Because there is no evidence for this. In cases where there is, like in lootboxes, we see a push for legislation.
We have enough evidence to at least build correlation between social media use and decline of mental health. This doesn't call for banning or legislating the business to oblivion, but for talks in the society. We need to talk about social media use, our representatives have to discuss measures with the scientific community and promote research so that they can legislate based on data.
One thing is for certain, what we have now is unacceptable. What we will build in the future is up for debate and should be debated.
Again, eerily similar to the violent video game panic in the 90s.
The original congressional hearings on violence in video games followed record-high gun violence in 1993 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_congressional_hearings_on... ). Politicians pushed a correlation between increasing popularity of violent video games and increasing gun homicides. It sounds dumb now, but video games were relatively new at the time.
The correlation felt right to many, especially those who hadn't grown up with video games in their own lives. I see this social media debate following the same pattern where adults feel that social media is evil and assume evidence will eventually support their feelings.
> Because there is no evidence for this. In cases where there is, like in lootboxes, we see a push for legislation.
That's rewriting history. Decades ago, there was a huge push for legislation against violent video games long before lootboxes were a thing ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_congressional_hearings_on... )
Violent video games have been called out as recently as 2019 by president Trump ( https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/politics-news/trumps-... )
Violent video games have been a political scapegoat for decades. The debate about social media is following in the same footsteps.
This is the best study i know about digital media and adolescent wellbeing and they find an extremely small effect size (accounting for less than 0.4% of adolescent wellbeing).
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562%20018%200506%201?mod=...
This doesn't mean we shouldn't be concerned, especially if we are motivated to design better media culture. I can't stand Facebook.
No I don't think so.
I've played lots of first person shooters and it's harmless.
But social media causing damaging self worth worries, I slightly experience myself, sometimes. It's a real problem, in my eyes.
(Loot boxes, and computer gaming addiction, are real problems with the games though.)
I never saw such a game. -- The FPS games I've seen, I'd compare them more with looking at a ww2 movie.
"The last of us" -- that game maybe that one can cause, like you wrote, a bit desensitization. It's more realistic brutal violence in that game than what I saw in the games i played as a kid.
Any games come to your mind?
For sure I wouldn't want military or policemen to play such games, and not kids either
If social media as it stands causes unreasonable harm to society, how would we know for sure? And how would we know we aren’t making the same mistakes made with demonizing video games?
(https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4183915/)
Not only that but anyone that has used social media can say that to you, specially younger people.
Meanwhile studies show there was no correlation between violence and videogames. And except for lag you can't really find a lot of people that will tell you videogames made them violent. (https://www.psychologicalscience.org/publications/observer/o...)
There are many ways to regulate social media:
- Determine constraints and objective statistical goals the ranking algorithm must meet
- Blocking and marking fake content
etc.
Facebook could choose to rank positivity higher but it does the opposite since it increases engagement.
Do we actually have these, or are you inferring we do from the general tone of the media conversation around this topic? I'm aware of some correlation studies, and think the topic bears keeping an eye on.
Would you mind sharing one of the "quite a few" causal studies you're referring to?
> Hell a genocide happened because Facebook fell asleep at the wheel.
This is a non sequitur. Facebook didn't cause the genocide any more than Marconi caused the Rwandan genocide or AT&T caused Watergate. Widespread communications technologies and platforms are deeply fundamental to human interaction in the modern age; the only model that marks Facebook as at all causal of Rohingyan persecution requires giving them a nonsensical amount of undue credit for the human interaction that occurs across their platform. Eg, you'd have to make obviously absurd claims like that Facebook is responsible for legalizing gay marriage in the US (activists heavily use FB and other social media platforms to organize).
To be clear, I think criticism of FB from the UN et al on the topic of Myanmar is warranted. The nature of the platform is such that the capability can be built out to direct and constrain the conversations that are had, and it's fair to say that Facebook needs to expand the manner in which it does so.
But this contradicts your point: the salient difference is the ability to control communication so that it stops violence, which in your framing is a _positive_ of social media.
(Note that I'm personally close to an unrestricted speech maximalist, but I'm taking your framing for granted in the above paragraphs)
Just as a quick gut-check, ask yourself this: if they didn't change your thinking, why would you play them? Assuming they don't offer any level of excitement or entertainment, what is the point?
Evidence: the US army uses FPS to train people for combat, and there is a longer history of what it takes to train people to shoot people: switching from round targets to human-shaped targets makes it a lot easier for soldiers to aim the gun at a person before pulling the trigger.
Now clearly most people who play violent video games don't turn into mass killers, but to say that the deep immersion of a FPS doesn't change your thinking is farcical on the face of it.
