Open letter to Mark Zuckerberg: act now on child and adolescent mental health
oii.ox.ac.uk
oii.ox.ac.uk
https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/facebook-knows-instagram-is...
More direct to your question: Not necessarily anything more than their research, but something that details what specifically their research shows and what those research methods were?
FWIW: I did end up finding a nonpaywall version, and the research wasn't super reliable / great. They asked people specifically how instagram made them feel, which is subject to a lot of biases and not a solid objective indicator. I understand it may be the best we do, but that's not a great reason to trust it.
Probably, the collapse of nuclear family in western society and ultimately the sexual liberation. Personal circumstances aside, statistically speaking.
If you mean the US (as per $DEFAULT_COUNTRY), it's kinda hilarious to see that you call this ‘massive political instability’.
For a kid growing up in a rural area with few opportunities to socialize without driving for miles, Facebook and texting were a genuinely great way for me to have a social life.
Of course, with algorithmic feeds, nobody posting original content any more, ads, and blogspam links radicalizing my relatives, Facebook is not longer a good place to socialize. Even when people do post original content, it's hard to see because it gets buried behind oceans of promoted content and ads. But I think I can safely say that an older incarnation of Facebook had a positive mental impact on me.
Edit: I think it might even help to imagine a ‘comedy in characters’ of this situation:
Previously in FB.
— Zuck, they say FB is bad for the brain!
— Well, how bad, if this is gonna blow in our faces?
Several months later.
— This bad.
Zuck spins for some cycles, counting zeroes on the bank balance.
— I can live with that.
A bunch of researchers see that FB funds research.
— Yo, we also can tell you in detail how bad it is! Give us some funding.
Zuck: — ???
Letters are not an ideal medium to change things via ethical grandstanding. Most people just aren't concerned with what random strangers write to large companies. Grandstanding may have a role in effecting change, especially political change, and letters may play a role in a larger grandstanding campaign led by someone with an influence and following — but in the era of the Internet and television, it is often an ancillary role.
The more successful campaigns of grandstanding via letters have often included strongly principled letters with sharp yet carefully restrained language. The contents of such a letter are published as a full-page ad in a major newspaper such as the New York Times, Washington Post, or Wall Street Journal. Ideally, they will be signed by credible authors, often many of them.
Something like this: http://www.cato.org/special/stimulus09/cato_stimulus.pdf
Or this: https://www.reddit.com/r/chomsky/comments/oq9su1/let_cuba_li...
But even these have had limited direct impact. What hope does your letter have?
If your grandstanding target is more specific than the general public, the question still remains: will this letter reach and affect them?
Take cigarettes. Known harmful, regulations around selling to youth expanded, again and again.
In Canada, first, as a store, you couldn't sell. Then fines for selling, 100s, then thousands of dollars. Then it became illegal to show cigarettes in the store, they had to be hidden behind counter.
Traditional media was outlawed from marketing, showing them too.
My point is, if industry doesn't change, then government will eventually step in, and no matter how powerful or rich, an industry will bow to the law.
Government moves slowly, often taking a decade to move, or more, but due to people like Zuck, and due to corps like Google and Twitter, government regulation is coming, because they aren't self regulating. Corps never seem to, history is full of such examples.
The problem is though, that these platforms are now conjoined with how we express ourselves, and thus, this new series of upcoming regulations are very, very wrought with landmines, and the potential to significantly impact free speech going forward.
Free expression is at the core of our modern democracies, and if government become too controlling here, or conversely if private corps too wary, we literally could end up wit truncated democracies.
The decisions being made right now, will impact the future dramatocally, for generations. This is a fulcrum, a focal point, a nexus of change.
I am concerned.
It's this:
Right now they profit from engagement. Engagement =/= good mental health Metas definition of good mental health =/= my definition
If a depressed person who scrolls all day gets off and leads a better life how does that make meta money? Asking genuinely, as im sure some change oriented folks within meta are.
Just spit-balling: I think bars will kick people out once they've had too much to drink, sometimes from a legality standpoint, but also from a place of sympathy or even fear (this person will disrupt the environment).
How would you say other businesses have handled this without government regulation?
There's heavy regulation, policing and liability here. Bars will cut people off and kick them out because if they let a person get tanked and they go hit someone with their car while drunk, that puts the business in jeopardy. Not only are there laws that make it a criminal offense, that's how a business loses its liquor license and gets held liable for potentially significant damages.
