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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

#551

Post by atonalfreerider »

voidnullnil wrote: post #503
atonalfreerider wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ditto for online pornography. And unlike chemical drugs that have to be transported and administered, these images and videos fly through the wires into childrens' bedrooms. I know, because like most children, I was exposed to online porn at a young age and was addicted to it well into my adult life. These companies need regulation, because they are bad actors.

>[porn companies] need regulation No, nothing needs regulation. Stop making the internet fucking worse. Can we go back to 2000 now (not that it was good then either since the internet was fundamentally broken already)? This is like the bat shit insane morons who think having a popup about cookies on every page is solving the """privacy""" issue. Literally every single political issue on HN is bogus. Take the ad block…

> nothing needs regulation

This is a hyperbolic statement. Even if you are just talking about internet regulation.

Let's imagine for a moment that someone invented a hypnosis algorithm and hosted it on a website. Anyone going to this website went into spasms and died in front of their screen. Would we seek protection for our children and for the general public from such a website from internet browser companies, ISPs and the government? Yes we would. This is an extreme example but it illustrates a point. You can say the same thing about websites that prey on children, or the elderly.

I'm not advocating for the banning of pornography altogether. I am making the simple proposition that it be better regulated. People who distribute porn know full well that their content is seen by minors. Having a child check a box that says that they are over 18 is not good enough. If I hadn't seen porn as a minor, I might have had a better chance of avoiding the extremely negative impacts that it can carry with it. Don't believe me? Visit a support page like r/NoFap and read the hundreds of thousands of stories there.

I'm not going to touch any of the other subjects you raised because I'm not arguing for any of the things you listed.

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

#552

Post by bryan_w »

tqi wrote: post #357

I'm not familiar with this particular set of findings, but generally speaking internal research at Facebook are generally either large scale in-app surveys (which suffer from response bias) or small scale (often ~10 participants from a single city) in-person interviews. It's useful for informing product roadmaps, but I don't think we can really draw bigger conclusions from it. Put it a different way, if this research…

Interesting point you bring up. If this research claimed the opposite result, people here would be ripping it apart, but since it confirms their biases, they double down on it and accept it as ground truth.

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

#553

Post by uniqueid »

monocasa wrote: post #542
uniqueid wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm 'yes, but...' on both those points. (1) is true, but I was thinking more about the persecution aspect than the community aspect. If being gay made life unbearable in a particular town, it was at least physically possible , if expensive, for a person to cross state-lines and start life fresh. Today people leave a trail that follows them globally and for a lifetime. In terms of community, (2) is a little more bleak…

I don't know about your (2) argument. There's a lot of college towns even today that don't have gay bars. I've lived in Boulder, CO (CU Boulder) and Athens, GA (UGA) and neither really have a gay bar. In the 1980s? Only the major metros really.

I don't have any statistics, but there may well be fewer brick-and-mortar gay hang-outs today, precisely because the internet has given people other ways to meet.

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

#554

Post by monocasa »

uniqueid wrote: post #553
monocasa wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about your (2) argument. There's a lot of college towns even today that don't have gay bars. I've lived in Boulder, CO (CU Boulder) and Athens, GA (UGA) and neither really have a gay bar. In the 1980s? Only the major metros really.

I don't have any statistics, but there may well be fewer brick-and-mortar gay hang-outs today, precisely because the internet has given people other ways to meet.

There hasn't ever been a gay bar in either of those towns AFAIK, so my point still stands. And that includes 'The People's Republic of Boulder'.

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

#555

Post by [deleted] »

dillondoyle wrote: post #521
Darmody wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just want to point out that people moved without any money back in the day. Now we play it safe. We save money. We find an apartment, a job and then we move. We live comfortably now and we don't want to lose that when moving. You can even see it today with people from certain parts of the world. They leave with nothing else than maybe a 20 dollar phone hoping they'll be able to call their family once they get somew…

But queer people don't always have families, especially back in the day. So many were kicked out, ostracized, cut off. RuPaul is correct when she says queer people create their own family. Even today.

[deleted]

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

#556

Post by zepto »

remarkEon wrote: post #547
zepto wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You have to argue that there’s something unique about the not_the_United_States schools such that there’s something nullifying intrafemale competition. Why do you think this? You only have your school experience to go on. You have nothing to base this claim on. I think it’s entirely possible that the conditions of school create much of the competition you are observing, and that US schools are more extreme than oth…

I honestly think you must be trolling at this point. You’re taking this pedantic, academic view about the behavior of children and taking it to such an extreme (US school structure and its problems explain all malevolent minor female behavior) that I can’t believe you’re arguing in good faith.

No - I’m arguing that culture and social structures influence behavior, and that you can’t generalize from what you have observed at school to other cultures and times.

