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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

#301

Post by hilbert42 »

wussboy wrote: post #186
aspaviento wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The term I've used for years is electronic heroin. It's apt methinks.

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

#302

Post by ysavir »

franga2000 wrote: post #224
gilbetron wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, a nuclear bomb explosion can be bad, but there is a case where someone had a tree knocked down that they were going to have to pay to get cut down, so nuclear bombs can have positive effects!

This is also disingenuous, since they could've gotten the tree cut down without the nuke and so the nuke has no "exclusive" positive value. Social networks have some positive value that is exclusive to them, like the ability for people to connect with friends as well as diverse groups of strangers - both things that would otherwise be much harder if not impossible for many.

Exclusive to social networks... And restaurants, bars, parks, meetup groups, local events, email lists, chat servers (eg Discord), and generally taking the time to meet your friends and family in person rather than on the web.

It's only "much harder if not impossible" for lack of trying. And while yes, there are some out there that simply don't have such options, we also have people that need to cut down a tree but can't afford the work, and so simply hope it won't fall on their house the next time it gets windy.

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

#303

Post by dont__panic »

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…

Just like smoking cigarettes can have the positive side-effect of reducing your chance of catching covid!

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

#304

Post by nix0n »

GDC7 wrote: post #278

If this is the principle we should abolish the Forbes rich list to secure the mental health of teen boys and young adults. The 0.00001%ers are out there, in any realm of life. The genie is out of the bottle and it's not about social media, people are curious about extremely rare things, so they'd be digging them out on blogs and vlogs if social media didn't exist. The answer to make people feel better isn't to censor…

> The 0.00001%ers are out there

Actually, on Instagram, they're not. It's Photoshop.

Also, we should abolish the Forbes rich list, but in a different way and for a different reason. There's a limited amount of resources on the planet, so it shouldn't be allowed for some to have billions while others starve. But that's off-topic here.

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

#305

Post by Version467 »

justapassenger wrote: post #282
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…

> 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. I agree with the 2nd part of your comment. But this part is just dishonest, and sounds like a startup pitch about addressable market. Do you honestly beli…

While that is true, many people (especially teenagers) curate their Instagram page as if they had tons of followers. That doesn't come with the downsides that actually having many followers does (hateful comments, etc.), but it certainly fosters a stressful mindset where every posts success is closely monitored and the content is carefully chosen to achieve as much growth as possible.

Doesn't matter if it reaches 10 or 10000 people.

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

#306

Post by toss1 »

aspaviento wrote: post #131
andreime wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not defending Facebook and I just had some thoughts reading the quotes and am curious what you think of them. 1. I remember that while growing up fashion magazines, actors/actresses and I want to say peer pressure (but am fearful its incorrect) were a big source of body image issues. 2. Maybe it's a side effect of our society or "normal" to have security issues while growing up. We've been having good childhoods…

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…

Then do not defend facebook.

Period

Their business model is poisoning the well of society, and strip-mining its value by breaking the bonds that hold it together.

The very best that can be concluded about it's entire leadership is that they entirely lack any hint of moral compass or sense of responsibility to the society from which they extract their wealth.

The more I observe their behavior, the more it looks like worse conclusions are supported by the data.

Just stop justifying things on technical bases. It is what FB is doing the the top post above

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

#307

Post by addingnumbers »

gilbetron wrote: post #197
spockz wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This shows how a statement can be factually true and completely disingenuous at the same time. Yes 1/3 are effected badly but we just say that it can have positive effects. Just omitting the fact that it often has a detrimental effect…

Yes, a nuclear bomb explosion can be bad, but there is a case where someone had a tree knocked down that they were going to have to pay to get cut down, so nuclear bombs can have positive effects!

Just read that 1946 New Yorker article on the first bombing that made HNs front page a week back. This passage is probably the one Zuckerberg would use:

> Over everything—up through the wreckage of the city, in gutters, along the riverbanks, tangled among tiles and tin roofing, climbing on charred tree trunks—was a blanket of fresh, vivid, lush, optimistic green; the verdancy rose even from the foundations of ruined houses. Weeds already hid the ashes, and wild flowers were in bloom among the city’s bones. The bomb had not only left the underground organs of plants intact; it had stimulated them. Everywhere were bluets and Spanish bayonets, goosefoot, morning glories and day lilies, the hairy-fruited bean, purslane and clotbur and sesame and panic grass and feverfew. Especially in a circle at the center, sickle senna grew in extraordinary regeneration, not only standing among the charred remnants of the same plant but pushing up in new places, among bricks and through cracks in the asphalt. It actually seemed as if a load of sickle-senna seed had been dropped along with the bomb.

Never mind that the rest of the article will probably elicit a few spontaneous sobs from an empathetic reader.

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

#308

Post by JohnWhigham »

remarkEon wrote: post #234
jhardy54 wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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”.

It's a weird phenomenon that's unique to HN. I understand that the idea is to elevate online discussion here, but many do it to such an absurd degree that anything anyone says always has someone asking for a source.

I sometimes wonder how these people would have survived at parties or social gatherings before the Internet when you couldn't just whip out your phone, spend 2 minutes not talking to anyone, click on the first Google search result, and then proclaiming "um acksually..."

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

#309

Post by babyblueblanket »

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…

Teen girls are not at all ready for pregnancy in any respect. Just because they started puberty doesn't mean puberty has been completed.

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

#310

Post by ysavir »

Loughla wrote: post #176
everdrive wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like this is part of the point you're making, but this sort of statement should only be considered a lie. Some philosophers might correctly call this "bullshit," however colloquially it's the same as a lie: it intends to deceive.

Honestly, though, when did 'technically correct' become the baseline for messaging? If you say what's 'technically correct' even if you ignore the entire mountain of steaming horse shit right behind it, you get a pass anymore. Why? Why is this socially acceptable? Is this different from the past, or are we just more aware of it?

Whenever I hear people say "technically correct is the best kind of correct", I inform them that that's technically incorrect.
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