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 and wantonly misleading people.
A lot of pharmaceutical advertisements do this to: this might help you, it might also kill you, you choose(!) but please ask your doctor about us anyways and throw us some money.
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.
I make $BILLIONS from this drink.
(fill in whatever value of X, Y and Z makes this all ok)
The rest I would truly contest.
Prom is not an every single morning, universe commenting event no matter how the teenage brain may attempt to blow it up.
Cosmo and Vogue do not have the same continuous feedback loop and clearly have 100x (1000x? 1mnx?) less content being created, repeated, refreshed, etc. Its a magazine. If you want to invoke their IG handles honestly I could find 100s of influencers with more reach and engagement
How did you pull this from a rather benign statement about high school prom and magazines?
I believe other social phenomena are responsible for this, mainly forms of peer pressur. The stories influencers use to lure their audiences often invokes the threat of sexism and that naturally increases fears that might lead to a feedback loop.
"Regular smoking use is associated with lower BMI, which is shown to correlate with improved heart health and lower mortality rates."
"Use of fossil fuels powers a number of ecology-preserving tasks, allowing us to care for the environment in a way we could not without this amazing source of Earth-loving fuel."
It still needs a name. Here let me try:
Disproportionate benefit insinuation error: Implying (without explicitly stating that it has more benefits than disadvantages because that would be a disprovable lie) that because something has some benefit, it is overall helpful.
Or just "plausible deniability"- factually stating the existence of a beneficial tree, but omitting mention of the harmful forest
Or just "cherry-picking"
Or to cover cases where a harm is insinuated/emphasized in the same way in order to discredit something (see: literally all the antivax data, antiscience, antimedicine... "trust doctors, you mean like the ones who prescribed thalidomide?")... "Misrepresenting the forest"
There's a conspiracy theory stating that he's wearing AR contact lenses such as those (https://www.wired.com/story/mojo-vision-smart-contact-lens/) and we know he's been working on this since 2017 (https://www.dezeen.com/2017/04/20/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-e...).
I think the problem is most people probably read the statement and don't realize just how weak the evidence required to make it true is.
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 for how long - 100 years? Maybe there are some feelings that we never had the option of expressing or feeling.
From the article it seems that young girls know about the toxicity in the application, why they keep using it? if their parents are aware too, why do they let their daughters use it?
But I'll not get in to that. :)
Facebook and Instagram are drug dealers. Sure, they're not physically distributing a substance, but the social interactions they provide are every bit as addictive. In time, society will abolish or tightly constrain them in the same way society has banned other highly addictive substances.
And this is why I don't blame the users.
getting off soapbox
I don't work in behavioral science, but this isn't my understanding. I was under the impression that research indicates peers are the larger influence, which can be tempered somewhat by parents. For an easy example, whether or not peers smoke is a better predictor than whether parents smoke.
Those are their peers.
They aren’t their friends. Kids make their own friends, but it’s unusual for them to be able to make lifestyle choices like where they live before adulthood.
To note, your peers aren’t people on Instagram per se. I’d guess a study on the issue would say that a peer group they associate with on daily basis like in school would have more of an effect on their choices than Instagram influencers.
True, but for most people this is only available within a subset of constrained choices. Parents in rural Appalachia or the rust belt probably aren’t going to have a lot of Phillips Academies to choose from
You might say that, but you would be wrong. Parents of teens have been the most influential people in their lives up to them becoming teens. Part of the process into adulthood is to break away from that pattern, to explore and build connections outside the family sphere. That's why teens are the most vulnerable demographic for a lot of things -- their brains are in the process of rewiring themselves for more personal responsibility and less parental oversight. So they're actively seeking to avoid parental control, but haven't yet learned to correctly weigh and assess long-term effects of their decisions.
I certainly think the internet gave me access to many more humans, ideas, and tribes than my parents' generation had access to, and it would be hard for me to see how it would have been possible for my parents to have as much influence on me as their parents had on them.