There is nothing pedantic or academic or anything I have said.

> US school structure and its problems explain all malevolent minor female behavior

This is simply a lie. I never said anything that implies this extreme view.

You are arguing that malevolent minor female behavior is universal and doesn’t need to be studied.

You might turn out to be right about the former, but without studying it, it’s just your baseless prejudice.

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

#557

Post by Jonanin »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #546
standardUser wrote: post #449

It used to be that if you were queer - in any sense of the word - and lived in one of the countless small, conservative, traditional communities in this country, you were shit out of luck. Now, thanks to the internet, there exists inclusive and positive communities for people of every type of background and experience. This simply did not exist for most people just a few decades ago, but now it's accessible to almost…

"Now, thanks to the internet, ..." This seems to be a common misdirection seen with defending Facebook. (Not to mention other Big Tech companies.) Facebook == "the internet" Facebook proponents, including public statements from the company, attribute the benefits we enjoy from the internet to Facebook. Criticism of Facebook == criticism of "the internet" It follows that any threat to Facebook is a threat to the inter…

I think you are reading too much into the exact wording of the OP's comment. You can replace "the internet" with "social media" or even "Facebook" and it still makes sense. Internet platforms for communicating with others (the use case that is being described in the OP) is literally the definition of social media.

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

#558

Post by riversflow »

joelbluminator wrote: post #29
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…

> and a large portion are more than happy to spout things they would NEVER say in real life This is pretty much an internet problem, not a Facebook problem. The things people say to each other on forums or Twitter or Facebook, especially when anonymous (but not always), are quite often horrendous.

Doesn't facebook & co design their service to be addictive, or, erm, "maximize engagement"? The internet is fine, as I see it, it's ad-revenue based social media that's the problem.

It's absurd to absolve a company as wealthy as facebook who optimizes for "engagement" from their externalities on children.

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

#559

Post by lkey »

everdrive wrote: post #411
lkey wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to be aware that you are just navel gazing here. You've based your analysis on a comedy you saw in the 2000s that in turn based itself on the experiences of white affluent American teenagers. The second leg of your analysis is not grounded in an understanding of actual female biology. The one 'fact' you cite is wrong, 'young girls' are not the most fertile, the range for peak fertility for women is from thei…

>You seem to be aware that you are just navel gazing here. I like to think of it more as "presenting the details of my argument clearly so that they can be discredited if I've made an error.," rather than "navel gazing." Of course, there is nothing wrong with criticizing ideas, and so thank you for your response. I don't know that I have a direct counterpoint to your claim, and it might be that my argument is irrepar…

I wrote and thought better of a too long response to this. Instead of trying to stay under the TL;DR word limit, I think instead you should focus on answering why you believe this:

"I might still wonder that this is still wrapped up in evolutionary psychology"

is a more useful frame of reference than, say, a model of addiction: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w28936/w289...

Do we gain any explanatory power by adding untestable hypotheses to the existing body of work about how society constructs /impossible to realize/ standards for both boys and girls.

To your question, yes, girls and boys are socialized differently in our culture, and thus they will be exposed to different social media, pressures, and expectations from the moment they are born. However, I don't think you need to immediately reach for evolutionary psychology to explain this.

The underlying pressure, in my view, is the pressure to sell objects that relieve the dissonance that 'influencers' and ad writers amplify.

Evolution certainly made us (regardless of gender) susceptible to this kind of influence, but culture determines which of our insecurities weaponized and how.

See also: brain pills, protein, and cars for predominantly male audiences.

Would these same kinds of pressures have existed in the tribal circumstances under which we evolved? Sure, but they'd have been way way way less potent.

I also don't think evo psych tells us that our current societal structures are pre-determined or inevitable. If anything, we've been taught again that human brains are remarkably flexible and even relatively light social pressure from social media can cut against the grain of other fundamental biological tendencies, like self-preservation.

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

#560

Post by standardUser »

ipaddr wrote: post #539
standardUser wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it confusing that people fail to to see the obvious switcharoo. It used to be unacceptable to be queer, non-white, non-Christian, non-male and it was OK to mock people for those traits. Now, it's all backwards, and it's OK to be queer, non-white, non-Christian etc. What is no longer OK is mocking people for these traits. So, now the people who are getting the pointy end of the stick are the people who used to…

People do mock other people for being Christian or for a political belief. Nothing has changed but the bullies are now using the power of social media and the press to amply that bullying. The bullying continues to employers or schools, groups, friends. Same as it ever was.

It's certainly not the same as it ever was. I think you're missing the distinction between "punching up" and "punching down". Punching up - taking aim at dominant power structures - is a necessary part of social advancement. Punching down is just cruel. Punching down used to be encouraged and celebrated, now it isn't, and some people are mad that they can't get away with it any longer.
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