Social media addiction linked to cyberbullying

This is just a theory but my fear is that social media that's optimized for "healthy usage" probably looked more like the forum and blog culture that social media killed.

Optimizing for engagement means you basically have a genetic algorithm on your hands for surfacing the content with the most "viral-potential." Eventually that stuff eats the healthy parts of the internet because people inevitably talk about the viral stuff that's happening, which means your healthy-use forum is nonetheless revolving around the conversation in the viral centers.

From there it's a matter of time before people start going directly to the viral source to keep up with the context and conversation. And once they're there, because it optimizes for engagement, it crowds out their use of everything else.

So there's a natural selective pressure here. Optimizing for engagement/addiction gets you a network effect that leads to overshadowing any other type of socializing. Unless there's some mechanism to actively select against virality and engagement they will naturally rise to the top even independent of ad-impression incentives.

It's like you're hungry and you're reading through an endless stack of menus with this weird idea that the menus will sate your hunger. And you just keep on reading, about sandwiches, pizza and Chinese food. But none of the reading helps. You just keep on getting hungrier.

I think that the Buddhists talk about this state, in their version of Hell.

It's only natural that this would lead to "demoniacal" behavior.

I was molested and raped as a child. Most people had no idea.

I did attempt suicide at age 17 and I began making two grades per year below a C starting after I was raped at the age of twelve and I spent time in an insane asylum.

But I also was one of the top three students of my graduating high school class, had the highest SAT scores of my graduating high school class, won a National Merit Scholarship (to UGA, in fact) based on those scores, etc.

Most people are not talented at identifying indicators of abuse and people in abusive situations are often doing everything in their power to find some high road solution because they know they are at risk of being blamed and ending up in jail or some shit.

When I was institutionalized in my teens, I was initially presumed to be a badly behaved teenager. I distinctly remember having a conversation with a staff member who assumed I was just some asshole teenager and they markedly changed their tune when they found out I was a victim of being molested and raped and I was suicidal and that was why I was hospitalized, not because I was doing bad things to other people.

for a certain definition of aggression. but social media bullying is a Mean Girls phenomenon. it's reputation and character assassination, which is aggressive behavior. male aggression tends to be physical and they spend more time playing video games, while females spend more time on social media. as a result, girls are seeing higher rates of depression compared to boys.

here's the research on this topic that Jonathan Haidt and other academics are maintaining;

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1w-HOfseF2wF9YIpXwUUtP65-...

Because we've given every single person a voice and the promise that their opinion is just as important as everyone else's, despite their understanding or their qualifications, and it has made people collectively entitled and vitriolic.

Couple this with absolutely batshit insane current events for the last ~5 years and you have massive divide.

Then multiply that by the expansion of technology into every day lives, where everyone is connected and has an up-to-date, moment-by-moment window into literally thousands of other lives, and people get extremely detached from their own selves and their own beliefs. They stop thinking for themselves, almost entirely.

Not to mention things like Twitter, with quirks like "you have to fit very heavy conversations into cute little limited messages" so as to even further increase the pressure on public discourse.

All of this friction creates heat, so to speak, and people start realizing that outside their circles are people who are so foreign and different that they MUST be idiot enemies, and thus everyone begins to despise each other, categorizing people and using assumptions about their character against them, all formed from a few blurbs of random information either from context or a few textboxes on a social media profile.

It's just like when one is unable to effectively communicate, they often resort to violence. I firmly believe this is the same thing happening online - it's just a huge, crowded shouting match and since nothing ever happens despite how loud you're screaming, you have to resort to other means to get a rise out of someone else.

I'm not a particularly happy person and I really, _really_ dislike interacting with other people, so I can certainly understand why some of this happens. Life sucks for a lot of people, and being able to express that whilst having the buffer of a computer screen and ethernet cable between you and the other person is certainly a "great power, great responsibility" type of situation.