My state has negligent serving of alcohol laws, and it also holds businesses responsible for any injuries, damages or deaths a drunk driver causes.
Do bars still cut off people for any non-legal reasons?
Trying to find if these establishments do anything to curb addiction even when not forced by outside regulators.
It only has to make them more money than the alternative, which is losing the ability to operate within countries that protect the health of their citizens.
There are a lot of businesses like this, with a profit incentive that is directly at odds with the health of their customers.
You can't solve that fundamental issue, so you regulate them or tax the harm. If you make the harm more expensive, the profit motive is (at least a bit) blunted.
Everyone forgets about this option.
Same deal with obesity.
Blaming individuals is how we’re wired, but it’s not functional when you’re concerned about population behaviours.
Like obesity, no amount of health warnings, sugar taxes, ect on products will solve the obesity epidemic if more individuals don't assume agency for what they put in their body and the bodies of their children.
Free will is an illusion
Even a fully deterministic computer takes input/instructions and completes actions.
Humans are complex logic engines with programing. They can be programed to need external input to take an action, or take actions without external input.
You can program a child to think they need permission to go to the bathroom, or to think they can get up and go without permission.
You can program an addict to think they helpless to resist a drug, or that they can resist the urge and stop.
In this sense, humans can be programed with logic that either helps them achieve their goals, or prevents them from doing so.
Human "agency", "willpower", and "control" is simply shifting a person's program to take actions less on environmental inputs based more on their core values (e.g happiness - also programed).
I think that telling humans that they are helpless to control their behavior and need outside input is bad programing which harms their outcomes.
People overestimate the helplessness and dependence on circumstance. It is better to program people to act with more self control.
Take obesity for example, do we know why so many people have gained so much weight? If I were to judge what I think your opinion might be from your response so far, it would be purely that people are eating too much.
So what causes that behavior? Do people just eat as much as the person next to them? Eat as much as their parents? Do they eat what's available and that just happens to be highly reinforcing (salt, simple sugars, fats) and easily available? Are there hormonal signaling pathways that control feeding behavior? Maybe there are environmental factors, such as hormone disruptors that weren't there 100 years ago? Is there a high prevalence of genetic disorders relating to weight control and feeding behaviors?
There may be multiple causes, and some may overlap.
Also this puts far too much on the end consumer, when there are also emergent patterns that come from behaviors of businesses and markets such as locations of grocery stores and stock in those stores. All of this, all of us.
We are all part of the same system and we should not attempt to place blame on any certain part when there are many many contributing factors. We should attempt to figure out which parts need to be adjusted and how, and its never going to be only one thing such as the agency of the individual.
>Admitting we are powerless allows us to investigate and change the factors that truly lie behind the behavior
I couldn't disagree more. I am all for scientific investigations but think that behavior psychology is vastly under evaluated relative to environmental or biological priming.
>Take obesity for example, do we know why so many people have gained so much weight? If I were to judge what I think your opinion might be from your response so far, it would be purely that people are eating too much.
People are eating to many calories, this is irrefutable. We can discuss why they are eating too many calories, which is the more nuanced question
<We are all part of the same system and we should not attempt to place blame on any certain part when there are many many contributing factors. We should attempt to figure out which parts need to be adjusted and how, and its never going to be only one thing such as the agency of the individual.
This reads as self contradiction to me: "There are many contributing factors but we should not assign blame" vs "We should attempt to figure out which parts need to be adjusted"
Figuring out which part of the system is the cause is how one decides what needs to be adjusted. You can not ignore the psychological decision making process. Why one person has self control, and another does not.
To say that the perception of agency of the individual is out of scope is ridiculous to me. Actualizing one's own agency was crucial for every addict, obese person, or depressed person I have ever known.
As examples: if Facebook spreads misinformation, my government gets worse. I may even lose individual liberties, like women currently losing the right to medical privacy.
If Facebook gives children eating disorders, my health insurance premiums go up.
Even if I only care about myself and police myself, Facebook can still rip apart the society that I live in.
> Everyone forgets about this option.
No they don't. You seem to have forgotten about externalities.
Personal responsibility is not a policy that can’t be applied across a population. You might have a combination of will, mental health state, and life advantages that puts you in the the 80 or 90th percentile of being able to resist or avoid addictive activities but you are not common.
