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> What nastiness are we subjecting ourselves to today? Maybe an overwrought comparison but I genuinely do feel like we’ll look back on this age of social media

> What nastiness are we subjecting ourselves to today? Maybe an overwrought comparison but I genuinely do feel like we’ll look back on this age of social media and disinformation in the same way we did leaded gas. The people making money knew exactly how dangerous it was and the problems it caused but they did everything in their power to cover it up in the name of profit. Originally it felt like a social annoyance and not much else but in this era of vaccine denialism, election fraud conspiracy theories, even body image issues from touched up photos, there’s little doubt in my mind that society is suffering and that the problem will likely get worse before it gets better.

dchichkov 5y ago
CO₂ could be candidate. Perhaps the effect will be even at a grander scale than leaded gas.
- bjowen 5y ago
  It seems like the top of the list to me! - though it’s been emitted for longer in quantity.
bobthechef 5y ago
I think there are always people around, more than we care to admit, who will do things they know are bad to make a buck and to wield power (and frankly, most of us, sadly, have a price; look at the widespread participation of people in tech in the aforementioned industries and companies even though they and we all know the bad stuff they're doing). So I wouldn't treat this as some exception. I think people are extremely good at quietly repressing knowledge they're rather not have interfere with their desires. > this era of vaccine denialism Not central to your point, but this isn't really that widespread. 98% of Americans have the full regime of vaccines. The whole "antivax" scare is largely fiction and has been whipped by journalists afraid of people asking questions. Now, where the covid vaccine is concerned, that's different. People who aren't skeptical of vaccines qua vaccines are skeptical about this particular vaccine or whatever you want to call it because of the obscene level of politicization around it masquerading as "science". So I wouldn't conflate the two.
- jjoonathan 5y ago
  On the contrary, I think it's dangerous to ignore the very close link. Yes, they've switched talking points from mercury to spike proteins but it's the same playbook. The meme just got more viral when it hitched a ride on politics.
  - Talanes 5y ago
    I think telling people who are only skeptical of this one new thing that they are anti-vax is just driving people to become anti-vax rather than change their mind about the Covid vaccines. I have a data point of one in my father, who followed exactly this path.
heresie-dabord 5y ago
> Maybe an overwrought comparison Yes, I assert that comparing social media to a deadly substance is overwrought, hyperbolic, and not lucid enough to be helpful. Lead causes brain damage and kills people. What we call social media is an advertising business offering free channels of shallow discourse as incentive. The business has delivered. Consider social media to be a test of the education system and of democracy in general. If society has failed the test, the test has been useful indeed.
- botverse 5y ago
  That is unfortunately not trying to see the problem from the future hindsight. Which is the exercise that GP is suggesting.
  - heresie-dabord 5y ago
    Social media is not a toxin of any sort. To call it "toxic" is a metaphor that expresses the revulsion that people feel for the idiocies that social media channels have uncovered. So I do disagree with the liberty of the metaphor in this case. Social media is the business of providing channels of communication to people in exchange for some lucrative data. Other businesses do this too (television, radio, newspapers). I am not at all a proponent of social media. The discourse is broken by petty, idiotic exchanges. The signal-to-noise ration is far too low and the sophisticated advertising techniques have become a form of surveillance that I reject. But petty, idiotic exchanges have always existed. So have ignorant people, propaganda, gullible people, and fanatics. They can meet in basements, in taverns, in temples, in arenas... The fundamental problem is failing education and social disorder. It takes great liberty of metaphor to compare social media to a real toxin. I share people's dislike of social media. But I will look back on the past decade and not blame any of the social-media companies for the idiocy of people who should know better through public education.
    - chx 5y ago
      Failing education is certainly a big problem (and I financed a tiny reform school for five years trying to combat the tiniest of slices of it) but you are missing the power of reach. Not even Edward Murrow could dream of the reach of Facebook.
mschuster91 5y ago
> even body image issues from touched up photos, Body image issues from advertising was an issue that existed way before the advent of Instagram, though - even before the first line of Photoshop was coded. Ultra-thin, half starved and sometimes drugged models were the norm for way, way too many years.
