Does society value beauty? Sure. Do models set "unrealistic expectations"? Sure. Are some high school girls assholes to other girls? Absolutely. But once upon a time kids would go home and those people would be gone. Now it's a 24/7 feedback loop and it's completely unhealthy.

This is pretty much an internet problem, not a Facebook problem. The things people say to each other on forums or Twitter or Facebook, especially when anonymous (but not always), are quite often horrendous.

It's absurd to absolve a company as wealthy as facebook who optimizes for "engagement" from their externalities on children.

Is there something on the internet that isn't designed as such?

Maybe weather apps... Everything else, from wikipedia to github to stackoverflow to the site you're on now is yet another automated massively multiplayer kudo ranking system. The only meaningful difference appears to be demographic; Facebook is one of the places 'teen girls' spend their time. All I see here is evidence that clicks can still be had by ascribing some concern to the fate of young women[1].

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_white_woman_syndrome

Gamification is benign compared to an interactive news feed developed to drive ad sales. I find pointing at especially wikipedia, but also github as being designed to maximize engagement comparable to social networks as silly. Neither has much to gain from having addicted users, the same can't be said for facebook, IG, or Reddit.

All three have various feed mechanisms. They all have various ranking systems. Every one of them have people employed (even if mere 'volunteers') to 'maximize engagement.' And every one of these systems have people obsessed with their profile. Every. Single. One.

They're just mostly not 'teen girls' and so the 'problem' makes for poor headline material.

"especially wikipedia"

Wikipedia is rife with obsessed 'editors' climbing the rungs of the interweb status ladder. They're easy to find. Look at their profile pages; filled with achievement badges (gamification) and vast profiles of their lives. Does Facebook have 'campaigns' for 'elections' that grant power on the platform? I honestly don't know because I spend no time there, but I know Wikipedia does, and we can only imagine the anxiety involved for these 'candidates.' Thankfully though, they're mostly not 'teen girls' so we're not going to worry about them.

Speaking to your point more directly, the massive, massive difference is the primary user of Instagram and typical social media vs the primary user of these other platforms. The primary user of Instagram is shown addictive feeds non-stop. It’s really not possible or enjoyable to use Instagram without interacting with designs deliberately and literally trying to get you addicted to the platform. This isn’t true for something like Wikipedia or Stack Overflow. The primary user is going to come across a few articles now and then or search something. But they are rarely going to be interacting with an algorithm or design trying to get you addicted for hours a day.

Think about it like gambling. The only way to use Instagram or Tiktok or Facebook or anything like that is by pulling the lever on a slot machine, trying to get a dopamine hit.

The inherent design and purpose of social media platforms is to addict people so they spend as much time on the platform as possible, and then show them ads. That’s not true for Wikipedia or stack overflow. Those examples are more about policies that encourage toxic behavior or just crappy people on the internet, not a critique of the inherent platform design.

"They came to the conclusion that some of the problems were specific to Instagram, and not social media more broadly. That is especially true concerning so-called social comparison, which is when people assess their own value in relation to the attractiveness, wealth and success of others."

"'Social comparison is worse on Instagram,' states Facebook's deep dive into teen girl body-image issues in 2020, noting that TikTok, a short-video app, is grounded in performance, while users on Snapchat, a rival photo and video-sharing app, are sheltered by jokey filters that 'keep the focus on the face.' In contrast, Instagram focuses heavily on the body and lifestyle."

So I suspect that their understanding of the problem is better than yours, and that there is something about Instagram that makes it worse than generic social media.

You are correct however, that Twitter is also toxic; like all social media.

The problem with social media, then, is that it allows -- indeed encourages, because "engagement" -- all that toxicity to spread so much more widely and rapidly than ever before.

This post is about FB suppressing their own research, which showed that Instagram and its algorithm are toxic to teenage girls.

> We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls,”

> Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression,”

> “This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups.”

