych tells us that our current societal structures are pre-determined or inevitable. If anything, we've been taught again that human brains are remarkably flexible and even relatively light social pressure from social media can cut against the grain of other fundamental biological tendencies, like self-preservation.
Now there's similar issue with male body image, but somehow that's even more extreme (visible six pack abs with single digit body fat), thus boys will think its not achivable without 8 hour workout a day and not bother, whereas for girls it seems like contemporary female body image is perfectly achivable to them or their peers and they lose sleep over it.
I still believe that ranking/recommendation models should be open, parents/individuals should have -at least- the choice to make these algorithms less harmful.
Today, we don't know how social media recommend posts to us, we don't know if it is biased, or good for some sub communities. There are [1] some engineering blogs where we can see that is based on some research ideas (e.g. embeddings) are prune to bias [3] and "rich gets richer" phenomena. There should be an open marketplace where institutes/researchers submit open & explainable ranking/recommender systems. This is how you democratize access to such social platforms, but the business model opposes such idea to make it reality. There is a large body of research in the area of explainable recommendation systems/Explainable AI. There are regulations today to use Explainable AI systems in healthcare field, but few of them in areas that impact our mental health (e.g. the use of Social Media).
[1]: https://ai.facebook.com/blog/powered-by-ai-instagrams-explor...
[2]: Explainable Recommendation: A Survey and New Perspective, https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.11192
No one is debating the challenges of coming of age in the age of the Internet. I'd disagree that its entirely FB's fault as if the rest of society, kids and parents alike, lack all agency to make sound choices - that they must passively consume and be consumed by all that FB offers... or that theses sorts of problems are best addressed by literally legislating morality.
Its convenient and easy to hate FB; expedient, really...
For reasons too personal to put here, I've been pretty depressed and dysfunctional lately and I've unintentionally discovered the experience of doomscrolling. The output of the instagram algorithm is absolutely terrifying. It has the perfect metrics (swipe time, profile browsing, etc etc) to prey on every impulse inside of you and to send you the perfect cocktail of content to feed those impulses. Fear, doubts, wants, etc. etc. are all inputs to the algorithm and the output is content that makes you feel those things more.
I have to wonder if this type of media is similar to magazines on steroids, or other pulp media of the bygone era. No one here makes this comparison so maybe I'm off base but I do often if I'm scrolling through the worst possible version of a home produced checkout-aisle magazine.
EDIT:
I appreciate the comments that make this personal and are trying to help, but my instagram problem will be fixed when I manage to fix my real life problems... a much bigger task. My point is to highlight that the algorithm can suck anyone in, not just teen girls. They just happen to be the most vulnerable.
I was getting hella bikini girls for a while but a few "not interested" and they are all gone. Now my feed is just people I know and my explore page is entirely almost woodworking content with a little bit of car stuff or travel stuff.
I think of it like reddit. The front page or all of reddit is absolute hot garbage that seems intentionally made to be divisive politically at this point (even on non political subreddits), but I also have a curated part of reddit with my woodworking and programming and video game hobbies i can browse happily.
> For reasons too personal to put here, I've been pretty depressed and dysfunctional lately and I've unintentionally discovered the experience of doomscrolling.
I never check the Instagram discover tab and I don’t feel like I’m missing anything. For me, Instagram has been a good tool for keeping in touch with friends as we all move around the country. If someone starts posting memes or content I don’t want to see, I use the Instagram mute function on their stories or posts. I can catch up on everything I want to see on Instagram in about 5-10 minutes per day and then I’m done.
Obviously, not everyone has the same experience with Instagram that I do. But by the same token, not everyone has the same experience with Instagram that you do.
If someone is unable to control their compulsion to “doom scroll” and setting limits on app usage isn’t working, I think deleting the app or the account is a good solution.
I had some friends go through similar problems with Netflix: They insisted Netflix was evil because they couldn’t control their usage and were staying up until 2AM every night watching shows. Meanwhile, they couldn’t understand how I managed to watch one episode and be done.
Same story with alcohol: I can have one drink and be done or decline to drink at all. Yet I have friends who find themselves drinking to excess every time they’re around alcohol. Interestingly, the demonization of alcohol is almost taboo despite arguably causing more damage than products like social media. No one has ever died from social media withdrawal, but alcohol has massive negative effects on addicts.