cwp 5y ago
Yeah, the analogy between toxic media and toxic chemicals is pretty good. However, I'd put they blame for that somewhere you might find surprising: influencers. Everybody likes to hate on "big tech" these days, but if there's anyone that knows the dangers and all the ill effects but ignores them to make a profit, it's content creators. They are hyper-attuned to the way people respond to their content, and they'll do anything to get a reaction, the more intense the better. And if that means siccing a mob on somebody, so be it. If it means doing stunts that endanger people in the real world, fine. And polarization is the best technique they've stumbled onto yet: say stuff that enrages people to get them to engage with the post, and then pick up followers among those that watch the rage with glee. Just about every successful influencer has done a post about how hard it is to be internet-famous. It's almost always about how the negative effects of their work get reflected back at them. They know how the things they say harm people, they just want the negativity to be directed elsewhere. There's a lot of debate about how social media companies should be regulated, how much censorship should be allowed, how much platforms should subsidize legacy media etc. But none of it will matter if we don't rein in what's considered acceptable in the creator economy.
- adambard 5y ago
  Sure, it's the influencers pumping the oil, but it's social media networks running the pipelines, and they're splitting the profits. Unfortunately, toxic content is a lot harder to regulate than toxic chemicals, when one man's truth is another man's fake news.
- CharlesW 5y ago
  > Everybody likes to hate on "big tech" these days, but if there's anyone that knows the dangers and all the ill effects but ignores them to make a profit, it's content creators. This is like blaming smokers instead of Philip Morris.
  - hazbot 5y ago
    I think your analogy is pretty apt. However, even though I don't think you can give corporations a free ride just because 'people could choose not to use the product', this is not an absolute! 'People could choose not to use the product' does hold a lot of truth.
Misdicorl 5y ago
I disagree. The future doesn't have less social media, it has more. We won't look back with contempt, but amusement much as we do today at early cgi and tabloid efforts. I don't love the idea with the current iteration, but every mass media invention has the exact same trope play out as we're seeing with social media. 1) first adopters and skeptics 2) major use 3) exploitation of those users 4) combo of regulation and individuals becoming more savvy We're deep in phase three. It might get worse still, but I don't see much worse until you factor in additional game changers (deep fakes seem most obvious, but my money is on something currently unknown) A new equilibrium will be found, better for some interests and worse for others.
- sammalloy 5y ago
  That seems highly unlikely. Almost half of social media users are considering leaving the platforms, while around 10% have deleted Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or some other app. We also know that the data shows that the pandemic increased the likelihood of people leaving social media, which would seem odd on the face of it, because you would think it would lead to more adoption due to being at home. What happened is that the pandemic was a catalyst for people finding what was truly meaningful in their personal lives; social media wasn't it.
- zarzavat 5y ago
  It depends what you mean by "social media". Facebook already feels very dated and Instagram is getting that way. People will get bored of it all, I know I have. Right now my platform of choice is Discord. It might technically be social media but it's way less toxic as it encourages people to build relationships rather than shouting at each other.
  - sammalloy 5y ago
    I use Facebook for hyper-local news and groups only. I have no other use for it. I use Insta to follow subcultural interests, such as vegan cooks, shapers, small niche bands I like, car modders, and unusual cat reels. I had something interesting happen to me last week on Insta. It was very late at night and I was about to fall asleep, when a live feed alert informed me that a band I liked was talking live directly with just about anyone about their new album release. It was amazing to see them that open and welcoming to their fans and to be able to instantly download their album after being told it had just dropped. That kind of instant communication is wild.
kongin 5y ago
>Originally it felt like a social annoyance and not much else but in this era of vaccine denialism, election fraud conspiracy theories, even body image issues from touched up photos, there’s little doubt in my mind that society is suffering and that the problem will likely get worse before it gets better. I'd go the exact opposite way and say that in this age of free information the self serving lies of the old centers of power were found wanting and ignored. Blaming fakenews for things going wrong is the dying gasp of a failed system trying to stay relevant like the catholic church was after the printing press. Before I get dogpiled on because of the current pandemic, we should remember the food pyramid, the following fat epidemic and the 200k deaths a year we have been getting every year for the last 30 years: https://www.pnas.org/content/115/5/957 https://www.pnas.org/content/115/5/957 The past wasn't great, experts got things wrong and a whole lot of people died.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
