Live data from Hacker News

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

wsj.com

231–240 of 687 posts

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

#231

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…

It's cultural.

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

#234
post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Teenage girls are predisposed to behave in the way described, and Facebook/Instagram is profiting by exploiting that. Has this been studied, or are we taking an arbitrary thought experiment as a foundational axiom?

It’s kind of amazing to me that an observation that anyone could make based on their experience as a human living on planet earth gets discounted because there isn’t some peer reviewed study from Harvard or whatever that confirms the observation. Young girls are mean to each other, that’s a fact. We don’t need an army of data scientists to “look into it”.

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

#235

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…

Teen girls are always mean, in all cultures? You always can pick any non-universal human characteristic from your culture and with creativity find biological hipothesis to justify this. But this is very dangerous because it can easily naturalize prejudices, taboos and social norms that never were biological.

If you want to ask about these things, you first should first ask to anthropology how teen girls behave in different cultures before jumping to biological explanations.

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

#236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> relaxed gun laws make it easier for criminals to shoot people 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.

While there is very little research on this (because Congress banned funding research on this after pressure from the NRA in the 90s), what research does exist does not support your assertion: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/27/states-with-strict-gun-laws-...

It's not about criminals not caring about the law. Shooting people is already illegal. It's about making it more difficult to access and acquire these weapons. If you can't access something, it is much more difficult to use.

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

#237

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…

> Why are young girls so awful to each other? Why does this conversation always have to exclusively revolve around how young girls treat each other? Young boys are awful to young girls. Women and men are awful to young girls. The question you should be asking is why do we as a society tolerate people (of any age and any gender!) being so awful to girls? The article is about Facebook , the company. Facebook isn’t run…

Young girls and young boys (and adults, etc) have peculiar behaviors that differ among groups. Statistically speaking. Of course this isn’t exclusive behaviors among groups, but young girls are more likely to do some things than young boys.

Since this article is talking about young girls, the interest is in behaviors and interventions that would be more impactful for young girls, as a population, than other groups.

It’s not blaming young girls to develop interventions that work to help based on the common characteristics. Nor is it blaming African Americans to study and create specific diabetes interventions to address the specific risks of that subpopulation. It’s not African Americans fault that they have higher diabetes and different characteristics of the disease and they shouldn’t be blamed for this condition. But to help, creating customized interventions will be more effective.

I would think it bad if there were only specialized interventions and no one address other parts of the population.

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

#238
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 don't blame Facebook (or Twitter, or any particular company) for this.

Perhaps I would agree with you that I don't blame Facebook for the root problem here. After all, it's been around a lot longer than Facebook.

However, Facebook is actively providing the scale you're talking about. They are an accelerant. Not only that, they're making absolutely wild amounts of money while they do so. So, they have an opportunity and the resources to offset the damage done by the scale they profit from. But they have zero interest in doing so. I most definitely blame them for that.

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

#239
post #175

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 seems backwards. Cut-throat competition for mating opportunities should be a strategy for the least desirable, who have the greatest need to compete for the scarce resource. If you're top of the desirability scale, you are the scarce resource, and your job is to discern the best suitor amongst the many who put themselves forward.

What if you're second best? What if you don't know your position?

Game theory.

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

#240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I often think of Facebook/Zuckerberg as the perfect example of why having a mission statement (something something connecting all the people) that seems perfectly non-controversial in a vacuum, often leads to a willing delusion that this must mean it's always a good thing and justifies any means. They reach a point where they're fundamentally unable to honestly ask themselves whether their "good thing" is actually go…

This is a very interesting point. As someone who wants to start an organization with a very strong mission statement, it brings a sense of caution. Is it the mission statement itself which is dangerous? Or is it possible to come up with a "good" one?

Mission statement: WWJD

(I was joking with the comment, but I'm not so sure now.)

Post reply on HN