Willpower is finite and companies have thousands of lifetimes worth of resources.
I don't believe personal responsibility and willpower is a fixed quantity, even at the population level. In fact, I think they are negatively impacted by emphasizing the influence of external factors in personal behavior.
Telling an addict that they are powerless to regulate their consumption only erodes their ability to improve. External factors my have led them to their addiction, but they can't fix an additional without assuming agency taking control of their behavior. Yes, this is HARD, but no addict can recover without it.
The only durable solution that will help people is shifting the curve such that more people are able to resist or avoid addictive activities. Policy solutions are simply too ineffective and porous to have a durable effect.
Social media platforms are giant algorithmic feedback engines creating the most reliable way for their regular users to fulfill their neuro-chemical and social needs. That these people cannot find better information in their mediasphere means that we need to encourage people and remind them of their agency - yes - but we cannot leave it at "words of encouragement" when the other end is "massive highly personalized feedback loop of all the people you miss seeing"
I think much of the problem with duality dissolves once you eliminate the concept of the soul or free will. People tend to ignore the fact that the individual still exists as an information processing agent that takes actions, even if you remove free will.
If a program fails to provide the desired output when given an input, it is neither the input or that code that is to blame, but an incompatibility between the input and code that is at fault. You it is possible to get the desired outcome by modifying either, or more likely both.
I'm sure I am overlooking some implications or counterpoints, so I look forward to reading your suggestion.
And it's not just Meta, you should really look at IOS & Android's culpability. Smartphones changed the game.
And FB already has lots of content moderators trying to filter things like hate speech, bullying, and thinspo. What would you have them change? How do you know for sure your suggestion will work?
I don't think Mr. Zuckerberg can do much, besides pivoting to a new-flagship product which is what he might be trying to do with "Meta".
With FB/IG they are just responding to demand in the market. Maybe there are low hanging ways to make it fundamentally better for mental health, but at a certain point that objective will clash with $ and who know's if it's what consumers want if given the option https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premier_(cigarette)
The government should probably step-in to research and regulate but its more systemic than just FB. Apple/Google don't get their fair share of the blame, they are selling Skinner Boxes as a service to all these companies. It's ridiculous you can't have more control of notifications. If I want to get a notification for a New Message, Tagged in a post or an update from Delivery driver... I have to also let these apps poke me whenever they want to try to get me addicted to their platforms.
Or is that because millions is not a sufficient number, and billions is the number to become what matters?
For the purpose of scientific research, it is not a good argument to ask for the platform to cooperate with you. Researcher should develop their research methods totally independent of the subject.
I'm obviously not the only person saying this, and I don't want to brush Facebook and Instagram issues under the rug, but I fear the series of articles that arose from this whistle-blowing has created all sorts of twisted incentives for every player whose digital product can be abused. What's the upside of making such research looking into negative effects if, when leaked, (1) only the negatives is headlined and presented, (2) the positives are ignored and (3) no acknowledgment of the research existing in the first place is made? I'm conflicted myself writing this, especially #3 as it may (I'm not informed enough to have a strong opinion) be akin to historic examples of tobacco and petroleum industries ignoring their R&D, but #1 and #2 seem pretty clear.
Why are these researchers not addressing the industry at large, if only as a bullet point/segment? It seems like scapegoating while these issues are widespread and no company/executive will position itself to be the next scapegoat in line to be ousted. Research on FB-Insta could be useful to expand to the rest of the industry, but why would they be inclined to respond to this piece where they are made out to be as the nefarious actor when it comes children's health?
Just put a university after your name means nothing. Do I need to search each of your name to know whether you are a scholar in the related field, or just simply a student studying in the university?
This whole letter reads as a somewhat patronising attempt to force FB into sharing their toys without offering anything in return. Once you go down the path of publicly shaming someone into working with you all hope for cordial collaboration must go out the window.
Frankly, if OII want a slice of the company, shares are trading at $300 a pop right now. Not that I condone it, but shareholder activism feels like a more viable (and morally defensible) route. Bullying via PR fluff does not.
Keep this up and the mob will be back to rattling pitchforks over Facebook harming kids by “refusing to add a Panic Button”. Perhaps that’s the goal — OII’s funding is proportional to the level of public anti FB sentiment?
