201–210 of 687 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the other hand, teens blaming Instagram does not mean Instagram actually has that effect.
there was this absolutely devastating graphic about rising suicide rates of teen girls which coincided with mobiles and especially instagram. Sorry can't find it right now.
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.
And it's really pretty clear that Facebook didn't create any of these problems and that removing it won't solve them. Facebook makes it easier for girls to bully each other in the same way that relaxed gun laws make it easier for criminals to shoot people. Or, as Londoners will tell you: "you can't solve knife crime by taking away people's knives".
The fact that Facebook profits from the issue doesn't make it their fault unless you can prove that they actively seek to make it worse. And even then, they can only carry the blame proportional to how much they made it worse.
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.
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…
"They came to the conclusion that some of the problems were specific to Instagram, and not social media more broadly. That is especially true concerning so-called social comparison, which is when people assess their own value in relation to the attractiveness, wealth and success of others."
"'Social comparison is worse on Instagram,' states Facebook's deep dive into teen girl body-image issues in 2020, noting that TikTok, a short-video app, is grounded in performance, while users on Snapchat, a rival photo and video-sharing app, are sheltered by jokey filters that 'keep the focus on the face.' In contrast, Instagram focuses heavily on the body and lifestyle."
So maybe they understand the dangers of Instagram better than you do?
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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 don't understand how you could read the parent comment and decide that it's "blaming" teen girls, unless you are deliberately arguing in bad faith. Teenage girls are predisposed to behave in the way described, and Facebook/Instagram is profiting by exploiting that. Nothing about the explanation above is blaming them. If anything the comment makes a stronger case for Facebook's actions being immoral.
Has this been studied, or are we taking an arbitrary thought experiment as a foundational axiom?
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The less I want is to defend Facebook but I think lately people don't want to acknowledge their own responsibilities. It's like every time there is a problem, the cause is someone/something else. I don't think Instagram is impossed to anyone. Young people can feel the pressure to use it because their friends use it but they aren't forced to do so. From the article it seems that young girls know about the toxicity in…
I have a personal grudge against anyone saying "Why don't the parents take some responsibility to combat a multi-billion dollar company who puts the resources of small countries in to making their children behave in detrimental ways." But I'll not get in to that. :) Facebook and Instagram are drug dealers. Sure, they're not physically distributing a substance, but the social interactions they provide are every bit as…
There is no need to have any grudge against me (I hope). I get it. I never said being a parent is an easy job. I acknowledge how hard it is but...
> Facebook and Instagram are drug dealers
If you teach your kids not to consume drugs, why Instagram should be any different?
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Twitter is not algorithmically pushing supermodel photos to teenage girls. The target demographics are completely different from Instagram. You are correct however, that Twitter is also toxic; like all social media.
The more basic issue seems to be that (many) people are toxic. If not always, to everyone, at least some of the time, towards some other people. The problem with social media, then, is that it allows -- indeed encourages , because "engagement" -- all that toxicity to spread so much more widely and rapidly than ever before.
This post is about FB suppressing their own research, which showed that Instagram and its algorithm are toxic to teenage girls.
> We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls,”
> Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression,”
> “This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups.”
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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.
You're assuming people have morals to appeal to - most don't. When everyone is connected to everyone else the asshole always prevail. The solution is to sever the connections.
I don't know many such morally-absent folks. Perhaps the perverse incentives in our system mean a bunch of CEOs are quite sociopathic, but on the whole, people seem rather good intentioned to me. The internet certainly serves as a platform for many that would be otherwise shunned IRL, but I don't think they're the general majority...just the majority that decide to voice their opinions. The rest aren't even paying attention - only a small fraction of people have a Twitter account, for example.
Even reddit, which can be anonymous, is filled with good discourse, assuming you avoid certain subreddits, and sort by top. Moderation goes a long way to mimicking our more natural IRL tendencies to turn down the assholes. Twitter and Instagram generally lack those tools, so the assholes can be louder and _seem_ more prominent than they are.
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…
I think it's equivalent to the tobacco industry. They didn't invent smoking tobacco but they built it into an industry. Once they were aware of the health effects of smoking was it their fault that they suppressed this information and continued to market their products to more people, including children?
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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.
The comment doesn't sound to me like blaming the girls, but just taking the core of the blame off of Facebook. And it's really pretty clear that Facebook didn't create any of these problems and that removing it won't solve them. Facebook makes it easier for girls to bully each other in the same way that relaxed gun laws make it easier for criminals to shoot people. Or, as Londoners will tell you: "you can't solve kni…
A little O/T, but this trope needs to please stop.
The places with the highest gun crimes are also the places with the toughest gun laws. It should go without saying that criminals without definition would not care about laws.