Teenage girls are predisposed to behave in the way described, and Facebook/Instagram is profiting by exploiting that. Nothing about the explanation above is blaming them. If anything the comment makes a stronger case for Facebook's actions being immoral.
How could the words "I don't think it's unreasonable to suspect..." not be considered blaming them? There is definitely some nuance here (I don't think the parent comment is hard-lining to say that the victims here are 100% to blame), but they are most certainly associating some level of blame to teens and their inherent "predisposed" behavior as you say.
Has this been studied, or are we taking an arbitrary thought experiment as a foundational axiom?
Observer expectations can be really strong.
For example, does sugar make kids hyperactive? No real evidence for it (last I checked). But widely believed as fact.
In all societies across time? Or just in American High schools and on Instagram?
If you don’t think universities are the right people to help with this question, who would you recommend to answer it?
You said: “Young girls are mean to each other, that’s a fact.”
How do you know this fact?
It’s helpful because it’s pointing out how absurd it is to constantly demand “data” to verify rudimentary observations of human nature. For whatever reason, and maybe it’s because of tech being so data obsessed, you can make a claim on this website as benign as “look both ways before crossing the street” and inevitably someone will want to see a “peer reviewed” study that says looking both ways before crossing the street “affects the outcome variable” of not getting hit by a car.
> If you don’t think universities are the right people to help with this question, who would you recommend to answer it?
Your mother, or your sister if you have one.
>How do you know this fact?
My name is remarkEon and I went to middle and high school in the United States on a planet I call Earth.
>>> In all societies across time? Or just in American High schools and on Instagram?
>> How do you know this fact?
>My name is remarkEon and I went to middle and high school in the United States on a planet I call Earth.
Ok, so you think your American High school experience gives you insight into all societies across time.
Understood. Your answers make sense now. Thanks for answering.
It’s a claim so extreme that … I’d like to see some data to back it up.
Why do you think this? You only have your school experience to go on. You have nothing to base this claim on.
I think it’s entirely possible that the conditions of school create much of the competition you are observing, and that US schools are more extreme than others.
School intentionally creates behaviors. There is no reason not to believe that it has side effects.
And yes, to get any insight into which of is right, we’d need someone to have studied it.
There is nothing pedantic or academic or anything I have said.
> US school structure and its problems explain all malevolent minor female behavior
This is simply a lie. I never said anything that implies this extreme view.
You are arguing that malevolent minor female behavior is universal and doesn’t need to be studied.
You might turn out to be right about the former, but without studying it, it’s just your baseless prejudice.
That said, the error I see more commonly is that the observation is perfectly valid, (or at least roughly valid) but the explanation is poor. People believe in the explanation because they feel so strongly about the observation. This is a fallacy I see over and over again. (and is often something I've seen leveraged in scams: "You've all experienced X. Here are some emotional stories about X. Now let me tell you how I have all the answers to X.")
I've tried to make it clear that my idea is not proven, but is something that I think is reasonable, and will hopefully lead to an interesting discussion. I'm definitely not suggesting that I have access to the truth, or that my idea is fact simply because I've explained something using scientific terms.
I sometimes wonder how these people would have survived at parties or social gatherings before the Internet when you couldn't just whip out your phone, spend 2 minutes not talking to anyone, click on the first Google search result, and then proclaiming "um acksually..."
Facebook is immorally exploiting that stress.
And it's really pretty clear that Facebook didn't create any of these problems and that removing it won't solve them. Facebook makes it easier for girls to bully each other in the same way that relaxed gun laws make it easier for criminals to shoot people. Or, as Londoners will tell you: "you can't solve knife crime by taking away people's knives".
The fact that Facebook profits from the issue doesn't make it their fault unless you can prove that they actively seek to make it worse. And even then, they can only carry the blame proportional to how much they made it worse.
A little O/T, but this trope needs to please stop.
The places with the highest gun crimes are also the places with the toughest gun laws. It should go without saying that criminals without definition would not care about laws.
Only in America. Other western nations have tough gun laws and also low gun crime, because you can't hop in your car and pick up a gun in a neighbouring state.
And actually the correlation is only seen in parts of America. New York City has tough gun laws, comparatively low gun crime and a lower homicide rate per capita than the rest of the country.
Time and time again people say "tough gun laws lead to more gun crime" but really they mean "in a country where it's really really easy to buy guns, we mostly see the negative impact of gun ownership in high-density poor neighbourhoods".
You can’t do this in America either. You can only buy guns legally in your state of residence.
If someone is willing to buy a gun illegally, they don’t need to go out of state.
The claim that this is because people can drive to others states is false.
For everyone else, how available they are depends on where you live.
For the law abiding, that’s not true in places where you need a license just to buy one such as NYC, or in CA where most handguns and many rifles are not available.
It's not about criminals not caring about the law. Shooting people is already illegal. It's about making it more difficult to access and acquire these weapons. If you can't access something, it is much more difficult to use.
the link you posted does not oppose it as the other comment pointed out.
I hope you will keep an open mind as you look into this, setting aside the agendas of the NRA or the anti-gun groups.
When there is an item (gun, in this instance) which has both good and bad uses ( what they are, we are reasonably argue) -- there needs to be a balance in how the item is procured.
Nowhere in the country does one just go and pick one up. There are (again, we can argue on what is reasonable) checks and balances - checking the person's track history etc.
All this goes out the window when it is possible to skirt the law, or in the case of London, use knives instead of guns for the crimes.
We need to solve the problem at the right level of abstraction.
We need to focus on why the society today sees more shootings in the past decades when the guns have been existing for much longer.
Big claims require some big evidence. In the UK there are strict controls on gun ownership and we have virtually no crimes carried out with legal guns, and more but still very few with illegal ones. Can you give some counter examples?
And I can't really agree with your assertion either. See stats in [0] and a gun law map in [1]. At best it's a correlation without causation, but the correlation certainly isn't the inverse as you suggest.
I also don't see how it's not a relevant example - it's Thing A making Thing B worse, but Thing B would still happen without Thing A and so Thing A can't be blamed for Thing B. Regardless of whether the underlying assertion is correct (less gun control leading to more gun crime), the logic is valid.
[0] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/gun-death... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overview_of_gun_laws_by_nation
That is, tough gun laws are enacted exactly because of a high rate of gun crime?
And of course those tougher laws can have at best a mild moderating effect when guns can freely enter that area with the tougher gun laws from other areas that do not have them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-r...
Anyone, at any time, can stop using Facebook or Instagram with 0 repercussions.