Zuckerberg personally rejected Meta's proposals to improve teen mental health
cnn.com
cnn.com
> After sitting on the proposal for months, Zuckerberg wrote to his deputies in April 2020 asserting that there was “demand” for the filters and that he had seen “no data” suggesting the filters were harmful, according to the complaint.
So, why didn't instagram ceo provide that data? Seems a huge oversight for someone in that position.
Because there is no data that show causation?
I’m not sure they made the right choice in the absence of data, but I do believe that they didn’t have the data or a good way to get it.
You don’t think, for example, that most people would think it’s a bad idea to write software to facilitate showing teenagers unattainable and more desirable versions of them selves?
That ship sailed with the invention of the printing press. This conversation happened in the fashion industry with publications like Cosmopolitan long long ago.
The difference is in fashion magazine it is editors who choose what to project. With apps, it is teenagers themselves who create versions of themselves because kids compare themselves to others and it gets very clique - the apps aren't the problem per se, it is human behavior that is buggy and that is the real thing to fix because the next thing will come around that feeds off of the same suboptimal pathways in our brains, whether it is designed intentionally to make money or not.
At least if you remove the thing wholesale you can do the PR push along with it, and actually do something _good for people_ (at least if you subscribe to this concept in general).
I think it's hard to suss out some stuff quantitatively on this, but ... honestly? If you do qualitative interviews with a bunch of kids across the spectrum, have quotes with them, an info packet with all these articles.... maybe you're wrong, but the upside feels important and the downside feels pretty trivial.
After that, I bet they definitely want to avoid the same bad PR. It would be worse if they ran it on children, and someone died during the course of their experiment.
Doubt we’ll ever see them do it again.
-Jim Barksdale
Even if you have the data, this is likely all about the CEO not really wanting to hear the argument or go in this direction and not his officer’s inability to provide supporting data.
The hypothesis here is that usage of professional but automated editing tools to make people look more beautiful than they really are promotes unrealistic competition standards and makes people feel worse about how they look in a regular mirror that is showing them the truth.
How do you A/B test this? Giving the feature to some people and not others isn't good enough. The impact is because of seeing other people look more beautiful on the Internet than they actually look in person. How are you going to prevent a user from seeing the photos of other users who use filters? Even if the global social graph had strict partitions, which I imagine isn't the case, these photos leak into web search, news articles, and the same technology gets adopted by other platforms. You can't A/B test something that impacts the entire broad culture. The world is too connected.
Zuckerberg allegedly vetoed plans to ban filters that simulate plastic surgery on Meta-owned platforms, according to the unredacted lawsuit filed by Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell (D), and ignored requests from top executives to boost investments in teens’ well-being."
Were they saying "for the record" just as an idiom, or did they have a particular paper trail purpose in mind when putting something in writing to the CEO?
If there's an issue, you partner with your superiors to fix it. This is what the Insta CEO is trying to do (because he believes there's an issue). Having done that, yes, you leave a paper trail to cover your ass.
From what I can find, the correlation between social media use and mental health problems is small [1] or nonexistent [2]. There are few causal studies, and their results are even smaller, eg: halting Facebook usage for a month decreased depression by 0.09 stdev [3].
[1] "We found a small but significant positive correlation (k=12 studies, r=.11, p<.01) between adolescent social media use and depressive symptoms."
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01650...
[2] "There was no association between frequency of social media use and SITBs [self-injurious thoughts and behaviors] however, studies on this topic were limited."
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02727...
[3] "A study using an experimental design measured the effects of abstaining from Facebook for four weeks in an adult population and found that there was a slight decrease (SD=0.09) in depression."
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01650...
My first criticism would be that intervening only to restrict Facebook would likely just result in a substitution effect, with instagram, snapchat, youtube, reddit, etc filling the void. Likewise, if I remove cake from my diet for 4 weeks but make no restrictions on all other forms of sugary baked goods, I'm not likely to see the same magnitude of effect as I would've otherwise.
