Ex-Meta employee says his warnings of Instagram's harm to teens were ignored
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
But for adults, as status seeking individuals we’ve been given a platform that allows us to efficiently vie for status against one another.
The innuendos, humble bragging, etc. how is that any different than driving a Porsche down the freeway? Is social media more pervasive, gamified, and convenient? Is that why it’s bad?
I subscribe to the idea that social media is society holding a mirror up to itself. It is certainly divisive, but if all that had ever prevented that division is this rapid dissemination we have now, is that really the platforms’ faults?
It’s just more raw, real, fake, and everything people are anyway.
It takes the normal signaling and amplifies it.
I mean, some news is good. News all the time makes people sick.
Seeing your neighbors car every once in a while is ok. Seeing it every day and the cars of everyone you know stresses people out.
There’s data showing that this stuff makes people have poorer mental health. Especially teens. And especially teen girls.
It’s similar, but just worse.
Are boys less affected by this?
When I hear that a franchise owner doesn’t allow their kids to eat at said franchise it raises alarms. And yet…
Not everybody knows how to use /s or jk.
If your immediate reaction is along the lines of "surely sentiment analysis will analyze all the other words in my post" - consider what happens if your post is split into multiple posts. Some of which, perhaps, are images or gifs rather than words. And some of which refer to pre-existing context between the two people communicating and of which the sentiment analysis cannot possibly be aware.
Anyway, I should get back in the kitchen. I have vegetables to chop.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/19/style/tiktok-avoid-modera...
And that’s only taking about plain speech, not even touching on sarcasm or passive aggressive language, which is a whole deeper level that is even harder to detect…
Results speak for themselves: https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/13-explanations-mental-...
No mention of the continued decline of material conditions in the west or the growing wealth disparity, for instance. They bring up unemployment rates but then say it can’t be the economy cause unemployment went down, ignoring how unemployment classification changed after 08, and they don’t even mention what unemployment stat they used. Not to mention I can easily say they got work but it was trash and didn’t pay well. Or their parents struggled to make ends meet, were not there for the kids, and they lacked proper parenting. So many other possible explanations.
But, nope, it’s all social media and phones.
I imagine this is a similar problem that Meta won't address until they're forced to.
I don't see the issue with using AI to generate video ads. Sure, it makes it unreasonably cheap to produce video. But the cost of displaying the ad is the main cost anyway.
One of them was a pill that supposedly grew your penis, another was for some conspiracy theory site, and one was just a straight up phishing/scam attempt.
Here's one of the products:
https://thepatriotsdigest.co/code-red-blackout
Here's one of the ads:
https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/?active_status=all&ad_t...
Apparently all of these were somehow reviewed by a human and determined to be within Facebooks guidelines.
A team of facebook engineers could write an AI to at least flag that stuff for manual review in under a day.
Personally, going forward, this is going to be an automatic disqualification for me for any product or service. If you can't even be fucked to hire an actor, I'd imagine you can't be fucked to build whatever it is correctly either. No sale. I don't assume this will be a tectonic shift in my consumption habits anyway. I don't buy shit from instagram ads and the like and I have a feeling that's where this is going to really take off, but still.
I would rather buy a product that put 90% of the budget into the product and 10% to ads as opposed to 50%/50%.
But I'm sure, they will first A/B test this with real actors to see what the results are before they decide on the course.
It feels like everywhere you look online is nothing but scams and grift now. Everyone out to fleece everyone else with minimum viable products. Nonsense letter combinations masquerading as brands all over Amazon hocking aliexpress garbage with poorly photoshopped product images comes to mind immediately.
I only got halfway before it stopped letting me report.
Now LinkedIn doesn't let me report things anymore. It just gives me an "unknown error" message.
*AI FIRE, i got it backwards.
All the fake accounts remain. Because it's not in LinkedIns interest to reduce their usercount.
