Most Canadians believe Facebook harms their mental health
theglobeandmail.com
theglobeandmail.com
> Conducted Oct. 8 to 10, the online poll surveyed 1,545 Canadians and cannot be assigned a margin of error because internet-based polls are not considered random samples.
It's a pretty good sample-size, but we don't get error bars. I don't remember if there was anything FB-critical happening that week (when did the study about teen mental health come out?), but the timeframe could also affect the survey.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sample_(statistics)#Kinds_of_s...
This kind of discourse is annoying.
You don't get "points" for making some hypothetical claim. If you think there is something wrong with an analysis, demonstrate it. Isn't that what "pro-science" people do?
https://leger360.com/surveys/legers-north-american-tracker-o...
Also, the most pertinent question to this discussion is in the post by the polling company I linked to above.
+/- sqrt(p * (1-p) / N)
https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/29641/standard-err...
My guess is the reason for this disclaimer is that it's not a quota sample, it's just literally a completely undirected opt-in survey and there's no reason to believe this is anything resembling a representative sample, probabilistic or not.
Online polls are usually done by letting people opt-in and then sorting and weighting to sample, just like phone polls. The idea though is that because they aren't reached "randomly" in the first place (as they are by war dialing phone numbers for eg.) there's additional sampling biases at play that a margin of error doesn't account for.
Leger is a legitimate polling company in Canada, and I doubt they did it any different from how they do it for election polls. I'm not sure why people are assuming this was just an unweighted facebook poll or something.
But the reality is that "traditional polls" are probably no better because of the extremely high non-response rate these days. Inertia is a thing though.
An article about this subject: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/margin-of-error-debate_n_6565...
Quota-based sampling -- a preferable term to convenience sampling -- (i.e. non-random samples that allow respondents to opt-in but with invitations to opt in extended to a large pool about whom basic information is gathered in advance, with invitations extended in a manner to quota on population weight targets, often with additional post-survey weighting to hit interaction terms in the targets) is non-probabilistic, but its performance is fine -- and indeed given reasonable quotas, the coverage of the classical MOE -- as I said, a conservative normal approximate binomial CI e.g. +- 1.96 * sqrt(0.5 * 0.5 / n) ~= +- 1/sqrt(n) -- is about the same as it is in a probabilistic survey. If your quotas are exactly correct then it's literally the same.
As you allude to by linking that article, sampling error is a small component of the TSE framework. And crucially, both probabilistic and quota-based samples typically do weighting to targets after they get their sample, and neither typically report the design effect (i.e. how the choice to weight affects the sample variance) when reporting results. The choice not to be honest about design effects is a shame of the polling industry. It probably leads to a good deal of "movement" in the polls being completely illusory, which was part of Gelman's point in his earlier writing on the subject.
What I don't understand is why you would report an estimate like this and not attempt to report any uncertainty. The reader is not likely to take away "design-based inference considerations require that we refuse to state a classical MOE representing sampling error on principled grounds", and instead is likely to take away "number in headline = correct".
I don't think that they "just did a dumb Facebook poll". I am concerned that they did not do a defensible quota sample or that they don't have reasonable population weight targets and that may be the cause for the failure to state any measure of uncertainty.
The article you linked is very, very old, reflecting a fear of convenience sampling within AAPOR a decade ago. YouGov more or less won that argument.
I think you are probably right about the poll as well; there's a more specific statement on leger's own release about the poll[1] about methodology and it does seem as if they just pulled people at random from their panel and does not mention weighting them. Which is surprising to me.
[1] https://leger360.com/surveys/legers-north-american-tracker-o...
If you think not reporting error bars is what makes people "lose faith in media brands", you are so far away from reality I'm not sure what to tell you.
But how about you put aside the statistical nuance of this for 10 seconds and acknowledge the fact that real people, when asked, actually consider Facebook -- a piece of software-- harmful. They are saying that. What does that mean?
"If you think.." - Why not ask me what I think instead of assuming and putting up a strawman?
>when asked, actually consider Facebook -- a piece of software-- harmful. They are saying that. What does that mean?
I don't consider opinion polls as pathways to truths. They're interesting data points, but not some kind of absolute truth. Human opinions change, perspectives change, often multiple times when provided new/different data. Opinions can also be in conflict with each other. We're not automations or pinnacles of logical consistency. You can hand-wave it away as "nuance", but it isn't. Its fundamental. It's messy.
It’s not an assumption. You just said it.
According to passivate's commentary, what makes people lose faith in the media is when they report a study that notes "our findings cannot generalize because we used a nonrandom sample" in the terms "most Canadians believe...".
itsoktocry is just putting up a low-effort bad-faith nonrebuttal.
we can probably find 1,545 people who think everything you love and hold dear is ruining the world.
what does that mean?
It means exactly nothing, obviously. You can substitute literally anything else for Facebook without affecting the truth of that sentence in the slightest.
It is the Internet, you'll find real people who believe democracy is harmful, black people should be slaves and earth is flat. So what does that mean? Nothing!!
What does that mean?
There's no way to tell what the balance is without actually asking them
But, recently, I realized someone I used to be very close has mental problems. Undiagnosed, but there is no other way I can explain his behaviour to myself. Obsessive behaviour, can only talk about his conspiratorial obsession, erratic, spends most of his time "learning" about a specific conspiracy. And I see how Facebook is exacerbating this. I see how these things are poisoning his mind, fantasies weaved by other mentally ill people. It's just sad, when I thought about it and dawned on me most of those _wild_ conspiracy theories are people that need help feeding each other's sickness.