I would even say it is indisputable there are forces beyond parents’ control unless the parents opt to live an Amish lifestyle, such as using devices connected to the internet and various social networks. If you do not give it to your kid, someone at school will, and even more, you probably need to teach your kid how to play the game rather than have them start it blind while the other players have experience.
And not all parents realize, or can realize, everything that goes on in their childrens' lives.
That’s not true in any western country :)
There is no need to have any grudge against me (I hope). I get it. I never said being a parent is an easy job. I acknowledge how hard it is but...
> Facebook and Instagram are drug dealers
If you teach your kids not to consume drugs, why Instagram should be any different?
Imagine if all the other kids at school used drugs on a daily basis, that there was advertising plastered everywhere telling you that drugs are cool, that successful people use drugs and that your worth in this world can be directly tied to successful use of drugs.
I don't mean to sound mean here, but are you a parent? If not I suspect you're not really aware of the realities of parenting, particularly once a child becomes teenage. You can only do so much. And you certainly can't win against a multi-billion dollar enterprise determined to make your rebellion-inclined teenager do something.
Do you have any comments on the tactics used by cigarette companies -- specifically in the United States -- before the 1998 "Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement"? When I was a kid, the amount of advertising by tobacco was incredible. It was unavoidable and everywhere... and any cool or famous seemed associated with cigarette companies.
Even if you ignore smoking cigarettes, the topic of smoking marijuana will surely be a major issue for current and next gen parents. How would you parent around this issue? It is so complex.
The tactics worked? Rates of smoking used to be way higher in the past.
https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2014/images/p0612-YRBS.pd...
With this I just want to say that I know it's a difficult task but presenting it as a lost battle/impossible seems to me wrong.
"Peers’ smoking is the strongest predictor of adolescent smoking."[1]
[1] Gecková, A.M., Stewart, R., van Dijk, J.P., Orosová, O.G., Groothoff, J.W. and Post, D., 2005. Influence of socio-economic status, parents and peers on smoking behaviour of adolescents. European addiction research, 11(4), pp.204-209.
The thing is, we made headway in the battle against smoking by disallowing people from doing all those things. You're not allowed to market to kids, you're not allowed to depict smoking in most TV that kids are likely to watch, you're not allowed to smoke in or near schools and teachers who do are frowned upon. Cigarettes themselves are taxed heavily specifically to price young people out of getting into the habit, vendors are required to card, and the cigarette makers are even required to pay into a fund that promotes anti-smoking messaging.
So yes it is definitely not an impossible task. But the things that make it possible require taking it seriously as a danger and addressing it collectively.
> But I was taught not to do it and never did it.
So not all young people in your time were taught similarly. Or if they were, those teachings didn't stick.
Ideally the number of minors smoking would be zero. I don't think that's a radical idea, and I hope it's something that everyone can agree on. "Teachings from parents" obviously didn't achieve that goal, from your own experience.
In many high schools this isn't far off the truth.
One thing that does some "obvious" for this generation of parents: Work hard to educate your children on the dangers of traditional cigarette smoking. That is a seriously terrible habit for your health and well-being. I feel much less so about vaping (e-cigarettes), as the health effects of nicotine addiction are still far lower than traditional cigarette smoke inhaled into the lungs.
I think there's a certain nuance there. Drugs (which ones?) can (should?) be legal - or at least their consumption decriminalized. We've made good progress already and yet much more is to be made.
But all this is not saying that drugs should be pushed hand over fist down people's throat and that billions should be spent on studying the ways people can be more encouraged to become drug users.
And this is what Facebook et al are doing. They are spending untold resources on devising the most efficient ways of making people addicted and ensuring that no other way exist of satisfying the cravings. They create echo chambers and push specifically topics that get the most response out of people.
And this is completely legal (currently). Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok etc... are allowed to be cool, hip, desirable and consumed in ways that the tobacco industry couldn't imagine in their wildest dreams during their heydays.
