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.