And then I look on my dad's wall, and saw the same hatred and resentment growing, and it scared me, the possibility he might drift even more this way.
Now I changed my mind. I think it is harmful and it does induce bad states in people that would otherwise be better, or at least... Surrounded by better support systems. But I still think it's not _just_ Facebook. It's a confluence of factors.
While mental illness is something you might be biologically predisposed, the outcome can vary wildly with or without support structures and good help. And I think on this end Facebook is profoundly destructive.
But, realistically, is the choice social media or real life? Or is choice between one part of the Internet and another part of the Internet? Which is to say, what are you talking about doing? Ending Facebook in particular? Ending "Social Media" but not say, youtube?
Even if it is just a higher tax rate for Social Media companies to help pay for the clean up of the damage. Sin taxes work, but in this case you'd have to apply them to the real customers, advertisers, somehow.
Provide help on a variety of levels (peers, professionals, etc). The idea that mechanical restriction social networking could be the answer is just misguided.
And it's not social media that are doing the damage but the interaction of social media and those with existing problems.
If we think these things are harmful and those harms outweigh the good, then we should do something.
I can see many people saying Facebook is "bad" in some way but often the criticism are completely contradictory. Facebook allows too much free speech or Facebook allows too little free speech. Peonple with both criticism "agree" on "harm" until they have to actually do something, then the absurdity appears.
Even if it is just a higher tax rate for Social Media companies to help pay for the clean up of the damage.
What's a "social media company"? Any company that let's people communicate? Social media is just blogging, message, forums and so-forth, put together in a roughly unified way. Acting like it's a single thing that can be managed and controlled seems plausible but is impossible if you think about it for a minute.
And obviously, the blame is not only on FB, there is an ecosystem of websites that feed into each other. I mentioned Youtube as also having had a big role in this.
I also see their usefulness. But the damage they are doing needs to be tackled somehow. And me not having a solution does not mean there is none. Surely other, smarter people can find one.
One thing to tackle would be the algorithm and the way it feeds into this addiction. It obviously is good for FB but bad for the user. And absolutely no one says... "Gee, I so love that FB is addictive." You could get the benefits of FB without the feed that pulls you the most it can to stay.
FB could also downrank _all_ political or polarizing content (hah, came to agree with HN on this, incredible). Obviously, FB is not a place to have reasoned discussion about politics and news and things of consistence. So downgrade them in the algo, and then the self-enforcing feedback loop should tone down in this area.
It's a tough problem but one that exists and cannot be ignored.
And it's worth considering that the situation isn't some mentally ill people and some opportunistic/predatory people. You have a mixture of delusion and predation over a substantial population and you have the ability of people in these groups to seek each other out. Maybe if you shut down usenet and everything past that, you could stop this phenomena, at the expense of more or less shutting down the Internet. But otherwise, the discussions blaming social media in particular for this stuff seem misguided. Social media is about connecting with people you know whereas "socially resonant insanity" or whatever wants to call it, involves find new friends and new facts.
Just because social media works the way it does now doesn't mean it has to always work like that. These things are constructed by humans and we can change them if we want. There is nothing intrinsic in Facebook or YouTube that says they must promote "engagement" above all else.
Maybe they might make a few less dollars, wouldn't that be sad.
There has been talk of Facebook actually using algorithms to make mental health interventions. The problem is that I don't think that many users find some automatically generated warning credible.
Just because social media works the way it does now doesn't mean it has to always work like that.
Either you something like a single, state approved connection system or each social media network will serve up anything that users will buy. That's both because of the profit motive and because someone, somewhere thinks X sort of content is totally cool, both factor are in play. What's the plan to counter that?
> And I see how [language] is exacerbating this. I see how these things are poisoning his mind, fantasies weaved by other mentally ill people. It's just sad, when I thought about it and dawned on me most of those _wild_ conspiracy theories are people that need help feeding each other's sickness.
> I think it is harmful and [language] does induce bad states in people that would otherwise be better, or at least... Surrounded by better support systems. But I still think it's not _just_ [language]. It's a confluence of factors.
No the issue isn't language, the issue is Facebook way of pushing outrage-inducing content and isolating people in bubbles of ever more radicalized content. Spend some time on https://www.reddit.com/r/QAnonCasualties/ and come back tell us how the problem is "language" and not social medias.
You know, maybe spend less time on QAnon-anything.
I imagined that this is a problem that will go by itself. That people will inoculate themselves against conspiracy. But now, I'm not so sure.
Humans are not fit to live in a hyper capitalist society. We crave stability.
I had a friend post a picture of food made from ingredients they had made in their own garden, and it made them feel so good to eat it because they had had a rough year and it was a good personal win, so they apologetically posted a photo of it.
Forget the rest of the trash on Facebook - seeing a friend I haven't seen in a while experience something good and being able to share that with them is something we need more of in the world. I'd trade away all the "only geniuses can remember the order of operations for this future scam page" or "you won't believe how this person misrepresents their opponents views and tears that misrepresentation apart!" and keep stuff like this.