But a very small minority that doesn't have morals, is causing the illusion that it's most people that don't have them.

Right now we have a large percentage of people that refuse to get a vaccine to protect their neighbors.

Everyone might have morals, but the bar is low.

I don't know many such morally-absent folks. Perhaps the perverse incentives in our system mean a bunch of CEOs are quite sociopathic, but on the whole, people seem rather good intentioned to me. The internet certainly serves as a platform for many that would be otherwise shunned IRL, but I don't think they're the general majority...just the majority that decide to voice their opinions. The rest aren't even paying attention - only a small fraction of people have a Twitter account, for example.

Even reddit, which can be anonymous, is filled with good discourse, assuming you avoid certain subreddits, and sort by top. Moderation goes a long way to mimicking our more natural IRL tendencies to turn down the assholes. Twitter and Instagram generally lack those tools, so the assholes can be louder and _seem_ more prominent than they are.

Given how profitable that’s been it seems reasonable to expect them to be involved in fixing it.

Or they’re paid massive salaries not to do that.

And yes we need regulatory help. Tens of millions in this country are experiencing mental health issues as a result of these platforms. When we understood that other industries were causing a health crisis we regulated them, the same needs to occur here.

Note. I don't know what the regulatory solution should be, but we should be having that discussion.

I agree with the 2nd part of your comment. But this part is just dishonest, and sounds like a startup pitch about addressable market. Do you honestly believe that each teen girl is being followed by hundreds of millions, who comment on every single photo of her? Almost everyone still lives in their social bubbles, and yes, it's easier to to communicate and say mean things to each other (totally 24/7 feedback loop), but they almost exclusively come from people you know, not hundreds of millions of internet randos.

Doesn't matter if it reaches 10 or 10000 people.

An individual girl in 1995 had enough shows on TV and enough magazines to tell her she is not looking good.

And that's just some of the content. The algorithm is also just as happy to feed you a continuous stream of outraging, extremist "punditry", manufactured drama, fake "crafting" videos, conspiracies, and paranoid, depressing "news" - anything to keep you engaged.

I'm not really sure about it. When highschool girls wore the same clothes the Spice Girls wore, had the same haircut they had and replicated their dances, for me that's a lot of connection.

I'm sure Facebook/Instagram have a lot to be blamed for but we (not just young girls; parents, teachers, etc) need to be responsible of our actions to some degree.

Those girls in 1995 got their media fix through magazines geared at women and teenaged girls, where they'd find an impossibly thin model on every other page. The Kardashians wouldn't have been well-received in the 90s, because all of them would have been considered fat by those standards.

I honestly can't tell if you're joking or not, but study after study has shown that dating was far more mentally healthy in 1995 than it is today. Online dating falls into almost the exact same category of causing anxiety and making it more difficult for younger generations to form meaningful relationships - just like instagram and facebook.

It's a genuine problem, in that it is fully exploitative of men, but not related to this imo.

If anything I'd argue that more than ever both women and men are searching for authenticity in a partner. Something increasingly difficult to come by in our social media fueled world.

Sure, there is a subset on both sides that has been completely sucked in by this culture and measures each others worth by the number of followers on their instagram, but I'd actually view this as a positive. It's really convenient to be able to identify and filter out these vain individuals early on in the dating process.

Keep your head up nodejs_rulez_1, there are still plenty of good women and men out there.

Simply put, any man or woman with a lot of choices would be less invested in any of the options presented.

Also for all of the women I've seen flown out from Alabama, Mississippi, etc to NY, LA & Miami by the more affluent men in my social circles, I haven't seen a single long term relationship develop out of it. The wider net isn't leading to better outcomes.

Species, not culture.

The evolutionary explanations for such are not hard to come up with just with a bit of thought, and not hard to confirm in the literature either. Which also means the species isn't about to stop admiring those things any time soon.

