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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

#651

Post by tsjq »

riversflow wrote: post #558
joelbluminator wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 .

yes, they do.

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

#652

Post by rlayton2 »

Frost1x wrote: post #387
pfortuny wrote: post #296

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…

Most corporate PR statements are crafted this way. They often give the illusion of saying something because all the key words of saying something are there, but they're often crafted in a way that if read carefully, say almost nothing at all or have a giant disclaimer in small font that essentially says *none of this maybe true and is subject to change . A lot of pharmaceutical advertisements do this to: this might h…

I love looking at pharmaceutical advertising in this way - what they do say is the absolute legally maximum they could say about the product. If there were stronger claims, they could make them.

Therefore, if they say "may help against X", then it doesn't really, because if they had substantial evidence of that, they would state that.

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

#655

Post by atonalfreerider »

voidnullnil wrote: post #588
atonalfreerider wrote: post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Pornography does not cause you to go into spasms and die though. I didn't say it did. > You being unable to control yourself does not justify undue restrictions on other people. I'm not talking about myself, I'm talking about minors. Protecting children from products that require an adult brain to ascertain harm is a positive function of government. > The internet should not be ceded to nanny staters and morality p…

Please tell us a concrete plan on how to "protect children" (a moral appeal) from porn. Name one set of rules that would satisfy your legal appetite.

I don't know why you keep insisting that this is a moral appeal. This is public health.

1 - mandate disclaimers in front of all videos describing the possible negative effects of porn (there are concrete, well-studied effects). cigarettes and tobacco have the same mandates and they do have an overall positive effect on educating the public

2 - hold video hosting sites liable if content is shown to minors. there is a reason why a bar can get closed down or a gas station attendee can lose his or her job if alcohol and tobacco is served to minors. the same rules need to apply for sexually explicit material that is turbocharged to reach children

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

#656

Post by moonchild »

Tarsul wrote: post #412
deepfriedrice wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cdc [1] has some figures that show a remarkably clear trend upward after ~2007. But IIRC it's pretty even across gender. [1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db352-h.pdf

thanks for picking up my slack. Another CDC study/poll is shows even worse data than I imagined[1]: e.g. ~8% of high schoolers try to kill themselves every year (I know, sounds unbelievable. Please, everyone, check yourself and correct me if possible). The numbers for girls are higher than for boys but the rises over the years (and the influence through instagram) not necessarily, see the diagrams. [1] https://www.cd…

This was interesting:

> students who reported having sex with persons of the same sex or with both sexes (30.3%); and students who identified as lesbian, gay, or bisexual (23.4%)

Assuming that most people who have sex with others of the same sex do so because they are gay (rather than e.g. because they are experimenting), this indicates that people who are in denial about being gay are more prone to suicide.

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

#657

Post by joelbluminator »

noahtallen wrote: post #622
topspin wrote: post #596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wikipedia, Github and Stackoverflow don't really have a "feed" All three have various feed mechanisms. They all have various ranking systems. Every one of them have people employed (even if mere 'volunteers') to 'maximize engagement.' And every one of these systems have people obsessed with their profile. Every. Single. One. They're just mostly not 'teen girls' and so the 'problem' makes for poor headline material.…

I think this is just a red herring for the main discussion here. Of course that example is also terrible! Just because this discussion is about Instagram doesn’t mean we don’t care about anything else. Speaking to your point more directly, the massive, massive difference is the primary user of Instagram and typical social media vs the primary user of these other platforms. The primary user of Instagram is shown addic…

I agree with the points made here but if addiction or useless products is the problem we will have to disallow Netflix to teenagers and gaming as well. It's not clear to me we as a society are capable of doing that. Not only that, probably the whole pop culture and increased individualism is contributing to increased unhappiness. Facebook is just a symptom of a disease in our culture. Dismantling Facebook will do very little to help kids I think. I actually think the Chinese got it right (banning gaming to teenagers above 3 hours per week or something like that), but we don't operate like that.

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

#658

Post by OneTimePetes »

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…

Socialize the dutys, privatize the rights

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

#660

Post by joelbluminator »

acdha wrote: post #317
raman162 wrote: post #275

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…

There are quite a few things to think about here: 1) When do we agree science has actually reached a conclusion about something? Facebook is quite a new phenomenon. Social studies research is notoriously difficult to replicate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis While it's pretty clear social media has drawbacks, I am not convinced they are materially worse for kids than Netflix or pop culture. 2) Why do we only think about the kids? If we say that social media is more harmful than good - why not ban it altogether? There's this sense that after 18 years old we are all responsible autonomous creatures worthy of maximum freedom but I think that's not based on anything. 3) What happens if we decide to hold everything in our lives to the same yardstick of how good it is to our mental health? I mean social media shouldn't be the exception right? Is watching a violent sadistic show like Games of Thrones good for our mental health? Or watching T.V in general for more than 1 hour a day? How about using Twitter? Or the internet in general? Owning a smartphone? Looking at your smartphone for more than 30 minutes a day? The list of things in our modern lives that have a questionable effect on our mental well-being is enormous.
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