You don't get the warm fuzzies when someone tries to harvest intimacy across hundreds of their relationships simultaneously with a post? Weird.
It seems to me that the direction of the thinking goes the other way: in one, you think of a friend and contact him, in the other, you think of yourself, show yourself to the world and people send you likes.
When I thought of this, it seemed to me that social media is often some sort of "narcissistic exposure of oneself" and encourages this type of behaviour from me and I didn't like it. This plus the fact that I didn't like Facebook's behaviour with it's user's data made me delete my account, and I didn't miss it since. If I think of friends, I have other means of contacting them that have a more personal feel.
I forget where I read it, but it's similar to the idea that if someone you love makes a meal for you, at the end of it, you don't ask "how much do I owe you?" and break out your wallet. It's distasteful. Likewise, you don't do someone for a loved one or friend and afterwards say, "well that will be $X".
Posting on social media has a reward of sharing and liking, and as a result, to me, it turns human interaction into an exchange. (And I will admit that there is an element to that already, in terms of owing people favors etc., but the "bookkeeping" that we do is generally in our heads and is hard to quantify, which makes it a bit fuzzier and less commodified.)
There's also the asynchronous nature. If you're out with friends and hear about their engagement after the fact (among other catching up), that's one thing. But when you're sitting on the couch lonely and see photos from moments after the engagement (and nothing else), it's just that much more of a gap.
Then throw in everyone's highlights with their outrage and some random shared clickbait (fwd:fwd:fwd:fwd:You won't believe what this evil politician did!), and it's just toxic.
I love seeing a post about something that made a friend happy, but so much of the content on facebook is so obviously not an honest post about something that made somebody happy, but rather something they felt should have made them happy, or something that somebody else would be jealous of, or worst of all a brand trying to co-opt the "something that made me happy" style of posting, that it's ruined the few honest moments of joy.
But seeing people who are your peers, who have mostly followed the same paths as you being far happier and living much full and rich lives (by appearance), and _only_ seeing that, I think, becomes a subtle reminder of your own failings.
We just need to see some of that sheen taken down. If, somehow, we saw _all_ of the shit people go through in their lives, and not just the good, maybe social media would be way different.
Personally, I find it incredibly shallow to post about food you're eating or places you're visiting. That's just money, and you might as well just take a picture of the money you're spending. I prefer to see things people make in my feed (art, woodworking, metalworking, electronics, etc.). It impresses and inspires me to see people out there making the world better with their minds and bodies, not just consuming.
Most people will probably acknowledge that it's more complicated than that. I think it might have to do with how easily comparable the other person's life is to our own.
I can't explain it well, but here's an example:
I saw a video of a child surprising their step-dad with paperwork for the official name change (kid accepting the Dad's last name). The Dad cried out of joy.
The video made me feel good.
On the other hand, seeing someone that I graduated highschool with getting promoted and being more successful than me makes me jealous.
Why? Because he has something and I don't, but would be within the realm of possibility to achieve. This behavior can also be observed in monkeys, so I don't question it too much.
presumably there are some personality types that social media works well for, as opposed to personality types that work well for social media, of which there are clearly a lot.
I guess the one boundary is that I don't generally mine my interactions with my kids for internet kudos— I don't want my camera in their faces when we're at the park or reading a book, making them feel like I'm only there spending time with them to score internet kudos later.
I'm not a super active user, but as an observer, I do wonder if much of it is pushing those same buttons but in a perhaps more subtle way— like a lot of "wellness" creators who cultivate an apparently authentic persona from which to deliver a never ending stream of motivational you're-worth-it type content meant to encourage and uplift, but that ultimately rings a bit hollow.
As these sites/services gain more popularity communities tend to splinter and it's up to the service to keep things going in whatever direction they want to via things like the fyp algorithm.
That is to say, some people want real, individual, original and ultimately personal content. But the overwhelming activity and reactions to content has driven that out, and left us only with "mass appeal" - the things that get reactions and shares.
To say nothing of edited photos.
But yeah - being vulnerable and open like that is hard and not for everyone. And it can also be faked for attention. Ultimately I don't know what a platform is supposed to do if everyone starts optimizing for the algorithm or is constantly consuming the very content that is bad for them but doesn't want censorship. There's no win - social media would be amazing if everyone was kind, honest and authentic. But I realize that's asking the impossible on a global scale.
I've noticed this increasingly. It's sorta bizarre?
People who stream usually don't dump an entire 8 hour stream in one video on YouTube. How many people would sit through the entire 8 hour video? But do clips and more people will watch more content. From what I've seen at least. (I'm not a streamer FYI)
The "pretending to be on vacation" thing is super wired. Haven't been on Facebook in years. Is it a new trend.
Instant messages are more personal and you're not broadcasting your life to 5000 randos, who could potentially weaponize that data if they wanted (potential employer saw your meme about binge drinking & alcohol consumption? Too bad).
Would you please clarify this? I know that messages flagged by the recipient can be read by moderators [1], but I'm not exactly sure what you're getting at here.
I'm not defending WhatsApp (I've advocated for Signal since the days of TextSecure), but AFAIK the messages are encrypted using the Signal protocol, so I'm not sure how the "WhatsApp police" would be able to determine if you said something specific without the recipient reporting it.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/09/whatsapp-end-to-end-...