Iv 5y ago
My bet is advertisement. We know it is detrimental to informed decision, to market efficiency and to mental health. This is just an opinion that can't be relayed on any outlet that depends on advertisement (90% of them maybe?)
- datavirtue 5y ago
  Advertisement is great if all claims are required to be 100% true and provable.
  - Iv 5y ago
    Then it is called journalism. It already exists and it is usually considered unethical to fund it when you are one of the object of their scrutiny.
colordrops 5y ago
Factory farms, polyunsaturated fats, refined grains (white wheat and rice), HFCS, human driven cars, and sitting desks will all be seen as barbaric or grossly unhealthy in the future.
- capeterson 5y ago
  Throughout the last year or so, I've seen multiple people on HN call out polyunsaturated fats, is there a specific reason for that? Google hasn't really turned up anything for me that looked particularly compelling.
  - datavirtue 5y ago
    Soybean oil is one prominent and very prolific and profitable example. It is everywhere. It was first developed to add to feed to fatten animals (turkeys). You can still buy it in fifty gallon drums at feed mills. Nasty stuff. It breaks down and oxidizes readily under heat (and in the body). Oxidation == free radicals. Hydrogenation (hydrogen injection) makes it thick at room temperature, otherwise it is a thin oil like any other vegetable oil you might be familiar with. Very fattening, no nutrient value. Unless a restaurant is willing to invest in peanut oil (and they will tell you on the menu if they did because it costs so much more than hydrogenated soybean oil) all fried foods are cooked in burnt up (oxidized and broken down) soybean oil. You have to c he ange the oil in a fryer every day to get a decent food product out of it. Good restaurants might filter it and reuse it for one additional shift/day. In reality it is used until it is smoking heavily and not able to cook food without rendering it deflated and dark brown. There are massive inertia and industry lobbyists (producers and food mfg) behind it that know how to install fear in politicians. We have know for along time that putting it in your body is a bad idea.
    - Delk 5y ago
      Canola oil, some seeds and (true) nuts, as well as fatty fish also contain lots of polyunsaturated fats. Most of those are generally considered healthy. Would those also become unhealthy for the reasons you've listed? I think arguing that "polyunsaturated fats will be seen as grossly unhealthy" requires more than an example of (ab)use of a particular oil.
skocznymroczny 5y ago
I disagree. The "disinformation" is exaggerated. Many conspiracy theories turn out to be true after time. The problem is, there is a vocal group of people, who take the government/big corporation official stance as gospel, and anyone who even dares to question the status quo is branded as a harmful influence.
- culopatin 5y ago
  So you think the Earth will be proven to be flat and the vaccines will be proven to have nanobots and 5G modems in the future?
  - golergka 5y ago
    I think that Covid will have been proven to come out of Chinese virus lab. Which doesn't sound as a crazy conspiracy theory right now, but for a time during 2020, was suppressed just as the conspiracy theories you've listed. Have you considered a possibility that may be, the outright idiotic conspiracy theories that you're talking about don't actually have that much supporters, and could be used as scrape-goats to excuse the censorship and information control which would actually be targeted at much less insane stuff?
    - Sohcahtoa82 5y ago
      I believe COVID came out of a Chinese virus lab, but I also think that the leak of the virus was done out of incompetence, not malice.
      - golergka 5y ago
        That's reasonable. Also, I _think_ that it came from a lab, but it's still 80-90%, not 100% for me. And then there are some theories that I don't agree with, as I think that their probability is 5-20%, but it's important that those theories, too, aren't silenced, as they're completely different from 0% "Earth is flat" BS. Edit: Actually, strike that: I think that none theories should be silenced, including flat Earth. Exactly because of what I described in this thread.
bjourne 5y ago
What's your view on video violence and internet porn?
GLGirty 5y ago
> The people making money knew exactly how dangerous it was and the problems it caused Wow it didn't take long for evidence of that to surface: https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-knows-instagram-is-toxic-for-teen-girls-company-documents-show-11631620739?mod=rsswn https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-knows-instagram-is-tox...

