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Facebook knows Instagram is toxic for teen girls, company documents show

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Re: Facebook knows Instagram is toxic for teen girls, company documents show

#51

Post by agent008t »

ravenstine wrote: post #11

When does a vice of society get created and the creator not know of its harmful effects? Rarely, it seems. In actuality, though, as much as I think it's obvious that Instagram was designed specifically for the mindset of teens (and incidentally the countless with Peter Pan syndrome), it's too easy for us to simply blame Facebook. We are also responsible for raising our children to a certain level of emotional maturit…

I guess the fact that every generation seems to have moral panics about new technology (radio, tv, video games, internet), and every generation seems to complain about the decline of pop culture, led many reasonable people to adopt the heuristic that this is all just the talk of old curmudgeons, and new fads are no worse than old fads.

But what if facebook, instagram, youtube etc. are actually harmful? What if modern pop culture is toxic trash compared to that of the previous decades? What if popular music has, in fact, been getting worse?

Re: Facebook knows Instagram is toxic for teen girls, company documents show

#52

Post by runawaybottle »

mc32 wrote: post #20

It may be more “toxic” for teen girls but it’s more degree than binary. It negatively affects the great majority of people involved. Keeping up with the joneses and in vs out cliques in school are bad enough things that get amplified multiple times perhaps orders of magnitude more in a setting that promotes and encourages negative social behavior. It almost validates the attitudes of anti socials.

My parents keep seeing other people’s kids getting married constantly, and it’s driving them nuts. Also their relatives bought new houses recently. They are obsessed and pretty much make me feel like a loser (or worse, evil for not giving them those things), even though I have different life goals.

And these are grown ass adults, so god knows how the kids deal with it. One thing I’ll say is that other people have a way of smushing this info in your face regardless of what era. They managed to do it when it was just rotary phones, and they’ll manage to do it now with whatever the internet has. In fact, the real interesting one is when someone delivers food to you in jubilation. They will manage to rub it in your face, so Instagram is at the very least an asynchronous form of showing off that you can try to avoid.

Re: Facebook knows Instagram is toxic for teen girls, company documents show

#53

Post by supercanuck »

joelbluminator wrote: post #14

Is it Facebook / Instagram's fault or us as a culture? As a culture we adore beauty, wealth, power...Facebook seems to be just a platform where our natural desires can have a play. Facebook hasn't created this impossible beauty ideal, it was created long long ago by Hollywood and the fashion industry. Facebook just makes it super easy for people to become obsessed with something by "connecting" with it. It used to be…

Is it Facebook / Instagram's fault or us as a culture?

Yes.

Re: Facebook knows Instagram is toxic for teen girls, company documents show

#55

Post by snayan »

nodejs_rulez_1 wrote: post #31
tw04 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's their fault. An individual girl in 1995 who was concerned with her looks had at most a couple dozen people in her life to judge her. In 2021 it's hundreds of millions, and a large portion are more than happy to spout things they would NEVER say in real life. Does society value beauty? Sure. Do models set "unrealistic expectations"? Sure. Are some high school girls assholes to other girls? Absolutely. But once up…

Yes, but on flipside said girl now can and fully expects to be courted by best boys well outside of 1995 logistic reach.

Please reflect on the circumstances in your life that lead you to this belief. In my experience this is a very toxic viewpoint and couldn't be further from the truth.

If anything I'd argue that more than ever both women and men are searching for authenticity in a partner. Something increasingly difficult to come by in our social media fueled world.

Sure, there is a subset on both sides that has been completely sucked in by this culture and measures each others worth by the number of followers on their instagram, but I'd actually view this as a positive. It's really convenient to be able to identify and filter out these vain individuals early on in the dating process.

Keep your head up nodejs_rulez_1, there are still plenty of good women and men out there.

Re: Facebook knows Instagram is toxic for teen girls, company documents show

#56

Post by kwertyoowiyop »

bthrn wrote: post #6
blakesterz wrote: post #2

https://archive.is/egPlc “The research that we’ve seen is that using social apps to connect with other people can have positive mental-health benefits,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at a congressional hearing... “We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls,” said one slide from 2019, summarizing research about teen girls who experience the issues. “Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiet…

Mark’s use of the word “can” is what makes it technically not perjury.

And Frosted Sugar Bombs can be part of a nutritious breakfast.

Re: Facebook knows Instagram is toxic for teen girls, company documents show

#57

Post by fortran77 »

> “When I went on Instagram, all I saw were images of chiseled bodies, perfect abs and women doing 100 burpees in 10 minutes,” said Ms. Vlasova, now 18, who lives in Reston, Va.

I just logged into my Instagram. I saw a guy fixing an old "roundie" television set, someone baking food, some through-the-microscope photos of soldering surface-mount components by hand, a home-made 3D printer, and a couple of clips from musicians. What am I missing here?

Re: Facebook knows Instagram is toxic for teen girls, company documents show

#58

Post by GeekyBear »

joelbluminator wrote: post #14

Is it Facebook / Instagram's fault or us as a culture? As a culture we adore beauty, wealth, power...Facebook seems to be just a platform where our natural desires can have a play. Facebook hasn't created this impossible beauty ideal, it was created long long ago by Hollywood and the fashion industry. Facebook just makes it super easy for people to become obsessed with something by "connecting" with it. It used to be…

Extremist conduct keeps people engaged longer, so they see more ads.

Facebook/YouTube/Twitter all exploit the dark side of human nature. They've been doing it for so many years, that it's difficult to imagine that it's unintentional.

>in Google’s effort to keep people on its video platform as long as possible, “its algorithm seems to have concluded that people are drawn to content that is more extreme than what they started with—or to incendiary content in general,” and adds, “It is also possible that YouTube’s recommender algorithm has a bias toward inflammatory content.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/03/youtube...

Re: Facebook knows Instagram is toxic for teen girls, company documents show

#60

Post by bedhead »

Jonathan Haidt has done a ton of research on this and it's terrifying. His thesis seems to make a lot of sense: boys bully each other physically while girls bully each other reputationally. This is likely why mental health issues for boys and girls have diverged wildly since about 2014, because as lives moved online, this was a recipe for disaster for girls since social media is so perfect for this kind of bullying, but sort of a non-event for boys who were already online playing video games all day. Social media unlocked and turbocharged all those preexisting pathologies for girls.
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