So in this case we have Whatsapp users essentially snitching on each other and getting posts flagged for the purposes of law enforcement, and having those message unencrypted. Whilst this is largely helpful, there is the potential for false positives (e.g a meme about ISIS getting flagged as 'extremist' and 'violent')
It's a tricky one, because although the feature may help save lives and such, I am just uncomfortable with it, since the E2E encryption is slightly broken because of this mechanism in place.
We need whatsapp/telegram/signal to display a feed based on user's status and nothing more. It's almost free, frictionless and free from ads (for now). But sharing without the widest audience (just to the social graph of your contacts).
It could bring back Google+'s circles so you don't share the same stuff with colleagues and friends and family, but your feed page would display it all the same.
Decentralized micro blogging without the huge tech cost and barrier of entry of mastodon.
People could choose how people are allowed to react to their status: limited in time, to the latest status update, limited to emoji/thumbs up reactions, allows starting new chat with that status as a topic, etc.
It also reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pownce which I thought had some great ideas at the time.
There's no money in it though, so maybe bring back the old whatsapp model ? 1€ for 6 months or something ?
Or maybe just tell people to start a group chat in which they post updates ? Facebook/Twitter/Instagram got that easy to post/single tunnel thing simplified to the max, I don't think you can do better without being centralized.
I don’t care what my friends are doing outside of our interactions. Maybe if they started to murder puppies in their spare time.
I never really understood shitting on people posting food pics. How exactly is it hurting anyone?
1) To get updates on friends or family I don't talk to regularly, including their garden food pictures.
2) To use facebook marketplace, because in my region its basically taken over the online classifieds and if I want to buy or sell something facebook is the way to go currently.
The thing is, Facebook actively pushes the trash at you, because trash content monetizes the best.
The only effective avoidance mechanism is to not use it (unless there's some facebook-specific browser plugin that strips it all out).
Most people don't outright block offtopic material, they just gloss over it, and it still ends up with influence because that's what Facebook optimizes for. Plus people will still take the occasional click of curiosity to see what some posts are all about, even if they're not really into that content.
Yes, if you do have the discipline to take a zero-tolerance personal policy and immediately block even inoffensive things that just touch into the realm of polarizing, you can probably keep your feeds clean. But most people (eg, non-HN types) don't understand what Facebook is doing and don't think to actively defend against it, and just absent-mindedly consume the feed with no click discipline.
I'd like to share the most coherent conversation regarding the harms of Facebook (to a certain extent big tech algorithms/ML/AI). This is with Tristan Harris, Daniel Schmachtenberger and Frank Luntz. I didn't find any dull moment so please watch the whole thing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPAOzlqcGIQ
So, over the course of a year I made a hundred different cocktails and blogged my experiences on my blog, twitter, and Facebook. Most of the cocktails were simple 3-ingredient things based on what I had available, but a few were elaborate messes like eggnog or a Ramos gin fizz.
I had my neighbors coming over to me when I was outside thanking me for the cocktail blogging and saying it was one of their favourite things to see on Facebook, and asked me to keep posting them.
Social media doesn't have to be terrible.
Canadians?
As far as specifically Canadian factors, maybe don’t survey us in October when the days are getting noticeably shorter? I feel like we are all a little melancholy right now preparing for our lightless morning commutes.
Why not Twitter, YouTube, reddit and TikTok?
Also there's that little itty bitty issue where Facebook was purposely manipulating people's timeline feeds to see if they could produce depression-like symptoms, without informed consent.
In addition, the nefarious bribery of brazilian telcoms to allow whatsapp to have unlimited and free network bandwidth, so as to out-muscle any competitors.
Indeed, fb did push out PR messages like privacy is dead, although I'd love to cite some source on that... all I want to say is, Privacy isn't dead facebook, you're dead!
YouTube's feed basically shows me what I am subscribed to which is interesting shit I am legit interested in. I don't see any of my friends talking about their amazing lives, or any political BS, at all. The comments section is a 3rd class citizen in much of their UI and less toxic than friends all piling in and arguing about crap.
Reddit is global conversations, the topics and comments can be toxic but it's not an echochamber by design. I will say though, Reddit does make me sad sometimes so I have to work at it to use it in a healthy way.
Twitter, Tiktok, and unfortunately more and more Instagram are also sludge pools IMO.
Reddit is a de facto echo chamber. The two biggest news subreddits are heavily censored.
Deleted all my online dating profiles, limited my social media usage and I was making fantastic friends and meeting amazing girls in real life. This was very good for my mental health, during some of my really dark moments I'd spend hours per day on Reddit and Facebook arguing with other angry people. We don't need to be angry, you don't need to argue.
You don't need to give the Match group $60 a month to chat with bots. You can still wave at someone at a concert and ask if they want drinks after the show.
- The “you’re all caught up” screen that stops me from scrolling
- The fact that stories signify whether they’re watched
- The fact that my posts feed only contained followed stuff plus ads
So there was the sense of “I’m caught up with my friends’ lives”. Anyway, they’ve changed it:
- They now place random stuff below the list of my friends’ posts
- They place people I don’t follow into the ad slots for stories
Anyway, I use it much less now and we just end up sharing photos in group chats.
Does anyone know of what a true IG replacement is? Like something for your friends and you.
Quite aside from the deterioration of that medium, there's been good money in helping nefarious actors poison that well.