Then feel free to post the research. This was the core topic of my studies, and to my knowledge there simply is zero evidence of a causal relationship.
The US indeed has a big violence problem, but there are actual, established causes, e.g. the high wealth inequality, which is a big predictor for violent crimes in most countries.
Treat it like digital tobacco or similar - a product with known mental health side effects engineered specifically to modify your behavior in the name of "engagement". Limit access to children, require warnings with every email and notification. etc. etc. etc.
It's not hard, as long as you keep focus on the problem. This isn't about guns.
(I can dream, can’t I?)
Why should we allow microtargeted advertising?
Having said that, I agree that _another_ core issue is the data collection and privacy issues. Certainly, viewing advertisers as the value-subtracting rent-seekers as I do, I wish for them to know as little as possible about the world in general and about me specifically.
I prefer not to have salespeople come to my door, I prefer to seek them out when I am inclined to.
Advertisers should be relegated to their own greasy pit, to speak only at my pleasure and where I know to find them. Any other attempt to engage with me, anytime and anyplace else except where I explicitly permit them, is nothing less than an unwelcome intrusion. Begone, rent-seekers! Trouble us with your A/B tests no more.
For example, an advertiser might be able to microtarget people with certain characteristics that correlate with voting for a particular political party, and bombard them with ads that discourage them from voting.
That's targeted, but not "relevant".
The goal of the advertiser isn't to create a win-win situation, where you get just the right ad at the right time, for a good deal on what you actually need. That would be nice, but it's leaving money on the table - and the goal of the advertiser is to make money. So the ads get optimized further: a better ad is one that gets you to buy something regardless of whether you need it, on a deal that's as bad for you as possible without burning you as a future customer[0].
--
[0] - Which does not imply the deal isn't absolutely shitty. There are ways to guarantee you'll buy again, no matter how much you hate it. See e.g. the telecom industry - there's only few players on the market, and they're all equally shitty, and it doesn't matter because people need phone service, and those abandoning telco A in anger are offset by those flocking to A from the other telcos.
Remembering how incredibly shitty people could be in middle and high school, it's not hard at all for me to see how constantly comparing oneself to one's peers could be detrimental to one's health. It was bad enough having to go to school every day, but (back in the day) at least I didn't have to have that shit follow me around everywhere else too. In short, yeah, I'm having a hard time buying any comparison between Doom and Facebook.
All that said, I also have a hard time seeing a legislative solution to this problem, especially given what the typical legislature looks like these days.
That's kind of my point: The tech community can relate to Doom in the context of their own childhoods because we grew up with it. Adults can't relate to Instagram in the context of childhoods because that came after our time. So without first-hand experience, they substitute whatever feels correct, as prompted by hyperbolic articles like this one.
Every generation thinks the way they grew up was correct, while subsequent social changes are bad. There has always been moral panic about what "kids these days" are doing, from social media to video games to portable music players to watching TV and so on.
It was the exact same story with video game violence: Adults at the time didn't grow up with video games, so they assumed the worst. Politicians and news media stepped in to seed the most dramatic possible interpretations, pointing to correlations with increasing gun violence (at the time). To adults who didn't grow up with the context and saw no personal upside to the video games, heavy-handed legislation felt right.
Back in the day we joked about "Evercrack" too, but addiction to it actually ruined lots of people's lives in a way Doom never did.
Also note that both Fortnite and World of Warcraft are entirely multiplayer games. The way I see it, their addictive nature comes from the same set of factors that make social media addictive. In terms of addiction, Fortnite and WoW are like Instagram, not like Doom.
"Gaming has also been associated with sleep deprivation, insomnia and circadian rhythm disorders, depression, aggression, and anxiety, though more studies are needed to establish the validity and the strength of these connections"
https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/the-health-effects-of-to...
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/suicide-among-teens-and-...
And let's get real, this is not just a FB problem. If you really care about this, you have to burn a whole lot more than just FB. And it's probably going to include most internet companies. Cyberbullying is going to happen wherever teens spend most of their time on the internet.
We have important societal issues to solve. c54's comment touched on that in an insightful way. There are other things to balance here. Marginalized groups have benefited a lot from social media much like geeks benefited a lot from video games, D&D, and board games. But we don't like to talk about that because in many minds FB == the devil, and mentioning any benefit means propping up the devil. Soon we'll be talking about TikTok in the same manner.
This should be investigated but it needs to be done with an objective point-of-view. You do not have an objective point-of-view. Facebook does not have an objective point-of-view. The media definitely does not have an objective point-of-view. Let's at least try to be scientific.