dchichkov 5y ago

CO₂ could be candidate. Perhaps the effect will be even at a grander scale than leaded gas.

bjowen 5y ago
It seems like the top of the list to me! - though it’s been emitted for longer in quantity.

bobthechef 5y ago

I think there are always people around, more than we care to admit, who will do things they know are bad to make a buck and to wield power (and frankly, most of us, sadly, have a price; look at the widespread participation of people in tech in the aforementioned industries and companies even though they and we all know the bad stuff they're doing). So I wouldn't treat this as some exception. I think people are extremely good at quietly repressing knowledge they're rather not have interfere with their desires. > this era of vaccine denialism Not central to your point, but this isn't really that widespread. 98% of Americans have the full regime of vaccines. The whole "antivax" scare is largely fiction and has been whipped by journalists afraid of people asking questions. Now, where the covid vaccine is concerned, that's different. People who aren't skeptical of vaccines qua vaccines are skeptical about this particular vaccine or whatever you want to call it because of the obscene level of politicization around it masquerading as "science". So I wouldn't conflate the two.

jjoonathan 5y ago
On the contrary, I think it's dangerous to ignore the very close link. Yes, they've switched talking points from mercury to spike proteins but it's the same playbook. The meme just got more viral when it hitched a ride on politics.
- Talanes 5y ago
  I think telling people who are only skeptical of this one new thing that they are anti-vax is just driving people to become anti-vax rather than change their mind about the Covid vaccines. I have a data point of one in my father, who followed exactly this path.

heresie-dabord 5y ago

> Maybe an overwrought comparison Yes, I assert that comparing social media to a deadly substance is overwrought, hyperbolic, and not lucid enough to be helpful. Lead causes brain damage and kills people. What we call social media is an advertising business offering free channels of shallow discourse as incentive. The business has delivered. Consider social media to be a test of the education system and of democracy in general. If society has failed the test, the test has been useful indeed.

botverse 5y ago
That is unfortunately not trying to see the problem from the future hindsight. Which is the exercise that GP is suggesting.
- heresie-dabord 5y ago
  Social media is not a toxin of any sort. To call it "toxic" is a metaphor that expresses the revulsion that people feel for the idiocies that social media channels have uncovered. So I do disagree with the liberty of the metaphor in this case. Social media is the business of providing channels of communication to people in exchange for some lucrative data. Other businesses do this too (television, radio, newspapers). I am not at all a proponent of social media. The discourse is broken by petty, idiotic exchanges. The signal-to-noise ration is far too low and the sophisticated advertising techniques have become a form of surveillance that I reject. But petty, idiotic exchanges have always existed. So have ignorant people, propaganda, gullible people, and fanatics. They can meet in basements, in taverns, in temples, in arenas... The fundamental problem is failing education and social disorder. It takes great liberty of metaphor to compare social media to a real toxin. I share people's dislike of social media. But I will look back on the past decade and not blame any of the social-media companies for the idiocy of people who should know better through public education.
  - chx 5y ago
    Failing education is certainly a big problem (and I financed a tiny reform school for five years trying to combat the tiniest of slices of it) but you are missing the power of reach. Not even Edward Murrow could dream of the reach of Facebook.

mschuster91 5y ago

> even body image issues from touched up photos, Body image issues from advertising was an issue that existed way before the advent of Instagram, though - even before the first line of Photoshop was coded. Ultra-thin, half starved and sometimes drugged models were the norm for way, way too many years.

cwp 5y ago

Yeah, the analogy between toxic media and toxic chemicals is pretty good. However, I'd put they blame for that somewhere you might find surprising: influencers. Everybody likes to hate on "big tech" these days, but if there's anyone that knows the dangers and all the ill effects but ignores them to make a profit, it's content creators. They are hyper-attuned to the way people respond to their content, and they'll do anything to get a reaction, the more intense the better. And if that means siccing a mob on somebody, so be it. If it means doing stunts that endanger people in the real world, fine. And polarization is the best technique they've stumbled onto yet: say stuff that enrages people to get them to engage with the post, and then pick up followers among those that watch the rage with glee. Just about every successful influencer has done a post about how hard it is to be internet-famous. It's almost always about how the negative effects of their work get reflected back at them. They know how the things they say harm people, they just want the negativity to be directed elsewhere. There's a lot of debate about how social media companies should be regulated, how much censorship should be allowed, how much platforms should subsidize legacy media etc. But none of it will matter if we don't rein in what's considered acceptable in the creator economy.

adambard 5y ago
Sure, it's the influencers pumping the oil, but it's social media networks running the pipelines, and they're splitting the profits. Unfortunately, toxic content is a lot harder to regulate than toxic chemicals, when one man's truth is another man's fake news.
CharlesW 5y ago
> Everybody likes to hate on "big tech" these days, but if there's anyone that knows the dangers and all the ill effects but ignores them to make a profit, it's content creators. This is like blaming smokers instead of Philip Morris.
- hazbot 5y ago
  I think your analogy is pretty apt. However, even though I don't think you can give corporations a free ride just because 'people could choose not to use the product', this is not an absolute! 'People could choose not to use the product' does hold a lot of truth.