If I was clicking on outrageous type news headlines, it might look different.
I have disciplined my curiosity to not click on obnoxious viral headlines.
I see a click as a vote, so I don't do that.
Social Media is trickier because the media and the social part is mixed up. I quit social media about 7 months ago and I don't see going back.
Looking back on it, it really bothers me because I had a lot of good friends that I am still close with, partied a lot, had good relationships, and overall had a really good college experience. I feel like instagram took a bit of that away from me. At some point I realized this and deleted the app, shortly after I was happy as could be.
What I started doing is writing a quarterly e-mail newsletter to about 80 of my closest friends and family about details thoughts I've had about life, travel, and personal experiences.
Some friends have told me I should write a blog and put all my thoughts out there on the Internet, but I think this kind of defeats the whole purpose to share something intimate to a smaller crowd that the general Internet will never see.
Switching brand of cigarettes doesn’t protect your lungs.
Here are some thoughts I have:
1) The platform does not have a user-engagement incentive.
2) Personal network sizes are restricted. You can't be "friends" with everyone. Adding friends perhaps comes at some cost or is just strictly capped.
3) Sharing outside your friends network from the platform is not possible. This platform is for sharing with your friends, not the world.
4) Trust in the platform and how it shares your data. The easiest way to trust the server is if everything is E2EE, but we all know that's not trivial. Perhaps the limits in scaling E2EE can work synergistically with (2) and (3)
(1) seems to be the hardest thing here in my mind.
Anybody have thoughts on what could make a social network "healthy"?
5) limit how many posts / pictures / content you can share per day to avoid information overload. This should make people double thing what they are writing and hopefully more higher quality content.
6) automatically limit time spend for everyone on social media for e.g. 30-60 min per person per day.
7) Different business model than ads.
7 means some sort of paywall. You either collect from the users themselves, or collect from people who want access to those users.
You didn't "add features", you made a wish list.
What's your "solution" for online advertising? Ads that are noticeable but unobtrusive? Now all we got to do is get the nerds down in R&D to make it happen. It's a miracle no one has thought of this before.
Then you lose to a platform that does. There does need to be a level of incentive for user-engagement. Either that or users will invent one.
> Personal network sizes are restricted. You can't be "friends" with everyone. Adding friends perhaps comes at some cost or is just strictly capped.
Facebook is capped at 5000 connections where a connection is defined as a friend or page like. You can argue whether or not this should be a smaller number, but technically Facebook does have this.
> Sharing outside your friends network from the platform is not possible. This platform is for sharing with your friends, not the world.
What about Friend-of-a-friends? How do two people find out they're both on the platform? Some information has to be publicly available. I think if you stop making "public" an option, users will just find some way to make things more public. Like sharing images via avatar image. Or taking screenshots and passing those among their friends (and their friends share with their friends, etc).
> Trust in the platform and how it shares your data. The easiest way to trust the server is if everything is E2EE, but we all know that's not trivial. Perhaps the limits in scaling E2EE can work synergistically with (2) and (3)
Eh. End to end encryption only matters for information you want to be kept private. And the information isn't being shared between you and me, it's being shared between Facebook and me, then Facebook and you. The problem is that Facebook is the one selling the data. It's the fact that they're the hub.
It's a hard problem all over because in a lot of places, you're fighting human nature.
Maybe a P2P/torrent style system, where all the information is encrypted and your data exists as a hash. To contribute to that hash, you need the private key, to read that hash, you need the public key. Connections are made by swapping public keys with people. You'd need a way to get your own private key from some source if you want to use multiple platforms. But if the private key was stored in some central hub, but encrypted, you could request the encrypted private key and then use your password/phrase to decrypt it on your device.
Just spitballing.
Personally? I was thinking about this the other day and how I wish it was more like email - use whatever provider you want or host your own - either way you can post and share with other users.
That's at least one criteria after seeing how so much of the network effects are created by the need to use one platform in order to communicate on that platform.
Then I started thinking about how this would work. Subscribing to the feeds of people you care about, being able to browse and search updates, etc. and in the end I realized I was basically describing RSS with easy publishing tools.
Host your stuff on whatever platform/host/provider you prefer and see fit, but have some common format "calling card" or address that you can use to share your subscription address.
Competition would come in the form of hosting options, reader features, etc. but the conflict would likely result from some providers "innovating" features that only work on their platforms, devices, etc. Sort of like how I can message with anyone with full functionality...unless they're on an iPhone and default to iMessage. Then I'm downgraded to SMS/MMS.
That said, I would still prefer a nonFacebook that still allowed me to follow/converse with people on Facebook, even if it stuck me with the shitty interface when dealing with non-standardized platform "features".
My dream: a federated union of localnets that act like banks and data banks in one. A local facility I can resort to for my financial and computational needs. My email, phone services, VPN, and bank all rolled up nicely into one area. And, of course, it should also keep me anonymous except to the provider. The IT would be a nightmare.
Atleast get one with filters?
https://www.quora.com/Is-smoking-unfiltered-cigarettes-signi...
And even if one does exist, most groups of people aren't going to abandon the <50% of those who do want to stay on the platform.
From the article:
> However, more than three in four believe the social network helps them stay connected to their loved ones, with just over 50 per cent saying it is key to sharing information and positive for free expression.