These companies can tap into the deepest secrets and desires of vast swathes of people in ways that is unprecedented.
I feel that the vices of the old world, like drugs, are chickenshit compared to the power that the new vices can wield over their captives.
I hope not, the War on Drugs is one of the biggest disasters in modern history, directly linked to untold problems in society
"I got it all, buddy. Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook...I can hook you up."
“We” certainly blamed the users of addictive substances and vilified or at least looked down on them. That is until it was heavily white and middle class or above people with opoids. Even then it was slow, but some things were done. Far more than what was done with other highly addictive substances. It’s a disgrace.
I shutter to think any drug banning history happen in any other context.
I know, because like most children, I was exposed to online porn at a young age and was addicted to it well into my adult life. These companies need regulation, because they are bad actors.
Nah. That's been studied heavily. Here's an overview from the National Institutes of Health.[1] Wikipedia has an overview.[2] The overall conclusion is that most of the research is of terrible quality and there's no big measurable effect.
>The proposed DSM-5, slated to publish in May of 2014, contains in this new addition the diagnosis of Hypersexual Disorder, which includes problematic, compulsive pornography use. Bostwick and Bucci, in their report out of the Mayo Clinic on treating Internet pornography addiction with naltrexone, wrote “…cellular adaptations in the (pornography) addict’s PFC result in increased salience of drug-associated stimuli, decreased salience of non-drug stimuli, and decreased interest in pursuing goal-directed activities central to survival.”
Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3050060/
[1] https://www.mayoclinicproceedings.org/article/S0025-6196(11)...
No, nothing needs regulation. Stop making the internet fucking worse. Can we go back to 2000 now (not that it was good then either since the internet was fundamentally broken already)? This is like the bat shit insane morons who think having a popup about cookies on every page is solving the """privacy""" issue.
Literally every single political issue on HN is bogus. Take the ad blocking issue for instance, nothing that has ads actually matters. Your "solutions" like Brave are pure garbage.
The "privacy" issue doesn't exist because if we were using sane tech instead of webshit, there wouldn't be any tracking since it wouldn't be conceptually possible. Why the hell can tech even track you in the first place for reading static documents? This is a poor analog that cannot even compete with paper newspapers (which are also much more legible because they are not on LCDs).
Net neutrality doesn't matter because nobody can ELI5 why I should care about it. Since the internet is all garbage, it shouldn't be an issue that it's expensive. Just don't use it. Make a free replacement. Cuban citizens have already done it.
Now let me try and list CURRENT_YEAR.addictions:
- Games
- Working out
- Porn
- Social media
- TV (youtube or whatever you use now)
- HN (muh dunning kruger syndrome, imposter, et al)
- Eating
- Lotto tickets
- Stock market
- Programming
- Working
- Drugs
- Things that are sort of drugs but not
- Any substance what so ever
- Benchmarking
- Politics
- Literally any hobby
Oh look guys, HN needs to be regulated because I can come up with a person who has problems because of it.
Guys we need to regulate fat and high calorie food. Oh wait it grows on trees.
People who see a problem and immediately go "we need regulation to solve this" (and even proceed to come up with some ad-hoc hypothesis of how it solves the problem after it's proven that it doesn't solve it in a substantial way) are morons. There is actually something wrong with their brain. They hold back progress. Every new law is a potential stumbling block for progress and thus why new legislation should be avoided at all costs. See MECHANISM NOT POLICY article on wikipedia to see how people already knew about this 70 years ago in tech.
This is a hyperbolic statement. Even if you are just talking about internet regulation.
Let's imagine for a moment that someone invented a hypnosis algorithm and hosted it on a website. Anyone going to this website went into spasms and died in front of their screen. Would we seek protection for our children and for the general public from such a website from internet browser companies, ISPs and the government? Yes we would. This is an extreme example but it illustrates a point. You can say the same thing about websites that prey on children, or the elderly.
