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Comment by jimlongton | Hacker News Reader

Related "Social Media is a Major Cause of the Mental Illness Epidemic in Teen Girls. Here’s the Evidence." [1]

Does anyone else find these videos extremely emotionally manipulative and creepy? Now users have to contend with not just everyone else being unrealistically beautiful and young due to makeup and lighting but also AI.

[1] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-ill...

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"now people have to contend with fake things existing"

maybe its time people get a grip and realize photoshopped stuff is not real, movies are not real, cartoons are not real. Get a grip and do not attempt to run into the huge boulder just because a cartoon showed the roadrunner being able to.

I suggested reading the linked article.

> “Results showed that exposure to manipulated Instagram photos directly led to lower body image.” Engeln, Loach, Imundo, & Zola (2020)

Children with vulnerable developing brains being targeted by algorithms designed by teams of engineers and PhDs to exploit human psychology don't stand a chance. You may as well be telling heroin addicts to "just don't get addicted bro".

You can show kids /r/Instagramreality/ [1]. I doubt it will help.

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/Instagramreality/

> You may as well be telling heroin addicts to "just don't get addicted bro".

that makes no sense, it would be more like telling people that are not yet addicted: "dont get addicted bro".

and yes, dont fucking get addicted

edit: humans are also attracted to fire, we tell kids, "dont stick your fingers into the fire", they learn.

I'm upvoting, because the crux of this comes down to proper parenting.

It's the job of the parents to teach kids how the world works, including what are fictional constructs that should not be used for any kind of measurement.

That’s probably lost the time they go to school where social pressure is stronger than any form of parenting — that’s why DARE and banning social media doesn’t work, what a good parent is supposed to do is give them enough information with which their kids can handle the situation. They will try out weed and will have a secret tiktok whether you like it or not, and I much rather they tell me about these so that I can help when they feel lost.

Of course don't get addicted. Everyone knows that, even people who end up addicted.

If "just don't do X" worked, no one would be fat, corrupt, addicted, or injured in workplace accidents.

But people don't work that way, and "don't do X" is hopelessly reductive -- it leaves out all of the (often very strong) factors that drive people to actually do 'X', such as non-stop marketing on TV, movies, radio, and internet apps pushing them to look, think, act, and buy the same things.

Some people refuse to acknowledge the fact that a lot of what drives emotion is subliminal and can't be logic'd away. It doesn't matter if you know it's fake, if you see nothing but perfect 10's all day, then look in the mirror, you're gonna feel ugly. If you see nothing but people in G-wagons all day, your shitbox Honda is gonna make you feel like a failure.

That's not even considering that fact that the sheer volume of fake that gets dumped on people completely skews the logic aspect too. Even if you wanted to be rational about you successes and failures, how are you even supposed to know where you really stand?

> It doesn't matter if you know it's fake

I am reminded of the study that found that placebos "worked" (had positive effects) even when the patient knew it was a placebo[1]. Unrealistic standards of beauty perpetuated by digitally manipulated images in advertising and social media can mess you up the same way, even when you know what is at play. You can be manipulated by an ad even when you know it is an ad trying to sell you something you likely don't need.

[1]: https://www.apa.org/monitor/2011/03/placebos

There's no need to single out children. There's plenty more adults -- Gen X, Boomers, and probably Silent generation folks, too -- who seem to have completely lost their minds after finding their way onto the internet in the last decade.

What do you mean it isn't real?

Do you mean that anything projected onto a display isn't palpable, so it isn't real? That seems odd: what about my bank statement, or the comment you just left?

Or are you saying that people shouldn't care if they are misled by things on the internet? I get that people shouldn't believe Hollywood movies are real, but what about a video that someone makes which purports to be their real life?

I am trying to interpret your statement, but having trouble parsing it.

I think at this point in time any image on a screen should be at least suspected of not being real. It’s just too easy now but our sense of credulity has not kept up.

well of course the image is real in so far as it exists, but it is not the persons real face. ANYONE can be photoshopped to look like anything, industrial strength makeup can perform mostly realworld photoshops. It is quite obvious that those who engage in such does not look like that without the makeup.

I am saying that people must exercise some thoughts about what is natural. I could pay someone to put my face in a tom cruise movie, and be just like him. Also, I dont believe that people make videos that "purports to be their real life" as such, I mean sure, they produce a video, but do they explicitly say "this is my real face with no makeup, and this is the entirety of my life, ONLY these glamerous things you see" ? and EVEN if they do, people must simply understand what medium they are watching. Find the latest John Wick movie, and it will claim hard to be real life, claim shit is real, but its not. If someone on instagram or tiktok makes claims, judge them for what they are.

Now sometimes it might be hard, but the obvious cases are EASY. its extremely easy to see when someone has industrial strength makeup, uses smoothening filters that takes away ALL details etc

Given he is referring to a mental illness issue happening in teen girls, I don't think your tough guy advice is really useful here.

its developing into mental illness because everyone is just 100% encouraging and indulging the insanity. Do you honestly think this great new world of never calling people out on their BS, for fear of hurting their fee-fees is helping anyone?

I honestly just don't believe that attitude is helpful for people, teen girls especially. It's a societal issue that can't be addressed just by admonishing someone

I have a coworker who is 26. If anyone at all brings up being older (and most are), she bursts into tears about her "lost" years. She is a TikTok addict. This will not go well.

what's the deal with her lost years? Were they like really tragic or something? I don't get it.

without knowing the specifics, im gonna make a generic guess: she probably begins to realize that what she focused on during those years are not what she now realizes matters more. And she figures its probably not possible to perform a course correction at this point. I will no doubt be downvoted to oblivion for saying it, but this is becoming an increasingly big thing, in the next 10-20 years it will be an order of magnitude worse than now.

I mean that’s just growing up. I’d love to be a teen again with the life experience I have now. But that’s just a fantasy of course, nobody gets to do that.

ah yah, something akin to the Defining Decade https://www.amazon.com/Defining-Decade-Your-Twenties-Matter/...

The irony is that people who are looking at their lost years are not realizing that they are probably making the same mistake with their present. In 10 years they will look back and think those were lost as well.

Alternatively, now everybody has the technology to make themselves look younger in their pictures if they feel the desire to. No need to be a photoshop / aftereffects expert.

Social media is a scourge. In 20 yrs, we'll be reading about the harm it's done as much as smoking and alcoholism.

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