FB/Instagram is fueled by AI. It makes them money. They're not going to see this kind of 'pink slime' content as being a hindrance.
It doesn't help being in a shared custody situation. Where my voice was ignored when it came to introducing the device to her in the first place (aware of some of the dangers that lurked at that time). My ex (her mom) are in a very amicable post-relationship, but we just couldn't agree on the "own phone" thing. Too early. After she's driving age. If she can't legally enlist she shouldn't be connected to the hyperverse. She can't decide what's right and smart, just what she thinks is right and smart.
One very important thought is to remember that these low life-experience minors just don't have the experience and mental faculty to deal with low quality bait the same way as those who have come before her and grew up seeing the dastardly intentions of people. They are still very naive, and the power imbalance of bullshit detection.
Anyway, I don't think I have a point here except to say I am ashamed for my role in bringing the pervasive mobile device reality to fruition, no matter how small a role I may have played in it. At least how it stands, now. At this point I wish there were alternatives to "the internet" that work alongside and identically to it, but with more controls and regulation to protect minors.
That's not to say there shouldn't be a regular internet coexisting, but one where our devices can choose what network to operate near identically on, but has more accountability.
More than one kid in our large district has been catfished and had their nudes leak and criminal investigations that lead nowhere.
One kid has tried to start a fight online and wound up paralyzed.
These are sub-16 aged minors playing hardball with the pros.
I get sent links to videos that are cropped from landscape to portrait back to landscape. The videos have irrelevant emoji all over them. They are even split in half, showing two separate videos at the same time (I presume in case you lose interest with one).
Mind boggling as someone that grew up seeing the advent of streaming high definition video, with the ability to skip around, adjust the playback speed, subtitle, etc.
Older folks are more wary of trusting strangers, but way more willing to believe bullshit if it agrees with their established worldviews.
Whereas teens are SHOCKINGLY willing to trust strangers on the internet with deeply personal content, like nudes and mental health or medical stuff.
The risks are certainly a bit more dire these days than back in the 80s and 90s, but there was also just a more careful culture. Platforms these days want you to share everything, and so kids just fall for it because they want genuine connection... but can't find it.
"In fact, according to a recent Deloitte survey, members of Gen Z fall for these scams and get hacked far more frequently than their grandparents do."
https://www.vox.com/technology/23882304/gen-z-vs-boomers-sca...
Which is all to say none of this is the result of a “broken” system, it’s the result of a well designed evil system.
Technologists weren’t “trying” to build these systems, but happily devoted their lives to advertising without knowing jack shit about the industry or its effects on society.
Jesus Christ. The catfishing thing is bad too, but not surprising by now. This is a new kind of heartbreaking thing.
In this industry people are quick to say "but it's a tool! It depends on how people use it!" But the reality is that we very well know how some specific demographics use it, and we know it's overall not good. Both because of the addictive component, and the bullying/graphic content, etc.
That’s shocking! How do people survive over there, wasting a third of their lifetimes and their mental and physical health as well in the process?
only ~%20 joking…
Teenagers don’t typically need to survive. Half of it is probably throughout the day at school, in class, in between classes and in public transportation. And the rest is likely at night instead of socializing/studying/sleeping.
We hosted two teenagers from UK and US this summer at two different times, friends & extended family. They both spent a major part of their time locked inside their room scrolling TikTok, then scrolling TikTok some more on the couch of our living room. One of them was open about it and recognized she spends on average 10h/day on it when she’s on holiday. It’s really bad, an entire generation is particularly depressed, desperate and doesn’t know how to stop the pattern.
They can be on holiday in a foreign country for the first time, and still struggle not to waste their time on the compulsion, scrolling for hours instead of enjoying discovering something new.
I think ultimately what we’re saying is people survive, but it results in ATH all time high rates of loneliness, ATL rates of intercourse, and surprise surprise less babies, less families. Just an overall slowing down of adulting and building one’s life. It’s quite sad.