I did my own informal research study—I quit social media cold turkey. My findings: I feel much better. I don't need any other data.
I have informally reproduced your study and reached the same conclusion.
The case against social media is stronger than you think
161–170 of 304 posts
Re: The case against social media is stronger than you think
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
You might live in an extremely free country and have no fear about political prosecution but still fear social prosecution. If someone I was friends with made racist remarks, they wouldn't be prosecuted for that. But I would stop being their friend. Similarly if I was the only one in my friend group against racism and advocate firefly against it, they would probably stop being my friends.
>If someone I was friends with made racist remarks, they wouldn't be prosecuted for that. But I would stop being their friend. So you want your friend to be able to anonymously express their racism while being able to hide it from you? I can't imagine advocating for that as a desired goal rather than a negative side effect. >Similarly if I was the only one in my friend group against racism and advocate firefly agains…
sig says "So you want your friend to be able to anonymously express their racism while being able to hide it from you? I can't imagine advocating for that as a desired goal rather than a negative side effect."
Deceit is a characteristic of our humanity. We all deceive others and ourselves. If people are to be allowed to be fully expressive as humans they need to be able to deceive. And so they require anonymity.
See Robert Trivers' works
Re: The case against social media is stronger than you think
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's increasingly discussed in traditional media too so let's toss out that first line glib dismissal. More and more people declaring it's net-negative is the first step towards changing anything. Academic "let's evaluate each individual point about it on its own merits" is not how this sort of thing finds political momentum. (Or we could argue that "social media" in the Facebook-era sense is just one part of a large…
>It's increasingly discussed in traditional media too so let's toss out that first line glib dismissal. Traditional media is the absolute worst possible source for anything related to social media because of the extreme conflict of interest. Decentralised media is a fundamental threat to the business model of centralised media, so of course most of the coverage of social media in traditional media will be negative.
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Re: The case against social media is stronger than you think
#164Re: The case against social media is stronger than you think
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the United States, political votes are not anonymous. There is a database of how someone voted. If you’re out in public, you’re also not fully anonymous. You display metadata such as race, gender, age, behavior. Now you could wear a ski mask during broad daylight but I doubt if you’d be allowed inside a bank. And the bank has a right to judge you for that.
> There is a database of how someone voted. That cannot be right, that's the fundamental core of the voting process in our democracies. You might be thinking about the party registrations or voluntary polls ? > You display metadata What you show to the world has no requirement to be accurate. If you look like a rich 70 old Asian lady when going to the park there will be no check that's actually what you are (unless t…
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Re: The case against social media is stronger than you think
#166The last week has taken me from “I believe in the freedom of online anonymity” to “Online anonymity possess a weight that a moral, civil society cannot bear.” I do not believe humans are capable of responsibly wielding the power to anonymously connect with millions of people without the real weight of social consequence.
The strongest counterpoint to that is the intense chilling effect that zero anonymity would have on political dissent and discourse that doesn't match the status quo or party line. I feel that would be much more dangerous for our society than occasionally suffering the consequence of some radicalized edge cases.
Maybe the chilling effect is the point, and maybe it's been demonised unfairly.
To be clear, I think freedom of speech is a bedrock foundation of intellectual society and should be the starting point for modern societies.
But perhaps we really should outlaw anonymity when it comes to expression. Allow people to express themselves, but it shouldn't emanate from the void.
Re: The case against social media is stronger than you think
#167You reap what you sew. Stupid and uninformed voices receiving equivalent status to wise scientific experts was a mistake. Witnessing the flat Earth crowd growing over the decades encapsulates everything wrong with social media.
"1970-01-01" stepped in it 5 hours ago by saying: >"You reap what you sew.
"You reap what you sow" is correct. You sew cloth with a needle and thread but sow seeds by throwing them on fertile ground, hoping they will sprout, grow and you will later reap a harvest.
Re: The case against social media is stronger than you think
#168"everyone publicly talking in the same room" social media really sucks. I've really enjoyed the smaller-scale, better-curated interaction on mastodon. It feels like a giant step forward in how people can connect and socialize online.
A giant step forward into the echo chamber
Echo chambers aren't good but the large scale social media I've tried has a tendency to put me in an echo chamber (specifically one trying to wring out all the engagement possible, often with stuff to make me angry) and also elevate low quality opinions (often factually incorrect or philosophically incoherent).
Smaller and more personally curated social media has been better for sourcing broad opinions actually if I put just a little work into it.
Re: The case against social media is stronger than you think
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
But we made progress away from that and now we've regressed back towards it recently, aided by social media.
Exactly when did we make progress? In 2008 - before social media really took off how much of the population was a yelling that a Black man wasn’t a “real American” and was a “secret Muslim”? Before then we had the “Willie Horton ads”. Not to mention that Clinton performatively oversaw the electrocution of a mentally challenged Black man to show that he was tough on crime. https://jacobin.com/2016/11/bill-clinton-rick…
That black man you're referring to was elected President twice, despite his haters. Which does not mean that racism was conquered but does indicate progress since the aforementioned Jim Crow era.
Re: The case against social media is stronger than you think
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's increasingly discussed in traditional media too so let's toss out that first line glib dismissal. More and more people declaring it's net-negative is the first step towards changing anything. Academic "let's evaluate each individual point about it on its own merits" is not how this sort of thing finds political momentum. (Or we could argue that "social media" in the Facebook-era sense is just one part of a large…
I did not consider it a glib dismissal, and I would not consider traditional media an appropriate avenue to litigate this either. Trial by media is a term used to describe something that generally think shouldn't occur. The appropriate place to find out what is and isn't true is research. Do research, write papers, discuss results, resolve contradictions in findings, reach consensus. The media should not be deciding…
Weren’t you, in your initial post, suspicious that the research process was settling on a pessimistic consensus view? Figuring that, because most every formal study is coming up negative (or “no effect supported”), it must be that the research is selective and designed to manipulate? And that a phenomenon can’t exhibit a diversity of uniformly bad effects without “an underlying reason that has been left unstated and unproven”?
I don’t know how I’d state or prove a single underlying reason why most vices are attractive-while-corrosive and still, on the whole, bad. It feels like priests and philosophers have tried for the whole human era to articulate a unified theory of exactly why, for example, “vanity is bad”. But I’m still comfortable saying gambling feels good and breaks material security, lust feels good and breaks contentment (and sometimes relationships), and social media feels good and breaks spirits.
I certainly agree that “social media” feels uncomfortably imprecise as a category—shorthand for individualized feeds, incentives toward vain behavior, gambling-like reinforcement, ephemerality over structure, decontextualization, disindividuation, and so on; as well as potentially nice things like “seeing mom’s vacation pics.”
If we were to accept that social media in its modern form, like other vices, “feels good in the short term and selectively stokes one’s ego,” would that be enough of a positive side to accept the possibility for uniformly negative long-run effects? For that matter, and this is very possible—is there a substantial body of research drawing positive conclusions that I’m not familiar with?