Which means, rather than the "boil the ocean, then boil it a few more times again" plan of trying to somehow "fix" the species not to admire those things, one needs to pursue a plan of figuring out how to live within the existing constraints.

Which takes you right back to old idea of one's rationality being a small human trying to corral the crazy elephant that it is riding to go where we want it to go. The trick is to learn how to prevent the crazy elephant from even seeing the undesirable stimuli, rather than trying to deal with what happens if it does after the fact.

Unfortunately, explaining that to teenagers is a tough sell, especially when the alternative is tuning you out and going back to the highly-addictive social media.... even explaining it to adults can be a tough sell.

Facebook/YouTube/Twitter all exploit the dark side of human nature. They've been doing it for so many years, that it's difficult to imagine that it's unintentional.

>in Google’s effort to keep people on its video platform as long as possible, “its algorithm seems to have concluded that people are drawn to content that is more extreme than what they started with—or to incendiary content in general,” and adds, “It is also possible that YouTube’s recommender algorithm has a bias toward inflammatory content.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/03/youtube...

In corporate america, it's hard for me to see any private owned corporation doing what's in best interest for the public versus their own pockets.

Kind of like how we said that the answer to alcohol & tobacco was to show self-control, not restrict sales and advertising? Expecting people to go one on one against enormous companies’ profit motives is a recipe for failures.

https://media.gettyimages.com/photos/todd-matthews-and-emily...

https://www.bestuscasinos.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/slo...

https://ak.picdn.net/shutterstock/videos/1023380611/thumb/1....

If people didn't want to see it, they wouldn't click on it. Banning it or regulating it is not going to change that, it's just going to cause it to shift elsewhere. It's human nature.

Regulations come in flavors other than draconian. Do you have a specific policy proposal which you're referring to? Otherwise it seems somewhat disingenuous to predict the failure of something which we don't even have enough detail to discuss.

There are some things which you could try regulating: for example, a lot of what drives the dubious aspects comes back to algorithmic promotion maximizing time on site and advertising views. Legislators could ban algorithmic promotion for children, require companies to identify and curb addictive levels of consumption, or require companies to put more effort into moderation on the posts & comments which they promote.

Similarly, I believe at least some countries are exploring requirements to clearly indicate photos which have been modified or retouched.

"Some people feel bad about their bodies after viewing social media" doesn't nearly meet the threshold of measurable harm that tobacco does. And algorithmic promotion can be positive, unlike the universally health-corrosive effects of cigarettes.

Where the impact of cigarettes is relevant is in the discussion of how _strong_ a particular regulation should be. A deadly threat certainly warrants stricter rules than something minor, just as we do not enforce zoning violations with the death penalty.

If there's a specific policy proposal you could talk about whether you think it'd be effective or overkill but instead you appear to be arguing that there's no need to even consider the range of policy options.

There are tons of great examples where algorithmic feed is useful, particularly when your feed is related to activities such as cooking, music and exercise.

In theory I think the concept of forcing the companies to behave a certain way is ideal but I'm still unsure of what type of legislation could be put in place to address the problem in the article.

I definitely agree that there isn't a proven solution for this problem — that's normal for major technological changes. We saw the same thing with printed books, magazines, and newspapers; radio; TV; the internet; etc. — not to mention things like cars which weren't communications technologies but definitely had major impacts on society. I think the best thing we can get right now is more of the data companies like Facebook and Google tend to avoid sharing, especially after various governments experiment with rules and it becomes possible to see what does and doesn't work.

I agree that this is a test of our society.

> ... and are capable of discipline and self-control

These organizations have enormous resources dedicated to exploiting our frailties and overcoming an individual's discipline and self-control. One option is to continue to expect every man, woman, and child to fight this battle alone in their own head every day.

But we'd probably achieve better results more efficiently by organizing ourselves as well. Then we can combat it collectively as a community and a society like we have done for other human frailties. This would mean things like education, societal pressure, and regulation.

These companies are already amplifying content they think will hold our attention, by leaning into people's worst instincts.

