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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

#161

Post by JohnWhigham »

everdrive wrote: post #117

Facebook is an accelerant. The movie "Mean Girls" largely predated social media and highlighted many of the same issues. This seems to be a pretty ingrained issue, although I think most people agree that Facebook makes it worse. Here's a theory that's nearly guaranteed to land me in hot water: Why are young girls so awful to each other? I don't think it's unreasonable to suspect that is has to do with "hormones," new…

100% on the money. People will gnash their teeth because they don't like the truth being told out loud. It's the same reason why online dating is completely fucked up: incentives are completely different for men and women. Women hold access to sex (which men want), men hold access to relationships (which women want). The problem is that each wants completely different demographics; women generally want older secure men, and men want younger more fertile women. There's nothing wrong with this.

This has been ingrained in us for millions of years yet people act like a few decades of social upheaval will change this.

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

#162

Post by ___luigi »

___luigi wrote: post #133

It is disappointing to read some comments saying that "It is not FB/Insta's fault?". Those who don't see the challenges that these teens go through is clearly delusional. While there are some good things in the tech, it clearly has a negative side that impact children's mental health through unrealistic beauty standards, and trap them into dopamine loops. I still believe that ranking/recommendation models should be o…

> .. I still believe that ranking/recommendation models should be open.

Today, we don't know how social media recommend posts to us, we don't know if it is biased, or good for some sub communities. There are [1] some engineering blogs where we can see that is based on some research ideas (e.g. embeddings) are prune to bias [3] and "rich gets richer" phenomena. There should be an open marketplace where institutes/researchers submit open & explainable ranking/recommender systems. This is how you democratize access to such social platforms, but the business model opposes such idea to make it reality. There is a large body of research in the area of explainable recommendation systems/Explainable AI. There are regulations today to use Explainable AI systems in healthcare field, but few of them in areas that impact our mental health (e.g. the use of Social Media).

[1]: https://ai.facebook.com/blog/powered-by-ai-instagrams-explor...

[2]: Explainable Recommendation: A Survey and New Perspective, https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.11192

[3]: https://aclanthology.org/P19-1162v2.pdf

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

#163

Post by everdrive »

hdjjhhvvhga wrote: post #144
everdrive wrote: post #117

Facebook is an accelerant. The movie "Mean Girls" largely predated social media and highlighted many of the same issues. This seems to be a pretty ingrained issue, although I think most people agree that Facebook makes it worse. Here's a theory that's nearly guaranteed to land me in hot water: Why are young girls so awful to each other? I don't think it's unreasonable to suspect that is has to do with "hormones," new…

Your theory doesn't explain why boys don't act the same. Their attractiveness also dwindles with time - you could argue it's happening less steeply, but still.

>Their attractiveness also dwindlew with time

First, young boys are certainly competitive with each other. Bullying is largely about social status, and social status is the main predictor for mate choice.

Second, male attractiveness does not follow the same pattern. Yes, sperm quality does degrade with age, but that decline is nowhere near as sharp as the decline in a woman's reproductive health. Not only will their eggs run out, but their chance of surviving childbirth drops sharply with age. Remember, we're not talking about western societies with modern medicine, but evolutionary imperatives which would have developed prior to any sort of antibiotics, pain killers, C-sections, etc.

Third, male attractiveness is strongly correlated with access to status and resources. Which young men almost universally don't have. (although young men may show traits which indicate potential future access to status and resources: intelligence, drive, assertiveness, popularity, etc.) However, an older man (30s-40s) still has very healthy sperm, and may have proven access to status and resources, which is nearly universally considered attractive.

So, I don't think it's fair to claim that male attractiveness declines over time an sort of the same way as female attractiveness. (Once again, from a strictly evolutionary perspective.)

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

#164

Post by rg111 »

leokennis wrote: post #73
rg111 wrote: post #66

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 mean...who else but Facebook (or Twitter, or any particular company) enabled this scale? 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"

Scale is a force of nature of human advancement.

We can see geography invariance, viz. WeChat, TikTok existing in China where facebook, twitter are not allowed to exist. If these didn't exist, something else would.

Scale might have begun with printed books. One author writes something, that is printed as many times as the market demands it. She does not have to lift her pen again. And with her grand success, other authors have to find jobs being private tutors of children of barons and dukes and such or finding adjuct roles in community colleges in modern times. Hell, there is even competition with dead people in this trade.

But accountants, devs, barbers don't have to face this.