I'm not advocating for the banning of pornography altogether. I am making the simple proposition that it be better regulated. People who distribute porn know full well that their content is seen by minors. Having a child check a box that says that they are over 18 is not good enough. If I hadn't seen porn as a minor, I might have had a better chance of avoiding the extremely negative impacts that it can carry with it. Don't believe me? Visit a support page like r/NoFap and read the hundreds of thousands of stories there.
I'm not going to touch any of the other subjects you raised because I'm not arguing for any of the things you listed.
https://gizmodo.com/lawmakers-ask-zuckerberg-to-drop-instagr...
Literally every social issue on the web for the last 20 years follows this one simple formula:
> X causes Y. Yes it sounds stupid, but read this long winded reasoning or spend the next 70 hours of your life going down my trail of studies to back this up
And nobody actually invests their lives in rebuking them, and they get bored and stop talking about it 5 years later.
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 police.
This is not about morality. Please don't read intentions where there are none.
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
Why would you think this will work? My parents, school, etc already gave you a million false warnings about porn and yet I looked at it. Did that even work for smoking? I think smoking only stopped once vape replaced it. Now I have to skip the intro logo as well as some stupid disclaimer, and producers have to waste more of their time on legal checkboxes, great.
> 2 - hold video hosting sites liable if content is shown to minors.
That's not a concrete plan. Do we need photo ID here? Some experimental crypto to disclose your government certified age to the website so it can decide not to kick you off? What about a forum where anyone can post any image? Does the forum have to be legally liable to block minors if it has no rule against porn?
The internet worked perfect in 2000. I got my porn when I was 13 and had no problem. There was not a single complaint aside from corporate scum trying to enforce DMCA crap (the multi billion dollar company was complaining, nobody else). Only when all you American idiots came in 2010 from faceberg all these pretend social problems started existing. The internet is literally just data transmission and this act could not be more harmless if you wanted it to be. Quite literally, the internet is the most harmless technology in existence. It cannot give you any disease, etc. It costs nothing, etc. What we are seeing here is the American art of being a professional victim. One should start by observing that almost every single complaint about the internet starts with "I read some text and now I am offended".
I envision the internet as community run, and free. The current internet is all obsolete garbage. The problem is, on this new internet we wont actually be able to make it because everything will be illegal by then. It will be illegal to run point to point to your neighbour because of some stupid porno law that has absolutely nothing to do with your application.
I'm not familiar with actual research in this space, but i would imagine that its similarly addictive to being with friends IRL?
(To me) social media is a great tool to connect with friends and stay present even after we move away and work and pandemic quarantine. Its a suppliment for IRL relationships. I used to live with friends in college, and i used to go out and get food or drinks or whatever almost daily to get my "fix" of socialization.
Are social networks really that different? I recognize that some (teen girl?) people might wish they looked like a supermodel on social media or get jealousy of the lives of influences, but is that different from old magazine and movie stars? Is the mixture of "social" and "influences" to one news feed detrimental? Is there more exposure? What makes social networking more "addictive" (and therefore dangerous) than actual socialization?
Not even a little? Users aren't brainless, as much as they'd want to make you believe.
If you are not using it, uninformed people will laugh about you (peer pressure, network effect). Furthermore, because so many people use FB, many people will use FB to organize events, which one does not even know about, because of not being on FB. In the end, they will spin it, because they do not know better themselves, that it is you, who isolated yourself from the rest of "society".
I have experienced it many times. I have missed out on probably many things over time. Yet I refuse to be a part of FB and stuff like that. However, I am only one person. The peer pressure probably works on most people, because most are not as informed about FB (and Instagram and whatever else they own) and what it does, as the crowd on HN is for example. That means, that the argument of "no one is forcing anyone" is a bad one, because you would need to add "but they will make your life worse, if you do not join!". It is kind of an extortion, which an uninformed society unknowingly is excerting on the individual, put in motion by dark patterns, privacy-hostility and bad practices on the side of FB.