When I read that my impression is that what's actually being asked is :"give us power over the platform"
The "independent fact checking" on YouTube does not seem to be going well. I see no reason to think that this would
Even if you personally don't use Facebook or don't want to, we still all have to be around people who use it all the time.
1) If there is such a stigma with "mental health", why do people not use a different term for it, e.g., "emotional health"?
2) Why do they only focus on the impacts these platforms have on children (younger humans), do these platforms not have similar harms to us older humans?
Game. Set. Match.
Some of the contributors research child or adolescent psychology. Maybe all. And including adults would lose public support from people who think adults can look out for themselves. No one thinks children can and adults can't.
That's called ‘euphemism treadmill’: newly invented euphemisms will soon be hijacked for pejorative use. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphemism#Euphemism_treadmill (and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysphemism#Context_and_drift)
IMO this is a part of a more general process that many words shift meanings or are re-appropriated to describe emotional or political judgement. E.g. ‘autistic’ became trendy as an invective about ten years ago; and ‘awesome’ doesn't cut it anymore for clickbait, so different words are in vogue now—until they too become overused to death.
Anyway, science and healthcare can't and shouldn't change its vocabulary every time fourteen-year-olds on Reddit decide they are done with one pejorative term and start stigmatizing another one.
Ah, I wrote a paper on euphemisms in first and second languages when I was in college but hadn't heard about this before, I'm excited to check into it more, thank you!
> Anyway, science and healthcare can't and shouldn't change its vocabulary every time fourteen-year-olds on Reddit decide they are done with one pejorative term and start stigmatizing another one.
I agree that I don't want science to necessarily change its terms because a sub-cultural group decided it offended them; sometimes maybe, but not always, as having consistency of terms can make it easier to replicate research. I think the irony with the case "mental health" is that it used to be called "mental hygiene," so the term did change over time.
I also think one of the aspects of science is trying to come up with new linguistic ways to parse the world—recategorizing things as more research is conducted. Maybe it's less getting rid of the term "mental health" but creating a new category that distinguishes from it.
I think the challenge with the term "mental health" is less about a new stigma and more about the history of the term[0]:
> The mental hygiene movement, in its origins and reflecting Beers’ experience in mental hospitals, was primarily and basically concerned with the improvement of the care of people with mental disorders. In Beers’ own words: “When the National Committee was organized, in 1909, its chief concern was to humanize the care of the insane: to eradicate the abuses, brutalities and neglect from which the mentally sick have traditionally suffered.” 4.
> It was at a later stage that the Committee enlarged its program to include the “milder forms of mental disability” and a greater concern with preventive work. The rationale behind this shift was the belief that “mental disorders frequently have their beginnings in childhood and youth and that preventive measures are most effective in early life”, and that environmental conditions and modes of living produce mental ill health.
I think the term "mental health" can carry that cultural history, of being used to treat the more extreme versions of mental health, not the more common, less severe occurrences.
I also found this quote and wonder how much what the term covers has changed over time:
> The First International Congress of Mental Health was organized in London by the British National Association for Mental Hygiene from 16 to 21 August, 1948...Only one concept of mental health was put forward, by J.C. Flugel, Chairman of the Conference’s Programme Committee: “Mental health is regarded as a condition which permits the optimal development, physical, intellectual and emotional, of the individual, so far as this is compatible with that of other individuals.”
It almost seems as "mental health" was proposed to encompass physical, intellectual, and emotional development. Which may make sense if "mental" is defined as overarching, however, I imagine many today would see the "mental" as related to the brain.
So while I think yes, sometimes we change terms because they've gained new stigma over time, I think this may be a case where it started with stigma. Maybe not.
--
Mental health and emotional health seem like very different things. I think that's more of the problem than a stigma with the words 'mental health'. Truth is, being depressed is mental unhealthy the same way over-eating is physical unhealthy. (and mentally unhealthy too, hah!)
> Mental health and emotional health seem like very different things.
How would you say they differ?
I wouldn't call a person with down syndrome of having poor physical health, or emotional health. I'd say their mental health is permanently damaged. The same way someone with a life long disease might have permanently poor physical health.
It reminds me of being in a bookstore and I asked about books on empathy and the person led me to two sections: one on psychology and one psychics. I skimmed the psychology book and it talked about setting boundaries and paying attention to how one felt. I skimmed the psychics book and it talked about psychic walls and auras. I then realized they may be talking about very similar things but with different and slightly different approaches.