Here's an associational study that found almost 3x odds of having depression between the most and least frequent users of social media sites. This was among US adults aged 19-32 and adjusted for age, sex, race, relationship status, living situation, household income, and education level https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4853817/
This article looks promising: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Facebook#Psycholo...
I know the media often cites Instagram's internal research saying "we make body image issues worse for 1 in 3 teen girls", but the actual stat is not too damning IMO: 'Among teen girls with body image issues, 32% said Instagram made it worse, 22% said Instagram made it better, and 46% said it had no impact' [1]
[1] page 14 of https://about.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Instagram-Te...
Focusing on beauty filters really undermines the narrative. If you are talking about ways that Meta harms children and the first thing you list is that they didn’t ban beauty filters, it actually makes Zuckerberg seem reasonable.
This article's a nothingburger (unfortunately).
Obviously the bad version of anything is always available at some level of effort, but also obviously “level of effort” is in fact the only deterrent that exists.
Rejecting all proposals indicates any harms of the platform are inbuilt fundamentally.
Yet somehow each of these stories always goes viral and everyone seems "stunned" like "how can this amazing human Zuck (the worst scum of the Earth as most other big tech CEOs are) do this!?? So surprising given his impeccable record as a decent human being who cares about the well-being of our children..."!!
Can ads on the platforms in question be opted out of?
I mean google lets people get out of YouTube ads. YouTube is practically unusable with ads once you’ve had adfree.
The number of teen girls that I’ve seen with cut marks is terrifying. The dramatic increase in mental health issues is shocking.
I know with my kids social media has made every one of their challenging teenage moments more difficult.
Correlation does not prove causation.
But this isn't a debate, this is a decision. The agent is Meta. The field is their products. The goal is reduced teen mental health issues. And the buck stops with Zuckerberg.
"Correlation does not prove causation" alone is not an excuse to avoid an action. It is a principle that can be used to compare actions for how likely they are to achieve the goal, and so it must be combined with some other action and evidence that makes that other action appear more likely to work. Without that, then the action suggested by the correlation remains the action most likely to work, and so it must still be taken.
If, for whatever reason, Zuckerberg doesn't want these changes to be made, then he needs to either dole out resources to gather the evidence he demands and which may free him from them, or he needs to implement some other action which may turn out to work.
If he doles out the resources, and the evidence comes back and establishes causation, then he has to make the changes. It sucks for him, but the goal isn't to please Zuckerberg, it's to reduce teen mental health issues.
If he doles out the resources, and the evidence comes back failing to establish causation, then that's convenient for him. But he still has to try something else, because the goal is reduced teen mental health issues and it has not been achieved.
If he goes straight to implementing some other action, and it at least appears to work, then he doesn't have to make the changes he didn't want to make. That's great for him, and since teen mental health issues were reduced, he can put it behind him.
If he goes straight to implementing some other action, and it doesn't work, then still has to try something else, because the goal is reduced teen mental health issues and it has not been achieved.
And why does buck stop with Zuckerberg, not parents, school, govt. Why do under 13 have a smartphone? Is the usage monitored? Should Govt bring legislations on how much phone can be used for social media/video games by a child? Should bullying be handled at local level instead of a Corp controlling all?
Meta should keep the filters and actively develop more filters that users want and enjoy.
It can also create resources for parents to better deal with the risks of social media, the two are not in conflict.
Still, parents, due to various factors had to let their kids be kids, and fend for themselves.
The kids didn’t seem to suffer massive mental health issues though, things pretty much worked out in the end.
Fast forward, parents may be more overworked, or may be addicted to the same devices we’re discussing here, so things may be slightly worse, but we’re seeing massive mental health challenges (not solely as a result of insta etc…).
Parents are ill equipped to cope with this from my experience, companies are weaponizing their apps to draw eyeballs with a level of competency never seen before, we have few defences, it needs to be on the co. / gov.
