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Most Canadians believe Facebook harms their mental health

theglobeandmail.com

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Re: Most Canadians believe Facebook harms their mental health

#211

Post by heavyset_go »

themacguffinman wrote: post #169
CJefferson wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't "x is evil/bad/harmful. Government needs to regulate x." basically the entire purpose of society? I enjoy living in a society, and not having to worry about if every food I eat might poison me, or every bridge I walk over might fall down. If we decide, as a society, it would be better to ban Facebook, why shouldn't we?

If we decide as a society that certain races are evil/bad/harmful and should have fewer rights, would that make it okay? Just because a lot of people agree on something doesn't make it right or good. I'm not sure where you get the idea that society is just a platform for banning unpopular things. A lot of modern civics was designed specifically to counter that actually, things like constitutional laws, representative…

People can't choose their race, and one's race doesn't impact other people negatively. People can and do choose to engage in exploitative business practices for profit, despite any negative externalities those practices have on other people.

We, as a society, have tomes of legislation and case law that regulate business practices and their negative impacts on individuals or society as whole.

Re: Most Canadians believe Facebook harms their mental health

#212

Post by white-flame »

megaman821 wrote: post #180
white-flame wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Forget the rest of the trash on Facebook The thing is, Facebook actively pushes the trash at you, because trash content monetizes the best. The only effective avoidance mechanism is to not use it (unless there's some facebook-specific browser plugin that strips it all out).

Claims like these hurt your case against Facebook. For most people Facebook shows completely innocuous stuff. I have absolutely nothing political timeline, and the only political thing I have seen in 5 years was by an Aunt (who I muted). For those who love heated political debates and conspiracy theories, Facebook will serve up that content (trash). Other people hear about all the awful stuff on Facebook, check their…

I don't even have a Facebook account. But with my relatives that do, this stuff leaks in from seeing their coworkers' & acquaintances' posts and escalates over time once there's even the slightest hook with the algorithm. Any reasonable political opinion they might have in thumbs-upping some innocuous content eventually routes into the algo feeding more extremist content.

Most people don't outright block offtopic material, they just gloss over it, and it still ends up with influence because that's what Facebook optimizes for. Plus people will still take the occasional click of curiosity to see what some posts are all about, even if they're not really into that content.

Yes, if you do have the discipline to take a zero-tolerance personal policy and immediately block even inoffensive things that just touch into the realm of polarizing, you can probably keep your feeds clean. But most people (eg, non-HN types) don't understand what Facebook is doing and don't think to actively defend against it, and just absent-mindedly consume the feed with no click discipline.

Re: Most Canadians believe Facebook harms their mental health

#213

Post by smegger001 »

johnchristopher wrote: post #65
macksd wrote: post #7

As a side note, I'm a little saddened when I see friends apologize for their posts. There's such a reaction to "influencer culture" that people feel like foodgrams and humblebrags are a terrible thing, and in excess they certainly can be, but I think from most people it's a billion times better than strawman political arguments and manipulative media that is far worse for our mental health than just comparing ourselv…

I really do believe there's a solution for that. We need whatsapp/telegram/signal to display a feed based on user's status and nothing more. It's almost free, frictionless and free from ads (for now). But sharing without the widest audience (just to the social graph of your contacts). It could bring back Google+'s circles so you don't share the same stuff with colleagues and friends and family, but your feed page wou…

I think the ideal would be if everyone had social account like they do with email where they post their content be it pictures text video what have you. and friending someone was simply subscribbing to a rss feed hosted by that persons provider. possiblly with a automated generation and exchange of pgp key for encryption/signing under the hood

Re: Most Canadians believe Facebook harms their mental health

#214

Post by lr4444lr »

distortedsignal wrote: post #8

Most important paragraph, IMO: > Conducted Oct. 8 to 10, the online poll surveyed 1,545 Canadians and cannot be assigned a margin of error because internet-based polls are not considered random samples. It's a pretty good sample-size, but we don't get error bars. I don't remember if there was anything FB-critical happening that week (when did the study about teen mental health come out?), but the timeframe could also…

Do you really think non-internet users would make thr "FB is harmful" opinion LESS chosen?