> I have to wonder if this type of media is similar to magazines on steroids, or other pulp media of the bygone era
Definitely. Even if we could make Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter disappear tomorrow, the people who struggle to control their compulsions would quickly find the next thing to fill their time. The only sustainable solution I see is more education about responsible consumption and taking accountability for time management. Not an easy thing to do, but it’s the only lasting solution I can see.
I never have an Instagram account, and never see the need to create one.
I had a Facebook account, but I deleted it years ago. Problem solved.
Some people never start smoking and never have a nicotine addiction problem. Some people smoke a few times or even occasionally but don't pick up a habit. Some people get addicted but manage to quit easily, some manage to quit after many attempts. Some can't quit ever, but we don't tell them that they just need to try harder or they shouldn't have started smoking in the first place.
Try quitting smoking or drinking in a place where it's socially expected to do one of these, and you'll be quite close to how difficult it's for someone to quit social media in a society where using social media is the social norm.
I think it's fair to describe social media as addicting, but it's not the same thing as a chemical addiction where one can experience physical dependency and withdrawals. "Just quit" really is a valid solution, the reality is that most people just prefer to complain about social media rather than accept that they are responsible for how they spend their time.
Do it. You're not missing out on anything but happiness.
Disclaimer: I work for Facebook.
In actuality, though, as much as I think it's obvious that Instagram was designed specifically for the mindset of teens (and incidentally the countless with Peter Pan syndrome), it's too easy for us to simply blame Facebook. We are also responsible for raising our children to a certain level of emotional maturity and ego awareness, which I believe isn't necessarily a solution but may prevent some from getting sucked into the void of social media. My parent's generation pretty much failed at achieving that with their children, and their children haven't done much better with theirs. Maybe it's an overreliance on institutions which has made us complacent and often careless; as a society we seem to only react to problems rather than be proactive, acting like a deer in the headlights long after the symptoms of the illness have manifested.
But what if facebook, instagram, youtube etc. are actually harmful? What if modern pop culture is toxic trash compared to that of the previous decades? What if popular music has, in fact, been getting worse?
“Some Instagram researchers said it was challenging to get other colleagues to hear the gravity of their findings. Plus, “We’re standing directly between people and their bonuses,” one former researcher said.”
“Facebook executives have struggled to find ways to reduce Instagram’s harm while keeping people on the platform, according to internal presentations on the topic.”
Sums up the problem succinctly. Attack the revenue if you want results, legislation is the only tool we have to truly compel and affect change in a company that willfully ignores the societal harms they are uniquely perpetuating at scale to dizzying public health epidemic levels (population level mental health decline across demographics, Facebook echo chambers radicalizing people and affecting voting/eroding democracy, etc.)
Enough is enough.
Imagine working overtime for months, saving money, paying for a hotel room at some seaside vacation place, travel in a shitty plane and in a shitty buy to that location, be tired, sleep the first of the three nights there on a shitty bed, eat shitty breakfast, go to the shitty with sewer flowing into the water 100m away...
...and then you take out your camera, pull in your stomach hard, pose in a way that hides body imperfections, hold in your hand a really shitty cocktail, that you paid half your days spending budget for, be carfeul to frame in a way, that the sewer is not visible, and click...
...you now have a perfect photo of someone enjoying their perfect vacation on the beach, drinking a good looking cocktail, enjoying themselves. Maybe even more than one, so you can post them even after you've gone back home.
And what do the viewers who of course follow hundreds of people see? A bunch of happy people, enojing their lives, while they "slave away" at their shitty jobs.
No wonder people get depressed.
> They came to the conclusion that some of the problems were specific to Instagram, and not social media more broadly. That is especially true concerning so-called social comparison, which is when people assess their own value in relation to the attractiveness, wealth and success of others.
> “Social comparison is worse on Instagram,” states Facebook’s deep dive into teen girl body-image issues in 2020, noting that TikTok, a short-video app, is grounded in performance, while users on Snapchat, a rival photo and video-sharing app, are sheltered by jokey filters that “keep the focus on the face.” In contrast, Instagram focuses heavily on the body and lifestyle. The features that Instagram identifies as most harmful to teens appear to be at the platform’s core.
