Live data from Hacker News

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

wsj.com

561–570 of 687 posts

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

#561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'.

I'll settle at more than your 'major metros' and fewer than my 'most college towns' — although now that I think those two numbers over, it's probably not that large a delta to begin with ;)

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

#562
post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that this is not alcohol or tobacco, this is a digitized version of a free attention grabbing tabloid customized to the person's "interests" is always available to view at their desire. To me this makes it difficult to regulate as it's not purely based on the amount of consumption, it's based on the content you consume.

No, it's not the same as a physical product but there's a growing body of research, supported by some of Facebook's internal commentary, suggesting that it has similarly addictive characteristics, which is why I made that comparison. The point, again, is simple: most people recognize that it will not be optimal to tell everyone that it's their job to ignore a billion-dollar promotional system run by a company which m…

I agree that content consumed by facebook/instagram can be addictive. But I don't think this is unique to them, I think youtube (my personal weakness), netflix, television, video-games and movies all fall into this category. The particular problem with instagram is that it encourages people to post the "highlights" of their life. Therefore people end up consuming a super un-real version of what life is and end up depressed when they compare it to their own. This issue is not a problem of an algorithm or moderation but of one's personal expectations.

There are tons of great examples where algorithmic feed is useful, particularly when your feed is related to activities such as cooking, music and exercise.

In theory I think the concept of forcing the companies to behave a certain way is ideal but I'm still unsure of what type of legislation could be put in place to address the problem in the article.

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

#563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They used to call keeping your personal life separate from work "being professional". Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong here... don't most companies hire people to do a job, not to flaunt who they are in their private lives in a distracting manner?

wow. do you think people of color should somehow separate their skin & culture as to maintain 'professionalism' in the office? you can not 'separate' race just as you can't separate ones gender or sexual orientation. it is simply a fact and truth of that persons existence. the mere existence of us queer people is not flaunting anything. the expression of our true selfs does not 'flaunt' and thinking it's some kind of…

Please, without being racist, tell me, what is a "person of color"?

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

#564
post #457

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…

Is that really so? Has this been researched over longer periods? I'm honestly curious, because I'm probably biased when I think about medieval inquisitions or 1930 Race theories. Was, say, a black person in Rome treated bad because of racism? Were Jews hated in ancient early Muslim cities? Were there no same sex couples in, say, a 1500 village at the swedish coast? I can imagine many 'queer' were just accepted as suc…

You are correct that racism as we know it is a product of, roughly speaking, the post-1550 world. The response to homoerotic acts has varied extremely widely across time and space. "Same sex couples" were pretty uncommon in most times and places (largely because almost no one thought of marriage/cohabitation as something constituted primarily by romantic love or even sexual desire). But plenty of examples of people having same-sex sex and even long-lasting relationships.

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

#565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'.

I'll settle at more than your 'major metros' and fewer than my 'most college towns' — although now that I think those two numbers over, it's probably not that large a delta to begin with ;)

To be totally fair I never said "handful of cities", but instead "major metros". My point is that the presence of a college is not a good predictor for the presence of a gay bar. It's very much a large metro thing.

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

#567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Using social apps to connect with other people can have positive mental-health benefits" That statement cannot be false because it is devoid of any content, being a mere hypothetical. The fact that it is surrounded by "research" is meaningless as well, as the aforementioned sentence is like saying "the elements of the empty set fulfil all properties"... So no, they are not contradicting themselves. They are simply a…

wow this is fascinating, taking the veneer of something in the tautological space and using it as sheep's clothing over something known to be a wolf. There's something curious about this form of misleading that deserves to be identified and named to be called out in future instances.

This is called creating a narrative by cherry picking facts. This is what the media does, and is why so many people (most Americans per Pew) distrust them.

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

#568
post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will say emphatically that parents of teens are the most influential people in their lives, whether acknowledged or no. It is likely the case that parents will forever be the most influential people in someone's life and the positions you take, the behaviors you engage in, and what you teach will stick with them for their whole lives. Take a stance and teach them. They may rebel, they may not, but years down the ro…

> I will say emphatically that parents of teens are the most influential people in their lives I don't work in behavioral science, but this isn't my understanding. I was under the impression that research indicates peers are the larger influence, which can be tempered somewhat by parents. For an easy example, whether or not peers smoke is a better predictor than whether parents smoke.

Not true in educational outcome. Almost all educational outcome is correlated with parent situations, effect of the school is within the noise.

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

#569
post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will say emphatically that parents of teens are the most influential people in their lives, whether acknowledged or no. It is likely the case that parents will forever be the most influential people in someone's life and the positions you take, the behaviors you engage in, and what you teach will stick with them for their whole lives. Take a stance and teach them. They may rebel, they may not, but years down the ro…

I will say emphatically that parents of teens are the most influential people in their lives You might say that, but you would be wrong. Parents of teens have been the most influential people in their lives up to them becoming teens. Part of the process into adulthood is to break away from that pattern, to explore and build connections outside the family sphere. That's why teens are the most vulnerable demographic fo…

You can’t decouple the entire growth process from 0-teen though…

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

#570

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…

> The anti-cancel-culture people make it sound like they are being horribly oppressed. But for what? The color of their skin? At work last week, our "diversity and equity" team announced that our company is "obviously" not diverse enough. This is a company in the US with employees across North America and Europe, with some employees in South America, Australia, India, and even Africa, and not just South Africa, eithe…

Skin color is one of the characteristics that influences our lived experience, and a lot of companies are seeking a diversity of experiences in their staff and leadership. They may look around and feel like they have a significant diversity of backgrounds and experiences, but not in one particular and very important way. So they want to correct this.

I'll readily concede that many companies do this for image reasons alone, though I'm sure some do it out of a genuine belief that diversity can lead to better business outcomes, or create a more desirable workplace for attracting new talent. But in the end, this is the decision of a private company and they are not being coerced to make these decisions by any authority, nor does it sound like they are breaking any laws.

Post reply on HN