I'm unsure about the direct causal relationships between games and violence, but at the very least they're an expression of a violent culture. The glorification of shooters as 'lone wolfs', the fact that a picture of a breastfeeding mother gets banned but someone's head blown off in a game is no big deal, it makes you ponder what priorities that creates in a culture.
And the criticism of the addictive nature of games, how gaming can isolate people, the general lack of sexual relationships of young men in particular, but also young people in general, these concerns written off as 'boomer mentality' or whatever are completely valid.
>After all, we need to regulate what the kids consume, right?
I think it's completely obvious that you need to regulate what children consume, they are after all... children. Regulating what they do is kind of the point of raising them. This consumer culture that leaves everything to 'market choice' and where every intervention is seen as overreach is terrible. This is exactly the sort of pseudo-freedom that OP was talking about.
>the general lack of sexual relationships of young men in particular
That's because everything sexual is declared amoral and banned including a breastfeeding mother. Men simply behave in accordance with what they are taught.
Not something like the fact that "social media" is a (very strange) form of communication, not a type of literal media that is produced, marketed, and consumed either as popular commercial productions or niche fan-productions?
I'm sure you could point out more meaningful differences than "tech bros stopped liking one of these" between:
- a form of fantasy entertainment, largely analogous to the nonfiction novels, violent comic books, and violent movies/TV before them (and were complained about before them). Its only novel feature being interactivity - but no more so than even-younger children playing cops and robbers in a playground.
- a ubiquitous new form of peer communication that's full of novel features, from massive network effects and propagation of speech across and in and out of peer groups, gamification of peer approval, infinite-scrolling feeds and other dark patterns, widespread coopting by marketing and degenerate forms of "news" media...
Currently companies can do what they want in secret.
Perhaps they should be able to do what they want, but in the open so it can be examined and criticized.
That means their blacklists, algorithms, word lists, preferred user lists, and reasons for banning users become openly accessible.
Even without compelling them directly to change anything, compelling them to be transparent would help a lot.
I got some suggestios - No company w/more than 1 million MAU and deriving any income from online advertising may not combine any online information about a user with any physical real-world data; they may not sell data to another 3rd party that will combine online and physical;
- Ban the algo: Any user deriving more than $250 in value from an online service may not be banned by an algorithm. They must be given 60 days notice and an opportunity to remove their data from the service
- No company may own more than 1 domain in the top 5,000 (as measured by monthly traffic). All domains must be consolidated to 1
- No more hiding behind scale, expand the carve outs for 230 form beyond child porn to definitely include any threats of violence - but especially death threats
Thats just a start...
I have a radical proposal: reduce social media's value proposition by breaking them up. Then users' interest will naturally decrease.
>So video games get a pass, but social media must be attacked with everything we’ve got.
It applies not to any social media, but only to centralized giant monopolistic services. Federated social media like email are fine.
Advertisement targeted at children and using children.
If your advert features children or offers a product a child might be interested in, purchase it themselves or influence purchasing decision of the parent, is associated with a product children use or service children frequent then it's illegal. As simple as that.
You wouldn't believe how much such ban would clear up media sphere and improve children's health in all aspects.
https://www.ft.com/content/ad706bd3-2aed-49da-b4f4-862f15a2e...
I think the points about violent video games are good, but the OP here is that people are self-reporting instagram to be negatively correlated with mental health. That's distinct from more nebulous and bygone arguments about violent video games.
Funnily, this is also top page HN right now: "Is America Inc getting less dynamic, less global and more monopolistic?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28547224
Legislate what, specifically? I always see calls for more legislation around social media, but I rarely see any actionable suggestions.
Frankly, I’m kind of shocked at the degree that tech communities are rushing for legislation on this topic. When I was growing up I remember the big issue being violence in video games. Politicians went on crusades to demonize video games and demand that we pass legislation to protect the kids from any exposure to violent video games, lest the video games turn them into school shooters.
With video games, the online tech communities rallied against any legislation and wrote volumes about how kids were smart enough to manage themselves and not let violent video games influence their thinking. With social media, tech communities are doing the opposite: Writing volumes about how kids are incapable of managing themselves and will succumb to social media destroying their mental health.
The major difference between the two is that tech people (on average) like video games but they don’t like social media. So video games get a pass, but social media must be attacked with everything we’ve got. The secondary subtext buried in most of these articles is that young girls, specifically, are most vulnerable to social media issues, whereas violent video games were largely an issue for young boys. Apparently we’re okay letting young boys handle difficult content but we don’t give the same credit to young girls. The more I watch all of this play out, the more hypocritical it all feels.
I also suspect that if anti-social-media politicians see success that we’ll see a revival of the anti-violent-game politicians. After all, we need to regulate what the kids consume, right?