> The tendency to share only the best moments, a pressure to look perfect and an addictive product can send teens spiraling toward eating disorders, an unhealthy sense of their own bodies and depression, March 2020 internal research states. It warns that the Explore page, which serves users photos and videos curated by an algorithm, can send users deep into content that can be harmful.
> “Aspects of Instagram exacerbate each other to create a perfect storm,” the research states.
Keeping up with the joneses and in vs out cliques in school are bad enough things that get amplified multiple times perhaps orders of magnitude more in a setting that promotes and encourages negative social behavior.
It almost validates the attitudes of anti socials.
And these are grown ass adults, so god knows how the kids deal with it. One thing I’ll say is that other people have a way of smushing this info in your face regardless of what era. They managed to do it when it was just rotary phones, and they’ll manage to do it now with whatever the internet has. In fact, the real interesting one is when someone delivers food to you in jubilation. They will manage to rub it in your face, so Instagram is at the very least an asynchronous form of showing off that you can try to avoid.
Reminds me of something..
> It Is Difficult to Get a Man to Understand Something When His Salary Depends Upon His Not Understanding It
Ah that’s it. Tried and trued. Interesting story of the quote here:
I just logged into my Instagram. I saw a guy fixing an old "roundie" television set, someone baking food, some through-the-microscope photos of soldering surface-mount components by hand, a home-made 3D printer, and a couple of clips from musicians. What am I missing here?
I speak to a lot of folks in certain religious circles about it. A lot of the things the Church is typically against seems to be perpetuated by it--suicide, pornography, materialism. This is the same group of people that were vocally against rock music, drinking, sex, and D&D at various times in the past. The reaction seems to be "yeah, social media sucks" returns to scrolling on phone. My guess is that it's now such a foundational part of modern culture that it's impossible to avoid. It'd be like trying to live without automobiles, which requires an almost monastic dedication to the cause.
I don't understand why the school does not just ban them and discourage usage.
If we want to change the use of social media in teenagers and younger, we as parents have a responsibility to control access to these kind of sites and the internet in general.
https://jacquesmattheij.com/the-social-media-problem/
Which has a bit of a different angle, but my conclusion is that social media as a tool can be useful but that in the aggregate right now it is a serious problem for which we are ill prepared as society.
Banning pretty girls?
Allowing pretty girls but banning ridiculously-hot girls?
Banning photos shot from balcony of tropical hotels?
Quite seriously, I don't see how to put the toothpaste back in on this.
But that Facebook is aware of it and is investigating further I think is all that is noteworthy here; it's not like they are accused of using this data and attempting to make Instagram more toxic for teen girls, which would be a much more shocking allegation.
The idea that we (humans) can engineer engagement somehow is a misguided one; we stumble upon things and try to optimize things, but we don't have a theory of human behavior that will naturally give us concepts like this -- it's not even clear that such a thing could exist in any generality anyway, and if we had it, then it would naturally become ineffective because everyone would use it.
From conspiracy theories to depression it seems like Social Media can be a deranging influence. Maybe we can make it more like Coffee, but simple algorithmic goals like 'engagement' or 'watch time' seem to engage with our worst impulses.
“ a thing that one knows or considers likely from instinctive feeling rather than conscious reasoning.”
Part of wisdom is being able to apply knowledge in new situations, and this is the basis of intuition. Intuition is wisdom in action, and we ignore our intuitions as people and as societies at our peril, both in our personal lives and in business.
Things we know instinctively are frequently wrong. It leads to us discarding any information that goes against our intuitive beliefs. It leads to use thinking that anyone who disagrees with us is mentally deficient.
Guard against this whenever possible.
Of course...it would have been much harder for me to absorb those life lessons if my parents did those things they told me were harmful. If dad got loaded and drove around, or if mom shot up smack, it would have compromised me avoiding those things by following their example. It's tough to tell your kid to avoid social media when they watch their parent mindlessly entranced by it. Do the right thing there, remind your children that what 'Joe Influencer' or 'Jane Fashionista' thinks doesn't fucking matter. There are attention seeking idiots all around us, but they exist in spectacular high volume on social media.
tldr; parent your children to avoid social media, there is limited upside and infinite downside. This may mean not scrolling meme's all night on your phone while your kid does their homework - but you can do it.