Re: Most Canadians believe Facebook harms their mental health

#215

Post by joe_the_user »

retrac wrote: post #209
whimsicalism wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think FB is probably bad, but I've also noticed that people have a tendency to blame delusional mental illnesses on whatever a person was going through/up to at the time it onset when it is often more like a timer went off.

A person's mental illness can have drastically different outcomes depending on who they are surrounded by. Even before Facebook there were plenty of cases where people exploited the emotionally and socially naive or unstable, for their own gain or amusement. I worry social media can enable something similar.

But it's really not social media in particular. It seems pretty clear that when delusions are coming on, a person will seek out those who humor those delusions. If you're talking pre-social media Internet, you'd have the person on BBSes and email lists for whatever they find appealing.

And it's worth considering that the situation isn't some mentally ill people and some opportunistic/predatory people. You have a mixture of delusion and predation over a substantial population and you have the ability of people in these groups to seek each other out. Maybe if you shut down usenet and everything past that, you could stop this phenomena, at the expense of more or less shutting down the Internet. But otherwise, the discussions blaming social media in particular for this stuff seem misguided. Social media is about connecting with people you know whereas "socially resonant insanity" or whatever wants to call it, involves find new friends and new facts.

Re: Most Canadians believe Facebook harms their mental health

#217

Post by joe_the_user »

RealityVoid wrote: post #167
whimsicalism wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think FB is probably bad, but I've also noticed that people have a tendency to blame delusional mental illnesses on whatever a person was going through/up to at the time it onset when it is often more like a timer went off.

Yes, most likely the ilness would be there even without Facebook. But the platform enables some destructive behavior while in the real life, I hope, more productive support structures could exist. While mental illness is something you might be biologically predisposed, the outcome can vary wildly with or without support structures and good help. And I think on this end Facebook is profoundly destructive.

Yes, most likely the ilness would be there even without Facebook. But the platform enables some destructive behavior while in the real life, I hope, more productive support structures could exist.

But, realistically, is the choice social media or real life? Or is choice between one part of the Internet and another part of the Internet? Which is to say, what are you talking about doing? Ending Facebook in particular? Ending "Social Media" but not say, youtube?

Re: Most Canadians believe Facebook harms their mental health

#218

Post by Jonanin »

birtoise wrote: post #216

Why do they use it then? Just stop using. Damn ppl are dumb. “Oh it hurts when i poke my eye with a needle guess i will keep doing that for 3h everyday”

Because people's stated and revealed preferences on this topic are drastically different.

Re: Most Canadians believe Facebook harms their mental health

#220

Post by quadrangle »

passivate wrote: post #195
quadrangle wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can ask that for every single behavior that anyone claims goes against their deeper values like good health. Why do people keep smoking or eating junk food or staying up too late or yelling at family and friends when they lose their temper? It's true that deeds speak louder than words. But it's also true that habits are hard to break, and there's the thinking-fast-and-slow ideas that our judgments, actions, and v…

>You can ask that for every single behavior that anyone claims goes against their deeper values like good health. Why do people keep smoking or eating junk food or staying up too late or yelling at family and friends when they lose their temper? Okay, but who other than that individual person is to blame for their behavior? If we blame external agents for all of societies ills, that completely devalues personal respo…

You're already in a less open, less curious state when your language is that of "blame".

The more open-minded curious approach uses language more around cause and effect and studying causes vs correlations and looking for empirical evidence about how the world works.

When you notice that you are looking for who to blame, then the best thing for learning is to investigate your own reactive (though perhaps very subtly reactive) state.

"Facebook made me do it" is a blaming state too, and it leads nowhere to get stuck in that blaming mindset.

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