Period
Their business model is poisoning the well of society, and strip-mining its value by breaking the bonds that hold it together.
The very best that can be concluded about it's entire leadership is that they entirely lack any hint of moral compass or sense of responsibility to the society from which they extract their wealth.
The more I observe their behavior, the more it looks like worse conclusions are supported by the data.
Just stop justifying things on technical bases. It is what FB is doing the the top post above
They may know that it's bad for you, just as I expect most smokers to know smoking is bad for you.
But the "badness" isn't direct, it grows, and they could think "maybe I'll be able to control it / I can quit whenever I want", whereas if you don't follow current trends (or whatever it is people follow on instagram), you're left out immediately.
Of course, by the time you realize you can't quit, it's already too late.
Yeah, it is difficult for people to admit they're at fault.
Blame is justified only when someone is forcing you to do something or keeping you from something.
If FB/Instagram use is damaging a substantial percentage of your population, it's your problem, regardless of whatever moral frame you decide to put around it.
Unless telling people to take responsibility for themselves is an effective systemic intervention (it might be!) then it's not very useful, except as a PR strategy to deflect blame from Facebook.
This is a disheartening take.
For instance, I'm not sure becoming a social outcast is great for anxiety and depression issues.
And every time somebody else must do something about it in a way that affects everybody.
For example, take some 13 year old girl, probably a poor farmer, from Ireland in 1800. She will have seen almost no examples of the female body except her own, her peers rarely, and her familial elders. Then plop her down into today's world, and she'll definitely be barraged by all the most ridiculous images of flat stomachs, huge anatomical parts and tiny anatomical parts, immaculately photoshopped forms: she'll be made to feel less than them.
I remember reading somewhere, can't remember where, something that addressed this point.
Broadly speaking, the idea was that "people in magazines" weren't perceived as "peers", so you wouldn't compare yourself to them in the same way as you'd compare with a classmate, or some other "regular person", "just like yourself".
Instagram is an easy target like Video games, TV, Cell Phones, and Internet were before it. But like those things I don't think there's much causation going on.
About #1: From my childhood experience, this is accurate. Youth fashion magazines and network TV from 7PM to 10PM played and outsized role to influence our (small) world view. However, I find it interesting that as social media has exploded, there is parellel movement to reduce digital post processing on models photographs. It is still a moving target, but the trend is less and less processing of photographs in fashion magazines and adverts. (Note: This "commitment" varies wildly by region!)
About #2: This comment is so deep. I remember reading the novel "Orphan Train" a few years ago, and the author spent considerable time pulling you into the world within which these young people lived. Granted, the events occur about 100 years ago, but they help us the understand the pressures of youth from four generations ago. By the end, you felt like a movie director, peering into their fractured lives. Generally speaking, I think about a "generation" as being 25 years. If we look back 100 years, someone born in 1921, then each 25 years is a new generation. Assuming these people lived in relatively free and prosperous places... I dunno, pick Belgium or Argentina or Australia... each 25 years, children's lives would be hugely different than their parents due to major social advances, improved education, and new media outlets. In my generation, one of the biggest concerns was "peer pressure" and "too much TV or video games". Some of that still exists, but it has morphed more towards bullying (including early-age homophobia and transphobia) and too much Internet / social media. An exciting question: What comes after this generation? Too much AR / VR!?
In some cases, it's justified, but the vast majority of time it's just avoiding responsibility.
However, if you are looking at a large percentage of people experiencing something, it isn't helpful to just say all those people need personal responsibility. You can point to individual failings when you talk about an individual, but if 75% of people are having individual failings it is symptomatic of something structural.
There's always going to be some of this kind of thing in everything. I'd accept the concentration of it in social media (TikTok is probably the worst of them) is not healthy, but the issues themselves are independent of the medium of the time imo.
