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Comment by jhardy54 | Hacker News Reader

> Teenage girls are predisposed to behave in the way described, and Facebook/Instagram is profiting by exploiting that.

Has this been studied, or are we taking an arbitrary thought experiment as a foundational axiom?

It’s kind of amazing to me that an observation that anyone could make based on their experience as a human living on planet earth gets discounted because there isn’t some peer reviewed study from Harvard or whatever that confirms the observation. Young girls are mean to each other, that’s a fact. We don’t need an army of data scientists to “look into it”.

Maybe experience shouldn't be thrown outright, but there is a history of "obvious" stuff that falls apart under scrutiny.

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.

> Young girls are mean to each other, that’s a fact.

In all societies across time? Or just in American High schools and on Instagram?

Experience and observation are a great place to begin an investigation. Of course if you're not careful, they can incorrectly color your results. As you say, anecdotal beliefs are not necessarily facts.

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.

It's a weird phenomenon that's unique to HN. I understand that the idea is to elevate online discussion here, but many do it to such an absurd degree that anything anyone says always has someone asking for a source.

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..."

Facebook studied it internally and covered it up in congressional testimony. That's literally what the article is about

Agreed. SOME may behave this way, but without more info who are we to say that they "are predisposed" in general. Teenage years are very hard for tons of reasons mentioned above and the way people handle those stresses comes down to tons of factors, support systems, upbringing, context, culture, etc.

Facebook is immorally exploiting that stress.

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