Regardless, thank you for helping me feel more clear on just using the language that resonates with me and seeing if and how it resonates with others.
If it can be cured/aided with empathy, it may be accurate to call it an emotional health issue. ADHD? Mental or emotional? Well it doesn't have to be either, it can be both! Taking a baseball bat to the brain will damage your physical and mental health, why can't taking a few distractions to the eyes do something similar?
No need to thank me. I am only giving you my justification. You are the one doing the work. :)
haha, exactly! I think I can try to force my thinking into an either/or, when it can be both/and.
> No need to thank me. I am only giving you my justification. You are the one doing the work. :)
I thank people when I feel grateful and I felt grateful :) Kinda like how I apologize when I feel guilty, even if the other person doesn't feel angry at me. I think we're both doing "the work," however one defines it :)
And I suppose comfortable oversight board positions should go to the activists researchers who organized the open letter.
The delusion of ethical corporations instead of ethical regulation is rediculuos.
If you don't think the government can manage this problem, a corporation is even further into mismatched interests and agency.
"Открытое письмо господину Цукербергу"
It even matches the ending of господину, which -- without the у -- sure looks like the courtesy title "Gospodin". You're sure that's not a case marker?
If it was Putin instead of Zuckerberg, it would work just the same, "господину Путину". No difference at all, regardless of whether the last name is Russian or not.
However, Цукерберг/Zuckerberg is quite natural for Russian due to being an obviously Jewish name. The first letter isn't even the voiced ‘z’ in Russian, but a ‘ts’, because that's how analogous Jewish names are pronounced here.
Now that you mention it, that's exactly what happened with Greek too. Branding used to be Greek, then sort-of-foreignified Greek (eg Greek words with a foreign suffix) and now just English.
> first letter isn't even the voiced ‘z’ in Russian, but a ‘ts’,
That's probably because of the German pronunciation, no?
> That's probably because of the German pronunciation, no?
Well yeah. Wiktionary notes straight away that the surname is Ashkenazic—it was most probably naturalized in Russian through Ukraine's and specifically Odessa's Jewish population. The more familiar variation here is ‘Zuckerman’.
For example, Zuckerberg absolutely gets declined and gets that "oo" at the end. "To Mr. Dorsey" doesn't get changed (i.e., no added "oo" at the end) due to declining (but it still gets declined), while "to Mr. Smith" definitely gets that extra "oo" at the end due to declining. But "to Mrs. Smith" is unchanged after declining, so it doesn't get that same "oo" ending.
I think the same true for a last name such as Цукербергу. There are plenty of people with Germanic last names, especially ending with -berg, -man, -baum, etc, so maybe it is considered assimilated enough that it follows rules for Slavic based names.
One example of a case when the dative form would be the same as the nominative, is if the recipient was a Mrs. Zuckerberg, since this specific kind of the last name isn't inflected when it's of the feminine grammatical gender.
There's also the dubious trend of avoiding inflection of brand names for any and all purposes—but that's just contrary to how Russian works, and is dictated instead by whims of marketing people who lack the sense for the language.
Furthermore I don't see any reason why any children <16 should be on or have access to Facebook, Twitter, etc...
TLDR: Companies need to be prevented from making their applications excessivly addictive and parents need to parent their children more when it comes to social media.
Welcome to North Korea. I will win.
you have no idea what the impact of allowing access to "social" tech will have on them in the long term
Its all a massive guessing game.
After that day we realized its not easy to control smart children.
Is your example a smart child or a stupid child?
I like to take my son fishing because it teaches him it’s ok to be bored, silence is ok too, also our talks and bonding is deeper in these moments, and it gets us out in nature.
I say this every time this comment comes up and I always get downvoted but I just don’t care. I love my kids and I fight every day to keep them safe and healthy and I DO NOT NEED to fight a super villain with direct access to my child’s mind.
Social media is evil. It will be banned. Wait and see.
In short: Network effect.
Now it’s a “damned if you do and damned if you don’t”, and just giving your kids the keys is probably the lesser of the two evils.
Which is why we should be making sure that these platforms are healthy for everyone involved, as much as is practical and possible.
If this was business as usual, that wouldn’t have happened.
