71–80 of 687 posts
Perhaps teen girl culture is what's toxic.
Unfortunately, that bullying is amplified to incredibly toxic levels online.
I don't blame Facebook (or Twitter, or any particular company) for this. We can only blame scale . Some things are much more scalable than others, and "beauty" scales. And the "occurrence of beauty" does, too. Before the advent of scale on almost every aspect of our lives, a local musician or theatre group found easy income. Now, since after the invention of gramophones, more people can listen to less and less musici…
I am not advocating for any stance here, but your argument reads a bit like "I don't blame gun manufacturers for gun deaths, I blame sharp solid metal objects travelling through brains at 3000 km/h"
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…
At some point I just wish Zuckerberg would give one single fuck .
They reach a point where they're fundamentally unable to honestly ask themselves whether their "good thing" is actually good. I have a fairly respectable social graph on Facebook and Twitter, but far fewer actual friends than I did in the pre-social network days. A row in a database isn't connection, and it isn't good.
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…
Once there are algorithms ranking the posts, they are meddling with the culture.
Not that it really matters, I don't think either would help you find a fix that doesn't involve destroying the whole thing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
True, and the cat can't be put back in the bag, so it's up to the collective "us", who build the Internet, to rediscover our moral imperative to fix what's broken... and Facebook is a huge chunk of this brokenness.
I personally deleted my account but what is it about Facebook that is worse than say Twitter (also deleted) ? Twitter was a big bag of toxicity. Not saying it wasn't interested, tons of interesting people to follow; but the discussions were often rude, racist and hateful. And it poses the same problem of teens following supermodels and what not. What I'm saying is this is about social media in general, not about Face…
You are correct however, that Twitter is also toxic; like all social media.
I don't blame Facebook (or Twitter, or any particular company) for this. We can only blame scale . Some things are much more scalable than others, and "beauty" scales. And the "occurrence of beauty" does, too. Before the advent of scale on almost every aspect of our lives, a local musician or theatre group found easy income. Now, since after the invention of gramophones, more people can listen to less and less musici…
> We can only blame scale. Some things are much more scalable than others, and "beauty" scales. And the "occurrence of beauty" does, too.
I think over the next few generations we're going to see humankind adapting to what it means to live with near-infinite scale on all things digital. I don't know what that will look like, but I do hope it works out for the better.
I don't blame Facebook (or Twitter, or any particular company) for this. We can only blame scale . Some things are much more scalable than others, and "beauty" scales. And the "occurrence of beauty" does, too. Before the advent of scale on almost every aspect of our lives, a local musician or theatre group found easy income. Now, since after the invention of gramophones, more people can listen to less and less musici…
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,…