And, I am not supporting this. I know that these girls should not have to face this. But eliminating social media is not the answer, but having better interests is. (This reeks of snobbery and privilege, I know.)

Almost all teenager girls I know or knew, did not feel this way for social media. Because they have/had better things to do in life. They were busy with ballet, prep school, volunteering, math clubs, music class, etc. So, there is also a socio-economic aspect to it.

As a heterosexual male, I never conformed with the mainstream beauty standards. I, and hence my potential and past partners did not have to face the bad side of scale.

I also actively, regularly listen to young pianists on Twitch and donate to them, rather than some decades old recordings (better, too) I could find for free on YouTube or Spotify.

I see it this way- scale is inevitable, and even desirable (one girl makes 3000 girls jealous instead of 30; one Physics teacher teaches 300 girls instead of 30- who otherwise would not have access to one- scale is not evil in itself), but you can bypass its effects if you properly want.

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

#165

Post by debrice »

revel wrote: post #153
everdrive wrote: post #117

Facebook is an accelerant. The movie "Mean Girls" largely predated social media and highlighted many of the same issues. This seems to be a pretty ingrained issue, although I think most people agree that Facebook makes it worse. Here's a theory that's nearly guaranteed to land me in hot water: Why are young girls so awful to each other? I don't think it's unreasonable to suspect that is has to do with "hormones," new…

Can we please not react to this article by immediately blaming teenage girls? You have an article that shows one of the most powerful corporations in the world exploiting teenagers to boost revenues and lying about it in testimony before congress. That's the story.

I believe he’s not blaming the teenage girls but maybe trying to understand why it overwhelmingly impacts girls?

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

#166

Post by rhines »

arvinsim wrote: post #108
helen___keller wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great comment > 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.

From beauty, I think it will shift from conventional beauty to finding something that will set them apart from the rest.

For many people it has - defining yourself by your quirks, or disabilities, or unique sexuality, or whatever else has become celebrated in many circles. Things that at one time might have been considered private or taboo are now used to differentiate yourself from the crowd and gain attention from people who may otherwise have ignored you.

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

#167

Post by wussboy »

earthscienceman wrote: post #98

I'll make a comment that tries to be different than the range of criticism here already. Instagram is toxic for everyone . For reasons too personal to put here, I've been pretty depressed and dysfunctional lately and I've unintentionally discovered the experience of doomscrolling. The output of the instagram algorithm is absolutely terrifying. It has the perfect metrics (swipe time, profile browsing, etc etc) to prey…

I echo others here and encourage you to just delete your account and get off it. I did so with Facebook many years ago after getting sucked in to so many arguments and so much angst, and now, when I log in every year or so to check if an old friend has messaged me, I get physically sick within minutes seeing the garbage posts that get pushed by the algo.

Do it. You're not missing out on anything but happiness.

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

#168

Post by [deleted] »

everdrive wrote: post #117

Facebook is an accelerant. The movie "Mean Girls" largely predated social media and highlighted many of the same issues. This seems to be a pretty ingrained issue, although I think most people agree that Facebook makes it worse. Here's a theory that's nearly guaranteed to land me in hot water: Why are young girls so awful to each other? I don't think it's unreasonable to suspect that is has to do with "hormones," new…

[deleted]

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

#169

Post by mschuster91 »

leokennis wrote: post #73
rg111 wrote: post #66

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 mean...who else but Facebook (or Twitter, or any particular company) enabled this scale? 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"

> I mean...who else but Facebook (or Twitter, or any particular company) enabled this scale?

Unrealistic and manipulated portraits of models in media (as well as treatment of said models) leading to body imaging issues already was a problem in my teens, way before FB/Instagram.

If there is one company and product to blame, it's Adobe Photoshop.

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

#170

Post by yaseer »

everdrive wrote: post #117

Facebook is an accelerant. The movie "Mean Girls" largely predated social media and highlighted many of the same issues. This seems to be a pretty ingrained issue, although I think most people agree that Facebook makes it worse. Here's a theory that's nearly guaranteed to land me in hot water: Why are young girls so awful to each other? I don't think it's unreasonable to suspect that is has to do with "hormones," new…

The toxic culture of Instagram is not driven by teen girls, it's driven by a toxic mix of a powerful capitalist machine and social media. Sell the perfect lifesfyle and body.

For the record - I believe in capitalism generally, I just think the incarnation of capitalism on social media is particularly damaging. The free market has produced a product like big Tobacco did.

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