At some point, you have to draw a line at where you take personal responsibility. The utility to those who can use those things I listed above responsibly outweighs the potential danger and plies of those who use "addiction" as their primary argument for bans (aka I have no self-control, so you should not be able to use those things responsibly either).
I am not saying "let's make heroin recreationally legal, just use it responsibly", since both utility and danger are gradients, and for heroin they are of very dubious value. But for something that has no physical addiction component at all, like videogames or facebook, I am sorry, it is on you.
And please, no pedantry with "I get hits of dopamine when I browse my FB feed, so it is a physical addiction too!". This is not what physical addiction means in the context.
The way you talk about addiction, however, makes me think you don't really understand how it works and seemingly view any addiction that isn't physical as invalid and that is not how it works.
Poor assumption. Psychological addictions are just as valid as physical, and I've never claimed otherwise. I just believe that you cannot legislate the sources of psychological addictions like you can with sources of physical ones. Primarily because literally anything can be a source of psychological addiction, depending on the flavor of the month.
Cannabis has a strong psychological addiction component, and yet people tend to conveniently forget about it when it comes to legalizing it recreationally (I am in full support of the legalization btw).
Why? I think we know why, it is because people decided that it is the responsibility of an individual to not abuse something that doesn't have a physical addiction component. But if they end up getting psychologically addicted and need help, then sure, I am all in favor of supporting those people and helping them to get out of the addiction rut they are in.
You're looking at this from a western perspective. Some non-western countries are entirely linked by Facebook products. When Facebook went down last week, some people couldn't access their BANKS. You OK with that?
That's what Facebook wants: to become something you simply MUST use to survive.
It goes deeper in the US as well but not as deep: some restaurants and small shops don't have websites, they have facebook/instragram pages, which means I cannot access them.
We need legislation to stop Facebook creep, because that "creep" eventually makes it mandatory.
Wasn't this because DNS servers were effectively DDoS'd when applications overwhelmed them with requests looking for Facebook without caching the response? Or are there actually banks out there that require Facebook to log in?
I'm not ok with that at all however I would guess that those decisions are being reevaluated as we speak!
>That's what Facebook wants: to become something you simply MUST use to survive.
But if you choose not to use the platform they will never have the power to make that happen. Anyone in power would be tempted to make themselves indispensable. It is a very human thing and let's not forget how flawed we all are.
>We need legislation to stop Facebook creep, because that "creep" eventually makes it mandatory.
You just move the power from Facebook to the government, it doesn't solve the core problem.
It is far too late for that. Facebook is too big.
I'm guessing you don't know that there are countries in the world where Facebook is the only internet, am I right? Free Basic is a service that they offered with free internet in poor countries, but Facebook is the only internet. It has changed a little as governments have realized this is a problem but it is still the dominant form of internet in some places.
There are 2.8 billion monthly users, but only 200 million are from the US, yet it is a US company. [1]
> You just move the power from Facebook to the government, it doesn't solve the core problem.
You are assuming Facebook and the government are the same thing. (US I presume.) They are not the same. A government isn't a corporation. This is a totally different discussion.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/268136/top-15-countries-...
I'm saying that social media is a form of power. If you take control from Facebook and regulate it (give the power to the government) you are simply just shift the power from one potential abuser to another.
When I was a kid *all* advertising in F1 was for cigarettes. We stopped that shit because smoking fucking sucks for all of society.
Fuck Facebook. It's an evil company. Not because Zuck or the people working there are inherently evil, it's just that their incentives (profit) happens to coincidentally and unfortunately be aligned with extreme negative externalities.
Yes, I am am making the analogy that large parts of FB are equivalent to malware.
This is not a common carrier, but an active distorter.
> How do I permanently delete my Facebook account?
Oh, right. That's never what follows.
Sorry, but 0.00004% [0] of Canadians can't remotely be described as "most".
Unfortunately, the qualifying words "survey suggests" was chopped off the end of the article title, making it seem far more of an authoritative assertion than it really is. :(
[0] 1545 / 38246108 estimated population as per https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/210929/dq210...
https://leger360.com/surveys/legers-north-american-tracker-o...
"I can be happy and thrive without social media."
Here is how you become a billionaire today-
Step 1: Create some thing people want to indulge in, whether or not it is healthy or good for them (as long as it's legal).
Step 2: Convince them that it is good for them.
Step 3: Acquire anyone else who tries to do the same or squash them out aggressively.
Rinse and repeat.
Most Canadians believe that Facebook harms the mental health of others; their own use of Facebook is healthy and fine.
Facebook issues are everyone else's problem, not mine, believes the average Facebook user.
It feels weird as if everyone agrees, and knows that smoking kills but continue to smokes more and more.
To KNOW is not gonna change anything much. It's the nature of the beast.
There were a few who also used it because it’s easy to keep up with family or friends who might live far away (which is a really valid use case!) and have no problem quitting it or never checking.
These products are designed to be addicting. My hypothesis is that folks might recognize the harm but since the downside is reducing the quality of your mental state (FB doesn’t increase your risk of cancer ala smoking). It’s just not a priority to fix the addiction.