No, I foresee a future in which social media is mandatory - if not in law, at least in practice. I use none, as I found it turned me into a performer rather than a person, and even now sometimes find myself at an impasse where I am not able to do x, y, z because I do not have a social media presence. For instance, I was refused entry to the US for refusing to divulge my social media handles - because I have none. I was last night refused entrance to a bar because I wouldn’t share my instagram handle - because I have none. I had to go for a physical interview last year for a residency permit where I live, because I would not share my Facebook handle - because I have none. I got residency, but I was presented with additional hurdles for not being a user.
If you want out, the only way is to forgo much of modern life - and this will only become more and more apparent.
I’ve taken to writing physical letters. If I can’t be bothered, what I had to say evidently wasn’t important in the first place.
And even if you ban them from using ALL meta product. They will still be hooked to something else. Forum ( That is a form of Social Media as well ), other media for celebrity news or whatever. Ban Whatsapp? There is iMessages on iOS and used mostly across teen age group in the US, Line in Japan, KakaoTalk in Korea. Did anyone remember SnapChat ?
Even if you DO ban all of them. They will still get spread in school talking about the trendiest topic. They will find a way to join the conversation no matter what so they dont get left out. And I have seen this first hand.
I am not against Facebook providing some sort of filter or mode for Kids or something. But it is ultimately the parents that is responsible. The world has changed. And I have always argued it is not the platform or social media. It is the internet itself, extremely affordable and accessible via Smartphone everywhere. And so far I didn't even mention Youtube.
Parenting in the 21st century is harder than ever.
On the other hand kids these days learn so so much more at their age on topics that you could never imagined over the internet. Things I could only dream of when all I had was books in library written by people not targeting my age. ( Which is actually another issues because those who are curious and willing to learn excel so much further than the bottom half of the class, it seems the information super highway has fastened inequality everywhere. )
I am actually surprised at the Hotcake being the most upvoted comments, for the past 6+ years Facebook has been the most hated company on HN and anything that goes against hating Facebook tends to get downvoted.
I hope I'm not misrepresenting your argument with this analogy, but it seems like you're saying "Don't ban heroin. Kids will still get hooked on weed!"
It's okay to ban the worst offenders and carefully regulate the 'market'.
With a free and open market, billions of dollars of investment, and thousands of smart minds working over at Facebook, it's quite possible that things will get worse if there's no regulation.
Except I can see zero good about heroin, while social Media ( inclusive of instant messengers ) have their own good. So it is not as clear cut.
For example I define Chat as a different category then Social Media.
How do you define Social Media and what is the value (or good) they add that is unique to these platforms?
Hence, legislation shouldn’t target individual companies, but “features” that harm people or lead to bad outcomes for society at large. One such example is Europe’s GDPR, which imposes some fundamental limitations on what companies can and cannot do with their users’ personal data. And as negative consequences of poor social media design becomes more apparent, legislators must expand on that and ban more of the malicious practices that are at fault.
It may take time for the US to deliberately damage national champions like Facebook and Google. Other countries will be less patient to act. I cannot imagine democratically elected governments idly standing by as Facebook drags their people into a dystopian Metaverse where there’s no more escaping the misinformation and manipulation that’s already rampant on current-generation social media platforms.
How, by getting rid of the first amendment? Seems doubtful.
That’s exactly the reason people without children have no children: they want to have free time.
Like it or not YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and the internet in general has taken up the place of parenting and social interaction because parents are worked to death for the 1% and social media is designed the same way as casinos. They're designed to prey upon your instincts and are demonstrated to be quite effective at it. I wouldn't mind if tomorrow Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Reddit, etc, all disappeared overnight. Obviously government can't have the power to do that because they'll go after everything but that.
It’s interesting to watch Australia navigate this. Murdoch is rather powerful there and has some leverage.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/mar/16/rupert-murdoch...
And ppl like mark is obviously responsible because they are using dopamine tricks to make content more addicting. Like whats the point of showing me nonsense news because one of the people I added liked some nonsense? Why to show nonsense ads that says me "She looks beautiful and if you want try this cream"? (mark because he is the own who has ultimate control over facebook and insta)
China tackled this by banning and making sure tiktok etc returns more science content for children instead of dopamine addicting content. (China because I don't know if other country has regulated social media like this)
The opioid crisis is also the fault of all those pesky addicts who chose to get themselves addicted and it’s not at all on Purdue.
Right?! /s
We should also prevent the supply of these things and regulate harmful corporate behavior, but that doesn't absolve parents of their responsibility.