Harder said than done though.
A lot of engineers have to spend a lot of time in order to make something like this a reality. Sometimes I like to think that we’re “better” (morally) than that trope of the growth-obsessed exec who’s willing to exploit kids for an extra 5% revenue in the quarter. People will be people no matter the job title, I suppose
It's hard to raise kids, it's hard to be a parent, it's very hard to raise a good kid.
It's always been like that, just amplified by a factor of 100k with apps being with you at all times.
Kids are easy impressed by superficial things, try your best so your kid does not fall victim to this. Not by censorship, that will have adversarial effects.
It's ultimately the parents' responsibility to shield their kids from society to a degree they deem appropriate. Not only to provide a healthy physical environment but also a digital one. And this until their personality develop and crystallize.
In this case, it may involve limiting the amount of time spent on social media. And sit downs to discuss the fakery and deception involved.
The constant craving for likes that eventually turns into craving for attention can't be good.
Does any major government fund public research into social media addiction in the youth?
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/03/160301103108.h...
2) How the development of the prefrontal cortex affects decision making is a thoroughly studied topic and it is very clear that decision making ability becomes better as we mature(when looking at a significant population...again there are OBVIOUSLY outliers).
Facebook has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28512121 - Sept 2021 (489 comments)
In the 90's, "cool-hunters" would hire street promoters to hype brands one-on-one, directly to the consumer. These promoters were often friends of the consumers, who essentially became walking adverts for <insert big brand here>. Sounds a bit like the company "Influenceter". It's always been a goal of advertising to capture the minds of the youth culture. Facebook just does it to scale.
I put beauty in quotes because many of those filters are extremely unattractive, making their skin look like plastic and lips look cartoonishly large. Sometimes, they don't even look human. And it baffles me that everyone knows the photos are altered, and yet they somehow expect themselves to look like them.
I know photo editing has been done in marketing for decades, but the biggest difference is that you knew those were professional models and people you'd never meet in real life, but this, this is pervasive down to the level of "normal" people, skewing what "normal" is supposed to be.
And I'm over here thinking "Oh my god this photo is so clearly filtered." The color in her eyes had added saturation, eyebrows filled in, skin tone smoothed out, skin texture basically completely removed...
The worst part is, she's already a nice looking woman. She didn't need the filters. And yet she felt the need to use them anyways.
Yes, if a rigorous study found that social media helped girls, and there were replications of said study, then people would buy that. This is how research works!
Those exogenous compounds bind to endogenous receptors.
Social interactions lead to endogenous release of compounds that bind to endogenous receptors.
A human body limits how much endogenous ligands it produces.
There are different types of limits for exogenous ligands.
We know which one IG represents.
e.g. ‘They will eventually be exposed, ergo it doesn’t matter if they are exposed more.’
This is likely wrong. People that consume more TV media have more body issues and more depression. e.g. In our part of the woods, most of the senior girl’s sports teams are on anti-depression medication.
Unfortunately, that bullying is amplified to incredibly toxic levels online.
I think most would say no, but who knows
Also, Facebook is a case where a somewhat immoral but acceptable behaviour (judging people by their looks) has been warped and focused by technology to such a degree that 1/3 teen girls (and who knows who else) are suffering real effects from it.
1. Teens had their stupid magazines and MTV before this smart phone crap.
2. The media hyped potential problems of "negative self image blah blah blah" exactly as much as now.
3. Nothing happened. It was all concern hype.
The 0.00001%ers are out there, in any realm of life. The genie is out of the bottle and it's not about social media, people are curious about extremely rare things, so they'd be digging them out on blogs and vlogs if social media didn't exist.
The answer to make people feel better isn't to censor the 0.00001%ers but to show them that they are monodimensional individuals who excel at that particular thing and are world class bad at others
See Bill Gates entrepreneurial abilities vs. social skills
Actually, on Instagram, they're not. It's Photoshop.
Also, we should abolish the Forbes rich list, but in a different way and for a different reason. There's a limited amount of resources on the planet, so it shouldn't be allowed for some to have billions while others starve. But that's off-topic here.