Well for me I have mostly quit Facebook (other than messenger and using it for event scheduling for game night.) I don't do TikTok, Twitter, or Instagram. I only use Reddit for niche interest/hobbies and deleted all the default subs. I only use Snapchat to talk to a couple of people because its the best way to get ahold of them, and then there a couple of forums like hackernews i lurk and occasionaly post in and that enough for me.
Used in moderation social media is fine. Just like a beer every month or so or a coffee in the morning
It’s like a couple months ago having headlines saying “more American’s (USA) are afraid of crime rising than any time in the past 20 years!” and crime only rose slightly… it’s the cart leading the horse.
I am Canadian and it does not harm my mental health for a simple reason that I simply do not use FB or other "social media". I really do not give a hoot about somebody else's lifestyle and what they had for dinner.
This entire topic is very silly. Parents are free to forbid their kids from using it. Adults can make their own decisions.
What it is starting to become is that people want other people to stop using it because they want them to consume the content that they see fit.
Everyone is fake on social media, but it's not always apparent that it's fake (it it was, then it would defeat the purpose).
What happens when it seems like literally everyone is living a better life than you? You feel like shit.
https://accountabletech.org/media/polling/
The majority of Americans voters believe that Facebook does more harm than good.
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2021/10/fame-pres...
It's true that deeds speak louder than words. But it's also true that habits are hard to break, and there's the thinking-fast-and-slow ideas that our judgments, actions, and values are different when we are in the immediate flow of emotion vs considering the big picture with detachment.
If you ask "why" in a sincere curious way, there's a ton of interesting things to investigate. I hope that was the attitude you meant as opposed to the anti-curious condescending "why" that amounts to just being a doubter.
No, I was asking why in a frustrated rhetorical way. I get annoyed by the frequency with which people complain about social media, which is usually followed by requests for a government intervention or for a stricter moderation by the network owners. Just quit, I want to say. The internet is huge. Find yourself another hobby. A better network. Or, if you think you are addicted, as you may be to alcohol or drugs, seek help. It should be your responsibility, don't put it on others.
I totally get your reaction, and I have similar reactions myself all the time.
Some wisdom I got from elsewhere which I'm still working to practice is to eat-your-projections. We notice how other people are complainers and blamers and they make excuses and don't take responsibility. So, we turn it around and ask, "how am I being a complainer and blamer?" And we might notice how we're complaining about the complainers. And best to find this self-reflection humorous. If we switch to blaming ourselves for complaining, we're still blaming and complaining. Ideally, we find some empathy as we realize now something about how the complainers feel, and we realize that we didn't stop to be really curious about what is going on in their experience.
I agree with you completely about the value of taking responsibility. It's SO SO hard (I'm speaking for myself here!) to turn that around and literally ask, "what am I doing to take responsibility for this situation?" I.e. the situation in which other people were complaining, and their complaining triggered you, and you're unconsciously blaming them for your annoyed feelings instead of taking responsibility for your failure to be stoic.
Sorry for all the meta, this is stuff I am practicing, and it really seems the only "out" to the pattern. And really, take everything I just wrote as me noticing your patterns because I have them myself. I'm working on leading by example before telling you what you "should" do ("shoulding you" in one way to say it).
I'm laughing about this and about myself here, so I hope somehow that comes across in this overlong plain-text which I should expect to be misunderstood if I take my own damn advice. Haha ;)
Okay, but who other than that individual person is to blame for their behavior? If we blame external agents for all of societies ills, that completely devalues personal responsibility. I don't buy the "facebook made me do it" defense.
The more open-minded curious approach uses language more around cause and effect and studying causes vs correlations and looking for empirical evidence about how the world works.
When you notice that you are looking for who to blame, then the best thing for learning is to investigate your own reactive (though perhaps very subtly reactive) state.
"Facebook made me do it" is a blaming state too, and it leads nowhere to get stuck in that blaming mindset.
I wrote:
> You're already in a less open, less curious state when your language is that of "blame".
And DUH, that reads first to almost anyone (including myself on re-reading) as "you (yes, you, person I'm replying to) are in a less open state… blah blah blah"
When what I meant to express was the other way around in the emphasis. The better edit could be:
When our language is that of "blame", it's a good indicator of being in a less open, less curious state.
And I only mean that in terms of a general idea that being in a blaming mindset is a common thing, and it's not as conducive to real curious learning as other ways of talking about something.
I didn't really know what your mindset was before, but I think I now know that at least after reading my poorly-phrased post, you then were in a triggered and reactive state. I'm sorry about that. Thanks for replying so that I could learn from this instead of me not noticing the issues with my post.
P.S. I think condescension is the worst derailer of any communication, and I don't blame you for reacting when you read my post as having that tone. I didn't actually have a condescending view. I get into reactive blaming states too, and I don't think I'm any better than you, and I don't think there's any shame in having common reactive feelings.
Anyhoo, I'm not saying we need to abandon looking at how external agents influence behavior, all I'm saying is that personal responsibility is critical in informing how we look at behavior. Without that lens, it would almost impossible to implement a fair justice system. We can all work towards structural changes while still adopting a punitive stance when it comes to egregious violations of criminal and civil law.
I agree with you fully here. The semantic thing is that there's this useful self-reflective framing of contrasting "responsibility" from "blame" similarly to contrasting restoration vs retribution. The idea is that blame is about accountability, about finding fault, and it's commonly the mindset we're in when we're reactive in the sort of sense of not being stoic, being stuck on being mad that the world is the way it is and so on. By contrast, if we are taking responsibility, we are asking ourselves how to actually respond to the reality we face instead of focusing on figuring out who to blame. I know that's not a universally recognized distinction, but I find it very useful.
