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Treat Facebook Like Big Tobacco

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Re: Treat Facebook Like Big Tobacco

#51

Post by [deleted] »

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #25
SilasX wrote: post #5

I think it's a good (if inflammatory) analogy: in both cases, people are aware, in the abstract, of dangers, but systematically underestimate them by a big margin. People knew "smoking is bad for you", but didn't appreciate how bad. People know "Facebook violates privacy" but not the depth of the profile they've made on you across numerous websites. People know "You shouldn't compare yourself to others and feel bad a…

I think the fundamental difference is that smoking actually shortens lives by years. On the other hand, Facebook's privacy violations have . . . made people feel a little squicky? What concrete harm has been done? Nothing to rival even a hundredth of tobacco's death toll. That's not to say we shouldn't have laws and regulations around privacy, but personally I think it's a bit of a stretch to compare Facebook and Phi…

[deleted]

Re: Treat Facebook Like Big Tobacco

#52

Post by filoleg »

shahbaby wrote: post #47

Tobacco is inherently bad for you. Facebook can be depending on how you use it.

>Facebook can be [bad] depending on how you use it.

The same can be said about many things, including movies, video games, twitter, kitchen knives, construction tools, etc. Not trying to diminish your point btw, I wholeheartedly agree with it.

Re: Treat Facebook Like Big Tobacco

#53

Post by Circuits »

Barrin92 wrote: post #29
asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the fundamental difference is that smoking actually shortens lives by years. On the other hand, Facebook's privacy violations have . . . made people feel a little squicky? What concrete harm has been done? Nothing to rival even a hundredth of tobacco's death toll. That's not to say we shouldn't have laws and regulations around privacy, but personally I think it's a bit of a stretch to compare Facebook and Phi…

the suicide rate, especially among adolescent women has increased by almost 70% from 2001 to now, self-harm has increased, rate of depression, anxiety and related illnesses has increased in that demographic. Among young men as well, albeit to a lesser extent. While it will take more time to figure out precisely how social media impacts the development of teenagers and young adults, the relationship is pretty unambigu…

This is a classic example of: "Who is responsible for the death, the gun or the man pulling the trigger?" and from what I have seen, most people want to blame the gun or in this case, FB. If someone is unstable you can't blame FB for that, FB didn't make them unstable.. perhaps their excessive use of FB resulted in social problems that lead to an instability but you can hardly blame FB for that.

I don't know about you guys but I am seriously getting tired of people blaming everything and everyone else but themselves for their problems in life.

Re: Treat Facebook Like Big Tobacco

#55

Post by sytelus »

First, you need to look at human attention as a commodity just like gold - available in fixed quantity and everyone wants piece of it. It turns out that FB managed to conquer large portion of human attention after it emerged. This also meant massive attention transfer from news media to FB. However until year ago, FB benevolently gave back significant pie of its attention share to news media by heavily promoting their stories. After last year's WEF meeting, FB took sudden unilateral decision to reduce sharing its attention pie with news media. Several media companies saw their traffic dropped precipitously, sometime cut down all the way to 90%. The management folks at these media companies tried reach out to FB management to appeal but it all fall on deaf ears. The result is the barrage of articles from news media for any and everything they can possibly find on FB. If someone publishes little study on "FB is bad for you" you can count on news media to amplify it all over. If there is nothing new available then media folks get opinion writers to write zero-information articles. It's surreal to see this war for attention playing out between FB and media.

Re: Treat Facebook Like Big Tobacco

#56

Post by frosted-flakes »

patrick5415 wrote: post #43
stevetursi wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hello, my name is Steve and I'm addicted to Facebook. It has been 3 months since I deactivated my account. Kidding aside (I'm not really kidding) In my last year using facebook, I was aware of all the privacy shenanigans, and I saw news articles every day about things like cambridge analytica. None of that mattered. But the thing that actually got me to deactivate my account was realizing that it was all performant.…

I deleted my Facebook about 5 years ago but hung on to my Instagram. I was never very active, but about a year ago I noticed a similar trend to the behavior you describe: I’d post something and wait with bated breath to see how many likes it got. Didn’t like how that made me feel, so IG got deleted too.

I find that this behaviour happens to me everywhere, even on HN. Often, I'll spend ten minutes writing a comment, only to realise that I'm only replying because I want the attention, and that what I have to say really doesn't add anything to what's already there. That's when I end up backing out and erasing away what I wrote. (I almost did that now, but I decided to post anyway.)

And when I do end up posting, it's impossible for me to not check for replies or upvotes. I wish HN had a way to hide my karma score from the header.

Re: Treat Facebook Like Big Tobacco

#57

Post by jvagner »

Circuits wrote: post #53
Barrin92 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the suicide rate, especially among adolescent women has increased by almost 70% from 2001 to now, self-harm has increased, rate of depression, anxiety and related illnesses has increased in that demographic. Among young men as well, albeit to a lesser extent. While it will take more time to figure out precisely how social media impacts the development of teenagers and young adults, the relationship is pretty unambigu…

This is a classic example of: "Who is responsible for the death, the gun or the man pulling the trigger?" and from what I have seen, most people want to blame the gun or in this case, FB. If someone is unstable you can't blame FB for that, FB didn't make them unstable.. perhaps their excessive use of FB resulted in social problems that lead to an instability but you can hardly blame FB for that. I don't know about yo…

But that's not really how societies work.

Re: Treat Facebook Like Big Tobacco

#58

Post by chc »

Circuits wrote: post #17

An addiction to social media... you have got to be kidding me? If you have an addiction to social media then the problem is with YOU, not social media. FB has problems but people spending to much time on it is not one of them or rather not for people who have any sense of self respect, discipline and dignity. If you can't regulate the time you are spending on FB and it is altering your life then that is your fault. C…

People say all of the same things about alcoholics and drug addicts. It's defect with the person, they're irresponsible, they lack self-respect and discipline, they're just bad parents — I've heard literally all of these about substance abusers.

So for me, this comment doesn't seem to highlight differences as much as similarities.

Re: Treat Facebook Like Big Tobacco

#59

Post by harimau777 »

Circuits wrote: post #53
Barrin92 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the suicide rate, especially among adolescent women has increased by almost 70% from 2001 to now, self-harm has increased, rate of depression, anxiety and related illnesses has increased in that demographic. Among young men as well, albeit to a lesser extent. While it will take more time to figure out precisely how social media impacts the development of teenagers and young adults, the relationship is pretty unambigu…

This is a classic example of: "Who is responsible for the death, the gun or the man pulling the trigger?" and from what I have seen, most people want to blame the gun or in this case, FB. If someone is unstable you can't blame FB for that, FB didn't make them unstable.. perhaps their excessive use of FB resulted in social problems that lead to an instability but you can hardly blame FB for that. I don't know about yo…

I don't think "people are to blame for the problems in their life" explains significant changes in the rates of those problems occurring. It doesn't make sense that people as a group would become less moral/resolute/intelligent without any cause.

Re: Treat Facebook Like Big Tobacco

#60

Post by tosser0001 »

randyrand wrote: post #10

Who else finds this really silly? FB is just a social network. It's where dumb people post dumb things. How does it deserve this much new press.

I think the election of Donald Trump was the triggering event for the backlash. There are a significant number of people that feel it was one of the principal reasons why he was elected. I know several people that quit in direct response to that.

I find it odd that it is simultaneously a dying platform and an all-consuming monstrosity that must be destroyed.

Anyone who reads these types of threads and didn’t know what Facebook was would probably be startled to find it’s mostly just pictures of your aunt’s cats, etc.

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