Facebook proven to negatively impact mental health • Hacker News Board

Re: Facebook proven to negatively impact mental health

#81

Post by JohnFen » Thu, Sep 22, 2022, 4:46 PM UTC

standardUser wrote: post #43

AlwaysRock wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Um... I installed Instagram recently for the first time. Every 5th post or so is an ad. That you have no choice over... And there are a lot of suggested content posts which you have no control over. It's like the same as channel flipping and getting ads blasted at you but now the ads are smarter/more targeted.

Yeah, the ads are actually relevant sometimes and they don't demand 30 seconds of my life, so massive improvements all around. I don't see much suggested content unless I scroll too long, at which point I probably do need some more content.

I honestly don't see targeted ads as an improvement at all. I see them as the opposite.

Re: Facebook proven to negatively impact mental health

#82

Post by giantg2 » Thu, Sep 22, 2022, 4:47 PM UTC

gergov wrote: post #47

sbf501 wrote: post #13

I'd like to see similar study about the original gateway drug: "24-hour News Channels", which was followed by "24-hour Outrage-News Channels". Seems like we've been building toward this, the interactivity of the internet was the paradigm shift (to use a 90's term). EDIT: I realize it isn't news messing with youths' self-esteem (well, in some cases it is), but it is related in that the media is custom-made to drive en…

Right, engagement at all cost it is, but there is a fundamental difference. Television required professionals where even wrestling and reality TV is scripted: it requires some sort of willful ignorance from the viewer to engage with it. Social media pushes the illusion that you are not engaging with professionals but peers, and the dominant signals (how many views, likes, comments, etc.) of this day and age were not…

"Right, engagement at all cost it is"

Ha I actually read this as enragement, which I don't think is even a real word.

Re: Facebook proven to negatively impact mental health

#83

Post by JohnFen » Thu, Sep 22, 2022, 4:48 PM UTC

changoplatanero wrote: post #7

I don’t get why Facebook is so often singled out in these types of studies. What about other activities like dating or school or going to church? I bet those can be shown to increase anxiety and be bad for mental health

> I bet those can be shown to increase anxiety and be bad for mental health

Numerous studies over a long period of time indicate the opposite.

Re: Facebook proven to negatively impact mental health

#84

Post by singlow » Thu, Sep 22, 2022, 4:49 PM UTC

DamnInteresting wrote: post #30

I do not care for this trend of omitting the publication date from news articles. Temporal context is very relevant in news articles, especially to assess whether the information has been superseded. (I know, one can often find the publication date in the HTML source, but that requires savvy, and should not be necessary.)

Its a Drupal 7 site so every content item has a publication date in the db since it is part of the root data schema for posts/pages and all sub-types. In their case they have at least two content types in their news page. All of the "News" type articles do display the date but the template for "Research" articles does not display it. It is possible this was deliberate but most likely it just was in the default news template and when they created a custom template for the research articles they based it on the default page template which doesn't include a date line.

Re: Facebook proven to negatively impact mental health

#85

Post by mayowaxcvi » Thu, Sep 22, 2022, 4:49 PM UTC

dougweltman wrote: post #48

Quoted post unavailable.

- brought to you by the academic fields that can reliably predict almost nothing.

Re: Facebook proven to negatively impact mental health

#86

Post by PuppyTailWags » Thu, Sep 22, 2022, 4:53 PM UTC

gergov wrote: post #47

sbf501 wrote: post #13

I'd like to see similar study about the original gateway drug: "24-hour News Channels", which was followed by "24-hour Outrage-News Channels". Seems like we've been building toward this, the interactivity of the internet was the paradigm shift (to use a 90's term). EDIT: I realize it isn't news messing with youths' self-esteem (well, in some cases it is), but it is related in that the media is custom-made to drive en…

Right, engagement at all cost it is, but there is a fundamental difference. Television required professionals where even wrestling and reality TV is scripted: it requires some sort of willful ignorance from the viewer to engage with it. Social media pushes the illusion that you are not engaging with professionals but peers, and the dominant signals (how many views, likes, comments, etc.) of this day and age were not…