Yes 1/3 are effected badly but we just say that it can have positive effects. Just omitting the fact that it often has a detrimental effect…
> Over everything—up through the wreckage of the city, in gutters, along the riverbanks, tangled among tiles and tin roofing, climbing on charred tree trunks—was a blanket of fresh, vivid, lush, optimistic green; the verdancy rose even from the foundations of ruined houses. Weeds already hid the ashes, and wild flowers were in bloom among the city’s bones. The bomb had not only left the underground organs of plants intact; it had stimulated them. Everywhere were bluets and Spanish bayonets, goosefoot, morning glories and day lilies, the hairy-fruited bean, purslane and clotbur and sesame and panic grass and feverfew. Especially in a circle at the center, sickle senna grew in extraordinary regeneration, not only standing among the charred remnants of the same plant but pushing up in new places, among bricks and through cracks in the asphalt. It actually seemed as if a load of sickle-senna seed had been dropped along with the bomb.
Never mind that the rest of the article will probably elicit a few spontaneous sobs from an empathetic reader.
It's only "much harder if not impossible" for lack of trying. And while yes, there are some out there that simply don't have such options, we also have people that need to cut down a tree but can't afford the work, and so simply hope it won't fall on their house the next time it gets windy.
Email lists and chat servers are just Facebook with extra steps. The only difference ends up being the fact that Facebook-like social networks suggest you people and content you might like from a giant pool, whereas the alternatives have rather limited pools and the signal to noise ratio is pathetic because you get literally everything that is posted and have to filter through it manually.
Don't get me wrong, I hate Facebook and only use it on maybe a handful of occasions per year, but you can't tell me that it didn't enable things that weren't possible for many before it was invented.
I do not have any accounts in my real name, and I had no problems finding others via our pseudonym's when I wanted to share them with people in the physical world.
In all discussions I've heard that mention "exclusive value" or a similar concept, the agreed-upon definition was always something like "where all others are orders of magnitude worse".
Why? Why is this socially acceptable? Is this different from the past, or are we just more aware of it?
Second, it's possible to objective demonstrate whether a factual statement is correct or not. But whether a statement is disingenuous or misleading cannot be proven with the same level of certainty (absent evidence of intent). So bad-faith actors can always guarantee that disputing that contention will end in an "agree to disagree" draw at worst.
Running a company in today's environment feels very different than 20 years ago, and to make it clear - it's better for the world this way. Any employee - no matter how low or high ranking - has the ability to erase a significant amount of enterprise value from any business, no matter how large or small. This is driven by improved moral standards, but also extreme connectivity that we have in terms of obtaining information internally (slack, notion, google drive and thousands of other software solutions that have increased everyone's access to documents) and sharing it with the outside world (social media, easy access to journalists, readers' interest in holding companies accountable).
I would be surprised if we don't experience some type of a push back from the companies. At the very least, I imagine access to info will be reduced (already happened at Google), and also that we'll increasingly start seeing new ways of how employees are connected with each other (both in terms of policy as well as actual barriers that will prohibit anyone from reaching too many people). I imagine that companies will also start researching new candidates' propensity for activism by analyzing their social media content. For example, if you post "tax the rich!" on Facebook, I imagine that in the not so distant future that will have a negative impact on your market value.
If there's one thing that I've learned, it's that every action triggers a reaction (which is time-delayed in the sense that it arrives late and also overshoots the original target), and the constant yo-yoing between those two forces is what explains much of the irrational behavior in the world.
One thing could be to hire fewer people. Oddly large software companies is an evergreen topic on HN. Every middle manager wants to empire-build, but if each new hire is a potential leak, then that could be a brake on Google's relentless goal of hitting 1M employees by 2030: https://image.cnbcfm.com/api/v1/image/106318886-157800431271...
They reach a point where they're fundamentally unable to honestly ask themselves whether their "good thing" is actually good. I have a fairly respectable social graph on Facebook and Twitter, but far fewer actual friends than I did in the pre-social network days. A row in a database isn't connection, and it isn't good.
Is it the mission statement itself which is dangerous? Or is it possible to come up with a "good" one?
https://venturebeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/amzn_shar...
