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Comment by TechDebtDevin | Hacker News Reader

Yesterday I woke up, naturally, I started scrolling. The very first video (on Instagram) was an Uber driver getting pulled out of his car, a guy cocking a gun and executing him. I was barely awake and didn't really have time to react.

For the rest of the day I couldn't stop thinking about it, had high levels of anxiety for a few hours. I told all my friends I'm switching off for a bit on the socials. Mastodon and signal for a bit.

Edit: Just thinking about this happening yesterday puts me into a high state of anxiety.. Its absolutely bllsht these companies can effect us in this way.

Second Edit: Its my choice to expose myself knowingly, not entirely blaming meta. And I'm not going to anymore, but this is a more common experience than usual since Zuck got a chain and Tall-T

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> Its absolutely bllsht these companies can effect us in this way.

I'd be one of the last people to defend Instagram/Meta/Zuck, but is that really your takeaway from this? Execution videos are absolutely against Instagram's TOS and I'm sure they want it on their platform even less than you.

If anything, Instagram's issue is they're too heavy on the robo-censorship. My friend posted a photo of him standing on one leg with a chair in his hands, making a goofy face, with the caption "I'm gonna hit you with this chair!" directed at no one in particular, and it was taken down for, quote: "encouraging violence and leading to risk of physical harm, or a direct threat to public safety." Appeal was rejected too, and the post had to be deleted.

This happens because they're trying to moderate against people posting execution videos. One slipped through the cracks seemingly, but it's not like they don't put a lot of effort into preventing that. It's pretty hard to do at Meta's scale where most of the earth's population is using their platforms.

Moderation has basically gone away... Don't you think there's a extra bit of ML that goes into the first reel I'm seeing after not opening the app for 10 hours also? I'm making assumptions here, but this was the first reel. These videos have thousands of likes.

Yep. Just see YouTube comment sections with clear pornographic images in certain users' profiles–accounts which have existed for enough time for the dumbest of moderation campaigns to have identified as inappropriate.

Still there tho. The principles are irrelevant to the reality.

> Execution videos are absolutely against Instagram's TOS and I'm sure they want it on their platform even less than you.

Hardly a comforting statement to someone who just watched one of these videos served algorithmically to them on a very, very mature platform.

The ML moderation false positives/negatives do not annoy me as much as the slot machine design of reels/tiktoks/shorts. I do think the constraints of the medium's design (very short, random, visual, crowd-controlled) create perverse incentives.

The take-away is that not that they are poorly moderated (which is true).

The point is that these short-form videos deliver no actual value to those consuming them but come with plenty of mental health downsides. (Literal PTSD, for starters.)

The only way to win is not to play!

Some of the funniest things I've ever seen are on those platforms, but is it worth it.. Prob not.

I almost never get videos where people actually die unless I really want to (and usually, I don't). Lots of close calls, suggestive images, but an actual death caught on camera, no. Even the killing of animals is not something I see often, even though it is part of daily life for many farmers. Maybe some of it slips through, but algorithms tend to not let that kind of content pass.

If anything, I find mainstream news to be worse. They don't show the act of murder itself, but they are definitely going to show you a bunch of scenes and let your imagination fill the gaps. They constantly tell you how ugly the world is and how it is becoming worse. It is all war, natural disasters, climate crisis, overpopulation (or is it underpopulation), toxic chemicals, etc... Yes, these are real problems, but these are problems we solve. Wars end, natural disasters are better predicted and mitigated, we are using more and more renewable energies, it turns out that population self-regulates, toxic chemicals get banned and replacements are found, etc... It seems we are breeding a whole generation of people who think we are doomed instead of seeing all these things as obstacles to overcome.

Overall, I find social media more positive than mainstream news. I dislike how they turn our brains into mush, but we get more cute girls dancing and less massacres in Gaza.

Yudkowski mentioned a nice thought blurb about cancer.

1. More cancer cases being recognized efficiently.

2. More bombardment of cancer cases news through diverse outlets.

3. Social media refreshing our minds with same cancer cases, even 4-5 year old ones.

4. The same news circulating through offline interactions.

This gives us insecurity that a particular disease is out of control. I think there was a Lesswrong post about this phenomenon.

A couple assumptions you're making here I'd disagree with: 1. Yudkowski is ever worth listening to. 2. That this is just some antecdotal experience (the whole world is having), that isn't backed by any scientific merrit. I don't have time in the middle of my work day to go find all that, but we all know this is something measurable.

How humans adapt remains to be seen, it seems like a lot of (young) people adapt by shoving the barrel of a gun in their... Maybe they would have done that anyways idk.

"Yesterday I woke up, naturally, I started scrolling. The very first video ..."

May I suggest this minor hygienic practice ?

When you wake up in the morning, immediately go on a walk.

Just 5 minutes. Walk around the block. Whatever.

The first thing your eyes see in the morning should not be print/screen and the first thing your body does should not be sitting.

> Yesterday I woke up, naturally, I started scrolling. The very first video (on Instagram) was an Uber driver getting pulled out of his car, a guy cocking a gun and executing him. I was barely awake and didn't really have time to react.

Remember that (old?) internet 'meme' (concept, more like it) that was something like "can't unsee this"? Yeah, that.

There's all sorts of "infohazards" (written and visual) that one has to avoid today, largely a product of the social media landscape.

I've heard such practices and attempts at curation as psycho-social security (or something like that); the process of deliberate avoidance of certain "content" and attempts/diligence when interacting with these various platforms and landscapes to avoid such things. It actually does take a concerted effort now to avoid being exposed to "content" like you described, as addiction and "habit" of "scrolling" is in some ways more natural than not, now. Strange time to be alive.

that's one thing I miss about the old internet. Not every piece of info was a "meme." Some were literally just ideas. Not everything is a freaking meme!!!!

Yeah X/Twitter was running ads for a hunting game that showed you a real video of a fox dying slowly after being shot repeatedly. Can't block it and it popped up multiple times over a few weeks. It's getting to the point that I can't browse Twitter in public just due to the ads.

You are lucky. Most people don't have the introspection to draw the link between a video they consumed and the resulting anxiety afterward. They just keep coming back for the dopamine hit without realizing that they are effectively volunteering themselves for PTSD.

random sidenote:

I think growing up online alongside websites like Rotten and LiveLeak from a young age pretty much desensitized me to being bothered by such types of videos or images. The late 90s and early 00s internet was wild.

The difference between then and now is that on the 90's and 00's Internet, you had to go and actively find that kind of content yourself. Now it's the first thing you see in your feed after logging into FaceBook, YouTube, Instagram, and whatever else.

I grew up with this, born in 90, have witnessed gun violence in real life. I'm still not prepared to see someone getting executed in 4k immediately after I wake up. My past experiences don't prevent the type of anxiety that it causes, nor am I going to sweep for Instagram because I'm less of a pussy than the 12 yr olds seeing it right when they wake up also.

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