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Snapchat is harming children at an industrial scale?

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Re: Snapchat is harming children at an industrial scale?

#101

Post by jay_kyburz »

mugwumprk wrote: post #67
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Phone use during class time is banned in my kid's high schools. Makes no difference -- it's completely unenforced by the teachers. They're practically physically adults, teachers don't want to risk the confrontation, etc. And the kids suffer for it. And my youngest uses no social media but their mind is still eaten by constant phone usage. More than social media, the problem is the device. The form factor. The "smart…

Petition to build Faraday cages into every public school classroom in the country

Phones are banned on school ground here and its working. My kids have never been allowed social media here at home, and they don't see friends doing it because phones are not allowed at school at all.

Neither give a shit about their phone and we have to force them to take it if they are going out so we can call them if we need them.

Re: Snapchat is harming children at an industrial scale?

#102

Post by pmarreck »

alwa wrote: post #89
pmarreck wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So basically, if he hadn't added the comma, he'd still be at college. So he got kicked out because of an extra comma, which he added to make it even more edgy, at the cost of reducing plausible deniability to nearly zero.

I’m not sure which college was involved here, but if I were the person adjudicating this, I imagine the outcome would not have hinged on the comma.

Well, without the comma it can be entirely plausibly framed as a nice statement, no?

Re: Snapchat is harming children at an industrial scale?

#103

Post by JKCalhoun »

abletonlive wrote: post #88
light_hue_1 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. A large fraction of Snapchat's users are significantly harmed. First hand, I see it all the time in students. There's an extreme unhealthy obsession with social media that leads to serious inferiority complexes and depression. All of this wrapped in algorithms that compel people to participate in various ways, from streaks to points, etc. Quantitatively, everything from anxiety to depression to suicide has more…

> Social media is black mirror, and we're doing it to ourselves. You mean black mirror is a pessimistic exaggeration on the state of society and technology. It’s not the other way around. What you’re observing is not profound, it’s literally how the writers approach their process for the show. In fact, you’re doing this weird thing where you make it seem like black mirror was prophetic and it came before all the obse…

Your defense of social media seems to be that the jobs it has created outweigh the horrible things it has done to many of the young people in society.

Some of us apparently apply very different weighting to the two sides and come to a different conclusion on the efficacy of social media.

Re: Snapchat is harming children at an industrial scale?

#105

Post by ClumsyPilot »

stickfigure wrote: post #38
cbruns wrote: post #34

Some readers here presumably work at Snap. How do you feel about this and your work? Do you sleep soundly at night?

I don't work for Snap, but they do use some software I wrote, so I guess that's close enough. I find all of these "social media is bad" articles (for kids or adults) basically boil down to: Let humans communicate freely, some of them will do bad things. This presents a choice: Monitor everyone Orwell-style, or accept that the medium isn't going to be able to solve the problem. Even though we tolerate a lot more monit…

> Let humans communicate freely, some of them will do bad things.

That’s just normal phone calls - no one is complaining about those.

But social networks have algorithms that promote one kind of content over another.

I keep getting recommended YouTube videos of gross and mostly fake pimple removal, on Facebook AI generated fake videos of random crap like Barnacle removal, and google ads for an automated IoT chicken coop.

I have never searched for these things and no living person has ever suggested such things to me. The algorithm lives its own life and none of it is good.

Re: Snapchat is harming children at an industrial scale?

#106

Post by azinman2 »

heavyset_go wrote: post #104

Did some work with researchers at a local university and found out that Snapchat is like the #1 vector for production and distribution of CSAM. Same thing when it came to online grooming.

my guess is anywhere kids are will be that

Re: Snapchat is harming children at an industrial scale?

#107

Post by ClumsyPilot »

olyjohn wrote: post #95
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> CEO’s and founders just moan that it isn’t possible to regulate Surely if a CEO with a billion dollar budget can’t regulate it, neither can a parent?

A parent only needs to regulate their child. Not 25 billions daily posts.

It sounds like extremely convenient offloading of responsibility for a toxic product

Re: Snapchat is harming children at an industrial scale?

#108

Post by SamuelAdams »

aylmao wrote: post #64

> “Think it would be interesting to investigate how healthy Snapstreak sessions are for users… If I open Snapchat, take a photo of the ceiling to keep my streak going and don’t engage with the rest of the app, is that the type of behavior we want to encourage? Alternatively, if we find that streaks are addictive or a gateway to already deep engagement with other parts of Snapchat, then it would be something positive…

GitHub does the same thing with commits, displaying them on your profile. Is that remarkably different than what Snapchat is doing?

Re: Snapchat is harming children at an industrial scale?

#109

Post by exceptione »

aylmao wrote: post #64

> “Think it would be interesting to investigate how healthy Snapstreak sessions are for users… If I open Snapchat, take a photo of the ceiling to keep my streak going and don’t engage with the rest of the app, is that the type of behavior we want to encourage? Alternatively, if we find that streaks are addictive or a gateway to already deep engagement with other parts of Snapchat, then it would be something positive…

Bingo. If more people were carefully analyzing language, they could spot earlier that people are on the slippery slope of, lets call it, anti-human beliefs; as then they may help them to correct course.

If we don't, these narratives are getting normalized. A society is on a curve of collective behavior, there is no stable point. Only direction.

Re: Snapchat is harming children at an industrial scale?

#110

Post by spacechild1 »

ceejayoz wrote: post #71
spacechild1 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> where they'll use their friends' devices to do it. That'd already be much, much better than using it at every possible moment. Why do people just give up proactively? Yes, you can't prevent it 100%, but you can still try to restrict it as much as possible.

> Why do people just give up proactively? Because we're up against trillion dollar companies that employ armies of experts with the goal of inducing addictive behavior. We're deeply outgunned. Because kids have a genuine need for socialization, and being the one without a phone means you just don't get invited to shit. Birthday parties, hangouts, random trips to the ice cream shop. Because kids are smart. I'm very te…

Yes, I understand all of that. What I meant was: refusing smartphones as long as possible. For example, as long as only ~50% of your kid's friends have a smartphone, it should be possible to still resist. Just don't be one of those parents who (unknowingly) help create the problem in the first place by succumbing to Big Tech on the first occasion.
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