I deleted my account over a year ago now, because I do view them as evil and do cause overall societal harm. It's not life ending. You'll adjust and then wonder why you didn't do it sooner. I made the choice for myself. The only people you'll lose touch with were superficial relationships to begin with. Do you honestly care what that dude you went to gradeschool with but haven't seen for 30 years does? Real relationships don't depend on x platform. All they require is you, and the other person.
The argument isn't, "so I don't have to change my behaviors."
The argument is, OTHER people are too weak to change their behaviors, so we need to have the government regulate THEIR behavior. (The greater good.)
It's bad enough to be lazy and want someone else to fix your problems. It's almost worse to decide you know what other people's problems are, and decide what needs to happen for them. (Or phrased differently... What needs to happen to them.)
This is less about that dude from highschool and more about your cousin.
So, if you texted "Hey cousin, it's been awhile, how's it going?" you wouldn't get a reply?
It costs money to port numbers between carriers, and it's a pain to set up when you can just pop in a SIM card and start making calls/texts right away with your new number.
I find this "I don't know anyone who uses FB anymore" line to often be disingenuous when it's uttered by someone in their 20s or early 30s.
On one hand I get it because having a global centralized media source running bleeding edge optimization algorithms against humans is highly unprecedented till recently.
But at the same time I don't like the trend in recent years to completely "minimize individual responsibility"
It makes sense why these narratives are popular too.
It means I don't have to admit my lack of discipline.
That's extraordinarily presumptuous to assume you understand the contours of a billion strangers human connections.
I bemoan the loss of "church community" despite never having been a churchgoer. It's nice to show up, blend in, make time with a few familiar faces, and leave. Non-intense social interactions are good. People who only have intense social interactions tend to have bad social anxiety, because their brain isn't accustomed to anything between zero and 100. The good part about fb is that it can be used to facilitate that. I'd happily have a profile on the Facebook Events platform, if it existed as a separate product. But since it necessarily comes with all the other baggage, it's healthier for me to miss out.
I enjoy living in a society, and not having to worry about if every food I eat might poison me, or every bridge I walk over might fall down. If we decide, as a society, it would be better to ban Facebook, why shouldn't we?
Just because a lot of people agree on something doesn't make it right or good. I'm not sure where you get the idea that society is just a platform for banning unpopular things. A lot of modern civics was designed specifically to counter that actually, things like constitutional laws, representative democracy, high courts, political parties; they all serve to counterbalance and moderate the pure majority opinion on how to run society.
You know, I also enjoy living in a society and not having to worry if any media I want to use or any business I ran might be banned because someone somewhere didn't like it.
We, as a society, have tomes of legislation and case law that regulate business practices and their negative impacts on individuals or society as whole.
Racists would say otherwise. If racists were a majority of society, would you agree that we as a society are right to govern that way?
You know, we also have tomes of legislation about what we don't regulate. In most Western societies, speech has pretty big tomes on that.
Hear Hear!
> Most Canadians believe Facebook harms their mental health
Then don't use it!
This is like complaining that people who can't stop smoking cigarettes are just whining unless they quit themselves. Billion dollar industries spent decades formulating cigarettes to be as maximally addictive as they could possibly make them, and cigarettes are the #1 cause of preventable mortality, and kill about 500,000 people in the US each year. Despite those obvious, clear and unavoidable consequences, millions of people still struggle to stop smoking.
This is our generation's smoking but everyone only wants to know how harmful Marlboros are.
Edit: Please upvote this more. I need to feel like my views are validated.
- Users get an intense, one-sided parasocial relationship but with no upside of even communicating directly with each other
- The hivemind effect is very real, and using Reddit often gives people a very false sense of superiority of their knowledge on any given topics
- Misinformation is rife. Even outside of the conspiracy hubs. It's amazing how many of the "front page" posts are often misleading or slanted
- Astroturfing and content farming is even more prevalent but with less moderation.
I don't think antisocial fits as a descriptor, at all. When I think of antisocial behavior I think of graffiti or arson and other property damage without regard for the owners or the public sphere.
I think the word you're looking for is asocial.
Ultimately I think social media is an amplifier, taking whatever individual or collective insecurities that were latent, and just projecting them for better or worse.
Disclosure: FB employee but only speaking for myself
I have been uncomfortable on twitter to find enclaves where people are mentally ill, and have found others to exacerbate their behaviour and thinking.
Twitter, by a large magnitude, has been the most professionally useful social network to me as a knowledge worker/researcher.
In my, admittedly very brief, experience with twitter, I found it nearly impossible to actually grasp whole conversations. Little snippets and snipes get RT'd to the sky while the main discussion thread gets forced ever downward in the interest sorted feed.
What you will not find there is rational and reasonable debate, but imho that’s not what twitter is for.
See, for instance, "cryptic pregnancy" communities on FB, which are definitely hotbeds of mental illness.
The two big problems poisoning this well are:
1) monetization usually reaches for manipulating people's personal socialization stream, and
2) public broadcast of personal content to the feeds of strangers, usually the most inflammatory subset because of point 1.