1. You have no idea about teenagers.
2. You have no idea about the causes of the opioid crisis.
Also, I did not conflate the two which you appear to think I have done.
Parents can regulate the hours, but unless they regulate them down to zero, they cannot affect the adictiveness engineered into the product. Yes, the dose makes the poison, but I guarantee you Facebook has a team of psychologists making sure the dose needed to get kids hooked is as low as possible.
Personal story: to situate, when i was teenager facebook was starting to be a thing and myspace started fading. My parents did something i find to be very sensible: they responsabilised me and introduced me to computers. I had restricted "freetime" computer hours and slightly less restricted "working" computer hours (doing school work etc), which eventually led me to programming since it somehow passed as working (my mom's a programmer so there's that). I wasn't allowed to have a facebook account and it was explained to me why that was so. Reasons where mostly not putting random private stuff online somewhere i wouldn't control it, addiction wasn't too important but i think it was implicitly said that these stuff eat you time and that now your time doing constructive things vanishes. OTOH my computer was clean of any spyware and i was trusted (had admin password and all). I surely was an outsider from this pov, but i quickly managed to own it and be proud of not having that account. For me this is the key: you cannot protect your kid against his will, you must (and surely can, kids are smart) convince them that they have more to loose than to gain. Maybe at that time it was simpler since it was the golden age of xmpp and gtalk was something i had access to (Adium for the win!).
One of the oft-touted figures was that “thirty-two percent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse.”
My hot take is: "That's probably about right." Given the sorry state of physical education, fitness, and the fact that 60%+ of adults are obese or overweight, the fact that 1/3 of people on Instagram look at other people and feel their appearance needs improvement is probably about right -- if not a little low. There are probably another 1/3 that _should_ feel bad but don't. (And boys too!)
How much is the government doing well but we just don't see? Conversely, how much of business is doing things that harm people that we also don't see?
"It's up to you to fight me and my billionaire buddies and hundreds of corporations lobbying for new tax loopholes every year."
Accounting firms send people to Washington to "advise" legislators on changes to the tax code. Said people are then rewarded very handsomely, because the accounting companies get to use the changes for their clients, and because they "advised" legislators to do it, they know ahead of all the other accounting firms what's going to happen...
Governments tax corporate revenue too, it's just that's called a sales tax.
And also, yes, Amazon gets lots of tax loopholes and freebies. They wave "jobs!" around and get property tax breaks and whatnot.
Yep. If the past 10 years have shown us anything, it's that these billionaires are anticipating this pushback, so they'll add however many layers of fluff they need to prevent them from taking real action. Google didn't remotely care about privacy until they were relentlessly sued over it, and Europe implemented baseline privacy laws. Apple dragged their feet in the mud over App Store changes until the double-barrel end of the Supreme Court was staring them between the eyes. The only way we can make a change here is by exercising the powers we were given to keep these companies in check. The longer we hesitate and waffle over whether or not it's a good application, the more time we give them to exploit us.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29413173
"We are often told that the poor are grateful for charity. Some of them are, no doubt, but the best amongst the poor are never grateful. They are ungrateful, discontented, disobedient, and rebellious. They are quite right to be so. Charity they feel to be a ridiculously inadequate mode of partial restitution, or a sentimental dole, usually accompanied by some impertinent attempt on the part of the sentimentalist to tyrannise over their private lives. Why should they be grateful for the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table?"-- Oscar Wilde
She's donating more than anyone else, yet people are complaining about it.
Do we really need someone as deranged, corrupt, and irresponsible to get involved on this?I mean seriously, just because he has money/influence/power doesn't mean jack shit.
If anything, Zuck would be stupid to response to this "open letter": he PROFITS from the fact that some people are mentally ill.What a joke.If you want people to be more stable mentally, you would tell them to f#ck off social media, socialize, eventually keep some traditions or norms within smaller groups which create stronger bonds, those are things that keep you sane.Oxford at this point repeatedly showed that they're a shit institution, and i have to wonder if there's any substance on this besides a PR move.
I also got my doubt about this "science", social sciences are not really sciences, a lot of the research in those fields is not replicated or just based on asking people questions rather than actually observing behaviour. I don't understand how they claim as if there is some scientific truth that we have to follow when it comes to those issues, in most cases it is more assumptions, loose correlations mixed with ideologies and politics.