It’s claiming exactly that: certain social media as a cause of mental health deterioration among teens especially girls
https://pastafarians.org.au/pastafarianism/pirates-and-globa...
The number of women I know with cut marks is terrifying - but they grew up before Instagram and Facebook.
America just has a culture of pushing limits and often those limits were there for a reason. Chesterton's fence and all that. All this social upheaval and people aren't happy. So much progress and everyone seems to be more and more miserable. So what is the solution? Ban Instagram filters? Make self esteem our golden bull? Begin goose stepping? I don't think anyone knows, and we are all just looking for someone to blame.
I point to my sibling post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38201807
Visual social media like TikTok and instagram seem to be a different beast than TV, WhatsApp and other media.
Notice, I'm not saying the panty wringers were wrong about all the stuff that came before. I've come to terms with the fact that they were largely right. The corruption of each successive generation actually happened. What I'm saying is, it seems that this is just an artifact of culture rather than standalone negative impacts of new things. I don't know what to do with that information, but it is staring me in the face.
The legal use of dark patterns needs to be eliminated. This is the core issue.
No? But if they're anxious about posting with their own appearance then they might just look for a different app altogether.
[0] note: they're not switching, because kids are already using all of them
https://nowthisnews.com/news/tiktoks-bold-glamour-filter-fea...
My understanding is because of things like this Facebook and Instagram were losing interest in the teen market (ie. 'legacy' social media), so it doesn't surprise me that they decided to incorporate similar functionality.
I'm not saying Zuck is a saint here, but this is more of an issue with social media being a corrosive force in general... the modern version of big tobacco in a way.
There's nothing "to be fair" about here; it's disgusting no matter how you frame it. Big tobacco did disgusting things to glamorize smoking and hook generations of people on nicotine. The core "issue" you're describing is a bad one: being unable to concede even the smallest sliver of your engagement metrics in the interest of not being a driving force behind children's body dysmorphia. It's just as bad as adding camera filters to let kids see themselves lighting up a Marlboro.
At the corporate level it's really weighing optics vs features that drive engagement and revenue.
Let's not pretend like young people chasing sex and beauty is some brand new concept only concocted in the last 15 years by the evil developers at Facebook.
They had specific rules in place with a ban, then Zuck removed the ban. It's not like there wasn't a line in the sand here.
> It's also a bit of a can of worms if Meta no longer allows certain modifications to images of people on its platform "for the sake of the children."
That's not what's being discussed here. There's been no proposal to ban images. The proposal is to ban camera filters. Nothing would be stopping you from modifying and posting images. Nobody is having their freedoms taken away (and having Meta offer you certain kinds of camera filters by default is in no way a form of censorship).
> Let's not pretend like young people chasing sex and beauty is some brand new concept only concocted in the last 15 years by the evil developers at Facebook.
Let's also not pretend that Facebook doesn't advertise filters in Facebook and Instagram, pushing kids to use them. Fifteen years ago you could photoshop a picture. Today, kids are being _actively solicited_ by social media to use these filters.
Researchers are actively telling us that these are harmful to kids' self-images (we've known this for many years!). They accomplish no useful outcome, and the largest net effect is harm.
(For non-Italian people, it literally means "this piece of sh*". It's a rude yell at a person who is not behaving morally or ethically well proved of doing harm to other people, and is thus indicted of being a literal ... you know).
Sample size of my neice and her social circle isn't representitive but perhaps it represents a shift.
Don't select a photo from your phone - that brings up the boring old-school photo editor mode.
You want to start a new post by clicking the "+" at the bottom and then swipe to the left or click on "Story" or "Live".
This gives you the advanced AI filters with live preview. They are created and distributed by third parties through a gallery/store like interface.
These are the type that say add dog ears to your head. Or detect when your mouth is open and makes a scary effect. Or can give you perfect skin and AI-upgrade you or turn you into an anime character.