I don't really agree with this. Rush Limbaugh successfully ran a platform on mostly entirely television that deeply poisoned the cultural landscape of the USA at the time (he was defending Reagan's neglect of HIV/AIDS and playing "another one bites the dust" when Freddie Mercury died), and laid the foundation on current polarized rhetoric strategies. He spread lies that Obama wasn't a natural born citizen. He blamed volcano eruptions on the Affordable Care Act. So on and so forth. It's spurious to claim that outrage bait on television hasn't messed up people's brains just because the internet is doing a better job at it. They're just modeling what television was already successfully doing.

Re: Facebook proven to negatively impact mental health

#87

Post by blep_ » Thu, Sep 22, 2022, 4:56 PM UTC

JohnFen wrote: post #80

blep_ wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Earlier this year, I had a recruiter invite me to interview there, and I made an attempt at convincing myself with reasoning like: - they're going to do their evil thing anyway, may as well show up and intentionally do it marginally worse - they're going to pay someone large sums of money, may as well be me - I increasingly believe this whole industry is net evil overall, and large sums of money mean I can leave it s…

I think those arguments would only be persuasive to someone who is actively looking for a way to paper over their ethical concerns and take the money. They wouldn't be persuasive for a person trying to be true to their ethical stance.

This is an accurate description of my thought processes at the time.

Re: Facebook proven to negatively impact mental health

#88

Post by hhmc » Thu, Sep 22, 2022, 4:59 PM UTC

stickfigure wrote: post #64

inamberclad wrote: post #57

I wonder how people continue to work at Facebook. I know they tend to have the highest salaries from the FAANG groups, but still. We, as engineers and builders, have the responsibility to think critically about how the things we are working on will be used.

I wonder how people can continue to post questions like this to HN, when there are billions of people who happily use Facebook. I would think it's our responsibility to look outside of our narrow information bubble.

If the original claim is that 'facebook is damaging to (and beyond) its users', then the response 'but it has _many_ users' isn't much of a defense..

Re: Facebook proven to negatively impact mental health

#89

Post by lo_zamoyski » Thu, Sep 22, 2022, 4:59 PM UTC

duxup wrote: post #66

sbf501 wrote: post #13

I'd like to see similar study about the original gateway drug: "24-hour News Channels", which was followed by "24-hour Outrage-News Channels". Seems like we've been building toward this, the interactivity of the internet was the paradigm shift (to use a 90's term). EDIT: I realize it isn't news messing with youths' self-esteem (well, in some cases it is), but it is related in that the media is custom-made to drive en…

My father in law, who suffers from parkinson's calls me several times a day to leave me voice mails about how terrible the world is and how scared he is about what is coming. If there's a hell I hope there is a special place for 24-hour news channels and folks who feed fear and skewed garbage to people and hurt them. I sometimes wish I could run a 24 hour news channel that tried to do more of a mix of content / etc.…

You'd go out of business.

I'm not dismissing malice or opportunism in the media, but it is also important to appreciate the situation mass news media is in. Mass media are extremely dependent on things like advertising and that's always been the case for as long mass media have existed. The price of subscription or buying a paper is simply too meager to cover the costs of running a paper, for example. Advertising introduces its own perverse incentives and limitations (you can't bite the hand that feeds you, for example).

24 hour news are, for the most part, useless, so they've got to fill the air time with sensationalized garbage, and because there's an arms race, the sensantionalism escalates.

Re: Facebook proven to negatively impact mental health

#90

Post by fallingknife » Thu, Sep 22, 2022, 5:00 PM UTC

inamberclad wrote: post #57

I wonder how people continue to work at Facebook. I know they tend to have the highest salaries from the FAANG groups, but still. We, as engineers and builders, have the responsibility to think critically about how the things we are working on will be used.

Still say FB did nothing wrong. Maybe it's bad for you, but so is TV news, sugar, alcohol, tobacco, and fast food. As an engineer I have the responsibility to give my users what they want, not be some moralizing nag.

edit: I mean nothing wrong in terms of the product it delivers