>In the fall of 2018, Jonah Peretti, chief executive of online publisher BuzzFeed, emailed a top official at Facebook Inc. The most divisive content that publishers produced was going viral on the platform, he said, creating an incentive to produce more of it.

Mr. Peretti blamed a major overhaul Facebook had given to its News Feed algorithm earlier that year to boost “meaningful social interactions,” or MSI, between friends and family, according to internal Facebook documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal that quote the email.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-algorithm-change-zucke...

I think it's a losing game.

For as long as big social is allowed to be “free” with its paying customers being advertisers, it will keep benefitting from trolling and other unhealthy behaviours (narcissism?) that happen to drive up engagement and ad revenue. With user lock-in, full control over UI and algorithms at its disposal, big social has way too many tricks up its sleeve for your average tired-after-work-or-school, running-out-of-willpower, vulnerable user to consciously compensate for.

Normalising paid social (forcing interoperability, downgrading platforms to pipes) is probably the most straightforward way for us to finally gain the ability to vote with our wallet and to choose client software crafted with our needs in mind. (I’m not a proponent of regulation bloat or special rules for select big companies; I think a small but strategically focused general requirement could be enough for such a change to happen.)

The idea that this is just a lack of willpower on our end is total bs

"They came to the conclusion that some of the problems were specific to Instagram, and not social media more broadly. That is especially true concerning so-called social comparison, which is when people assess their own value in relation to the attractiveness, wealth and success of others."

"'Social comparison is worse on Instagram,' states Facebook's deep dive into teen girl body-image issues in 2020, noting that TikTok, a short-video app, is grounded in performance, while users on Snapchat, a rival photo and video-sharing app, are sheltered by jokey filters that 'keep the focus on the face.' In contrast, Instagram focuses heavily on the body and lifestyle."

So maybe they understand the dangers of Instagram better than you do?

PS: Where is the people that use to proudly say "with great power comes great responsibility"?

Sometimes people are seeking something that is beneficial, and maximizing that is fine. Lots more times, people are mostly responding to angry posts, or falling down a conspiracy rabbit hole that they cannot critically think their way out of. Maximizing the attention of those people is clearly negative.

So does society share some blame? Sure. Does an algorithm that maximizes some people into very bad places share some blame? Absolutely.

That doesn't mean giant corporations should allowed to exploit these mechanisms for profit.

Do we take the approach we take with opiates, and ban companies from allowing users to upload images?

Or do we take the approach we take with nicotine, and force companies to disclose the possible harms that can come from social interactions online?

Or is there another approach you'd propose?

Hopefully this doesn't come across too confrontational - I genuinely am curious as to what solutions are viable, and I do recognize the harm social media can cause. But it seems to me that as long as there exists any platform where we can freely post photos, we'll have toxic comparisons, and I don't see more education changing this - I don't think it's a rational choice that we make, to choose to compare ourselves to others.

It was created much longer ago than that. We've had beauty standards for as long as humans have created art, and probably for as long as humans have existed. It's probably biological to a large degree, although the manifestation has changed over time. As with many of social media's deleterious effects, they hijack, amplify, and distort our natural inclinations for their own purposes.

Ironically it seems a totalitarian country like China is better equipped to deal with these things (see how they simply banned teens from gaming lately). The liberal democracies number one value is individual freedom; well it works out great most of the time but other times we are not that great ourselves in handling our lives and using our time constructively. Some of us get bored, addicted and obsessed under certain circumstances and I don't actually see an easy solution for that. Maybe social media should be age restricted like porn?

But anyway, I think the reason that facebook is aware of the problem but doing nothing is not that they are cynically exploiting people, and it's rather that they don't know how to solve it.

I don't think the former scales, whereas the latter lends itself to amplification. Authenticity and community require much more complexity to uphold than anger, anxiety, and resentment.