These are what people are talking about. Not some laughable "color filter"
There’s no good decision to make here.
People complain about all kinds of change. That doesn't make the change wrong or mean that it shouldn't be done.
- there isn’t any data which suggests that beauty filters on insta hurt mental health
- if insta disabled such filters, people will simply move to snap or tiktok to use such filters
From the business perspective his veto makes absolute sense. But it’s was to point fingers at him as if he is the boogeyman.
I guess that's one of your jobs as the CEO. The buck stops here and all that.
If tommorow Meta shuts down and the entirety of its assets, all the money, all the infrastructure and the people get repurposed to do science instead of reels, commercials, cat videos, selfies and trending videos, that would be great.
It’s a good platform for certain types of businesses to share information with a lot of people in a channel other than email. Think gyms, restaurants, salons, laundromats, etc.
And then there are people whose businesses run on Facebook. Not that it’s a common thing, but I actually pay a fitness instructor $25/mo to join daily group fitness classes that anre available exclusively via Facebook Live.
If Facebook were to go away, the biggest missing piece up for grabs would be a common platform used by a lot of people to broadcast information to people who share things in common.
If they depend on facebook, it's like asking car mechanics to go back to whatever they were doing before cars were invented.
As if in the absence of this parasitic monopoly an alternative couldn’t be spun up in a matter of days, maybe weeks, given modern frameworks and cloud infrastructure. Hell, they bought WhatsApp. Most of what they have done to it just made it worse or knocked off features from other platforms like Telegram.
I think we need to be able to take a look at ourselves and evaluate what's chaff as tech evolves.
Desire is a stronger force in this universe than need.
If you think only groups and masses have significance, and individuals do not, then I'd be genuinely curious to hear the worldview & belief system behind this. Like what's the phenomenon behind groups coalescing and forming a critical mass?
Only if enough individuals decide together to not do it - enough to not allow the group to form - does it change the math. But unless there is a clear group of folks doing that, communicating that, and co-ordinating with that goal - no individual has any way of determining if they would ‘tip the scales’ or not. So it’s very unlikely to happen ‘naturally’ once a certain degree of momentum has happened.
A type of social prisoners delimma perhaps?
And if you’re noticing this also applied to the Nazi party, you’re not wrong.
Also applies to any other group though.
Sounds like in either case, someone has to take a stance, and hold the line. And such folks might not have individual profitability that involves going along with the group as the highest order.
Shout out to Godwin's law, though hahha.
The challenge I think is that for any individual the power/information dynamic is vastly against them.
Taken to an extreme, one just ends up poor and ostracized (best case!) and made no difference at all.
Any individual in Russia trying to stop the machine that attacked Ukraine would have accomplished nothing but their own destruction. If all the folks against it had taken action, it would have been stopped.
Which is why coordination to do that was, has been, and will continue to be, illegal and targeted by extensive gov’t security apparatus’s.
Not to say Meta is the Russian gov’t, but rather that for any potential employee, their incentive is always to get paid the most and go with the flow, and hope nothing too bad happens.
Taking idealogical stances can be high risk, low reward.
Eh, everyone has a price. The question is just how much.
You pretend that your price is zero or an epsilon away from that. I don't believe that. I don't think you would pick a job offer from a more 'evil' company, if they offered a hundred bucks more.
(I can believe that your price is pretty low compared to other people. But I don't think it's zero.)
Unless you are a nobel peace prize laureate or curing cancer, lets save the judgement.
And I would 100% work at Philip Morris if it meant feeding my family. Why shouldn't an adult be able to smoke a ciggaratte?
I don't drink coffee and don't even live in the U.S. I have absolutely no idea why it wants me so bad to go to sexy coffee shops in Florida. I swear, the spam is worse than when they were trying to sell me Christian dating sites and make me buy Russian wives 15 years ago before they started personalizing ads.