> It’s All About the Long Term
> We believe that a fundamental measure of our success will be the shareholder value we create over the long term. This value will be a direct result of our ability to extend and solidify our current market leadership position.
> The stronger our market leadership, the more powerful our economic model. Market leadership can translate directly to higher revenue, higher profitability, greater capital velocity, and correspondingly stronger returns on invested capital.
> Our decisions have consistently reflected this focus. We first measure ourselves in terms of the metrics most indicative of our market leadership: customer and revenue growth, the degree to which our customers continue to purchase from us on a repeat basis, and the strength of our brand. We have invested and will continue to invest aggressively to expand and leverage our customer base, brand, and infrastructure as we move to establish an enduring franchise.
> Because of our emphasis on the long term, we may make decisions and weigh tradeoffs differently than some companies. Accordingly, we want to share with you our fundamental management and decision-making approach so that you, our shareholders, may confirm that it is consistent with your investment philosophy: (...)
You don't have to operate your company in a way that makes your shareholders maximum profit from quarter to quarter. You do have a responsibility to them, but that responsibility can be met by following your mission statement. If you believe your company should only (e.g.) use sustainable energy sources because it's important for the planet, or that you're going to invest for long term growth, not short term profit, you can disclose that to your shareholders and meet your obligations. Company directors have considerable leeway in the way in which they meet their fiduciary responsibilities, and the idea people have that companies "must maximize profit at all cost" is incorrect.
Now, if your company is failing, the stock is falling, products failing in the market, then your shareholders may pressure for a variety of things: a change in mission, direction, the resignation of leaders; or they may buy enough of the company to own enough board seats to take control and out and replace current leadership. But if you're successful at executing on your mission and have investors who are onboard with it, and you're also making money (or growing, which is just as good or better), then you don't need to worry about that.
If your goal does not include making money for shareholders at any point, then you probably shouldn't organize as a for-profit corporation, though.
The fix here is that you must balance that mission statement with a well-defined set of Values as well. The mission is what you want to accomplish in the world, and the Values are the principles you plan to adhere to while doing so. The values can't just be some afterthought "check the box" exercise - they have to have significant decision-making weight in practice.
A set of (imperfect, I'm sure!) examples from the Wikimedia Foundation:
Mission: https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/mission/ Values: https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/values/
Have a mission statement, just don't go crazy with it.
(I was joking with the comment, but I'm not so sure now.)
[1]https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/su/su6901a6.htm?s_cid=su...
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/12/the-sil...
> 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.
It's reasonable that if one gender is developing self esteem issue from a social network, then the other gender _probably_ is too.
In 2018 "obesity prevalence was [...] 21.2% among 12- to 19-year-olds." [0] according to the CDC. That's one out of 5 being obese, not overweight. And it has more than tripled since the 70's [1].
And then we start blaming the "evil screens" for people not finding themselves attractive.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/childhood.html
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/obesity_child_15_16/obe...
Move fast and break Zuckerberg!
it just seems really silly to me to walk into this thread about how Facebook internally believes they're doing harm, and reply to a statement about how the harmed demographic feels they're being harmed, in the context of well-documented ways that harm occurs and what kind of effects it has, with a statement doubting the harm actually exists and questioning the self-reported experience of harm
It’s like asking why studies using self-reported survey numbers on penis sizes cannot be treated as the ultimate truth, despite adults surely being able to use a measurement tape or a ruler. There is a reason for why the average numbers on all those studies using self-reported numbers are always at least one standard deviation larger than the average numbers obtained from a study that wasn’t just a self-reported survey.
“The research that we’ve seen is that using social apps to connect with other people can have positive mental-health benefits,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at a congressional hearing...
“We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls,” said one slide from 2019, summarizing research about teen girls who experience the issues. “Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression,” said another slide. “This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups.”
From what researchers said in a March 2020 slide presentation posted to Facebook’s internal message board.