I do take your point, and think that un-nuanced conversations about the evils of Social Media are unhelpful, but I think the scaling problem is the real danger. Negativity scales globally, positive sentiment and experience is limited to the individual or local level.

What do you think of any of this?

Probably, but because of salience asymmetry, we don't realise it. Like the good stuff is often more local as you say, and more distributed, while the bad stuff makes the news.

You are right that there will always be a different “drug” that exposes the same underlying societal issues. But given that FB+Insta are /algorithmically/ pushing these posts to users to increase engagement, it is their problem too.

Nobody is saying that this is not a general social media problem, just that this article is reporting on FB hiding crucial information.

> “They came to the conclusion that some of the problems were specific to Instagram, and not social media more broadly. That is especially true concerning so-called social comparison, which is when people assess their own value in relation to the attractiveness, wealth and success of others." "'Social comparison is worse on Instagram,' states Facebook's deep dive into teen girl body-image issues in 2020, noting that TikTok, a short-video app, is grounded in performance, while users on Snapchat, a rival photo and video-sharing app, are sheltered by jokey filters that 'keep the focus on the face.' In contrast, Instagram focuses heavily on the body and lifestyle."

That's needlessly rude and doesn't add anything to the conversation. Lets try and be nice :) You do have some valid points.

Not that it really matters, I don't think either would help you find a fix that doesn't involve destroying the whole thing.

If we figured too much TV was bad for people, "social" media is 100 times worse. How is it even possible to still feel good about yourself after spending time there? I don't use any of these services because I see them as obviously bad for our mental health.

Tackling this issue in a sustainable way is something I believe most companies are capable of with the right guidance.

Why "should" FB do so? It is doing the "right thing" for its stake holders. Of course, Ideally they should, but realistically not going to happen.

It is us who need to protect our families because we are incentivized to do so. We have failed in protecting our own interests.

It is no different from the drug dealers in our town, we warn our children of the dangers, take steps within our means to reduce our children's interactions, etc.

Most users benefit from social media and you can't condemn them for not questioning other aspects.

Nevertheless, it is essential to question the intentions and procedures of the company behind it. I believe that external observers and institutions are required for this to happen and to spread awareness of things running afoul.

However, like so many things, software can be used for good, as well as for evil purposes. The difficult task is to define that boundary without compromising the utility for most users.

Related topics: Games, app stores, default browsers, etc.... How far does the state have to intervene? How much responsible behaviour can be expected from the user themselves?

What evidence supports this? The story is about evidence that this is in fact not true.

The software we are talking about is not dropped from the heavens. It is created by extremely large, powerful companies in pursuit of profit. If this software harms people, these companies are not neutral actors merely swept along with the tide of technology.

> How far does the state have to intervene? How much responsible behaviour can be expected from the user themselves?

Surely the most relevant question is how much responsible behavior can be expected from the companies themselves? They are the ones armed with research departments actually studying the effects of how their software affects people.

A great example is the girl who searched for exercise tips once and then her feed was algorithmically focused on weight loss tips and the like afterwards, which is not a cultural issue.

Don't you mean "as a species"?

Culture is one of the few tools we have to overcome these natural inclinations. Religion, too.

FTFY

Most issues are human issues. Just because it is a human issue does not make it alright to exploit it at scale with such invasiveness. Especially since they know that is it harmful. Sounds like cigarettes marketed to children. It's not a cigarette company issue it's a human issue after all! We are not liable.

The message of the Web isn't looking so great, all around, I'd say.

Yes it is Facebook's or Instagram's fault. We are endowed with our natural desires (which are even more fundamentally biological than cultural in this case), that we have no choice over, but we have the choice to remove bad technologies from our societies.

This is in fact the only choice we have. You can't cure people of their desire for power or beauty, but you can destroy the tools that amplify the worst instincts we have.

“Just”? I would say this is plenty enough. And this is done willingly. So is it their fault ? Yes (not exclusively though)

Yes.

It's one and the same.