Misdicorl 5y ago

I disagree. The future doesn't have less social media, it has more. We won't look back with contempt, but amusement much as we do today at early cgi and tabloid efforts. I don't love the idea with the current iteration, but every mass media invention has the exact same trope play out as we're seeing with social media. 1) first adopters and skeptics 2) major use 3) exploitation of those users 4) combo of regulation and individuals becoming more savvy We're deep in phase three. It might get worse still, but I don't see much worse until you factor in additional game changers (deep fakes seem most obvious, but my money is on something currently unknown) A new equilibrium will be found, better for some interests and worse for others.

sammalloy 5y ago
That seems highly unlikely. Almost half of social media users are considering leaving the platforms, while around 10% have deleted Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or some other app. We also know that the data shows that the pandemic increased the likelihood of people leaving social media, which would seem odd on the face of it, because you would think it would lead to more adoption due to being at home. What happened is that the pandemic was a catalyst for people finding what was truly meaningful in their personal lives; social media wasn't it.
zarzavat 5y ago
It depends what you mean by "social media". Facebook already feels very dated and Instagram is getting that way. People will get bored of it all, I know I have. Right now my platform of choice is Discord. It might technically be social media but it's way less toxic as it encourages people to build relationships rather than shouting at each other.
- sammalloy 5y ago
  I use Facebook for hyper-local news and groups only. I have no other use for it. I use Insta to follow subcultural interests, such as vegan cooks, shapers, small niche bands I like, car modders, and unusual cat reels. I had something interesting happen to me last week on Insta. It was very late at night and I was about to fall asleep, when a live feed alert informed me that a band I liked was talking live directly with just about anyone about their new album release. It was amazing to see them that open and welcoming to their fans and to be able to instantly download their album after being told it had just dropped. That kind of instant communication is wild.

kongin 5y ago

>Originally it felt like a social annoyance and not much else but in this era of vaccine denialism, election fraud conspiracy theories, even body image issues from touched up photos, there’s little doubt in my mind that society is suffering and that the problem will likely get worse before it gets better. I'd go the exact opposite way and say that in this age of free information the self serving lies of the old centers of power were found wanting and ignored. Blaming fakenews for things going wrong is the dying gasp of a failed system trying to stay relevant like the catholic church was after the printing press. Before I get dogpiled on because of the current pandemic, we should remember the food pyramid, the following fat epidemic and the 200k deaths a year we have been getting every year for the last 30 years: https://www.pnas.org/content/115/5/957 https://www.pnas.org/content/115/5/957 The past wasn't great, experts got things wrong and a whole lot of people died.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

Iv 5y ago

My bet is advertisement. We know it is detrimental to informed decision, to market efficiency and to mental health. This is just an opinion that can't be relayed on any outlet that depends on advertisement (90% of them maybe?)

datavirtue 5y ago
Advertisement is great if all claims are required to be 100% true and provable.
- Iv 5y ago
  Then it is called journalism. It already exists and it is usually considered unethical to fund it when you are one of the object of their scrutiny.

colordrops 5y ago

Factory farms, polyunsaturated fats, refined grains (white wheat and rice), HFCS, human driven cars, and sitting desks will all be seen as barbaric or grossly unhealthy in the future.

capeterson 5y ago
Throughout the last year or so, I've seen multiple people on HN call out polyunsaturated fats, is there a specific reason for that? Google hasn't really turned up anything for me that looked particularly compelling.
- datavirtue 5y ago
  Soybean oil is one prominent and very prolific and profitable example. It is everywhere. It was first developed to add to feed to fatten animals (turkeys). You can still buy it in fifty gallon drums at feed mills. Nasty stuff. It breaks down and oxidizes readily under heat (and in the body). Oxidation == free radicals. Hydrogenation (hydrogen injection) makes it thick at room temperature, otherwise it is a thin oil like any other vegetable oil you might be familiar with. Very fattening, no nutrient value. Unless a restaurant is willing to invest in peanut oil (and they will tell you on the menu if they did because it costs so much more than hydrogenated soybean oil) all fried foods are cooked in burnt up (oxidized and broken down) soybean oil. You have to c he ange the oil in a fryer every day to get a decent food product out of it. Good restaurants might filter it and reuse it for one additional shift/day. In reality it is used until it is smoking heavily and not able to cook food without rendering it deflated and dark brown. There are massive inertia and industry lobbyists (producers and food mfg) behind it that know how to install fear in politicians. We have know for along time that putting it in your body is a bad idea.
  - Delk 5y ago
    Canola oil, some seeds and (true) nuts, as well as fatty fish also contain lots of polyunsaturated fats. Most of those are generally considered healthy. Would those also become unhealthy for the reasons you've listed? I think arguing that "polyunsaturated fats will be seen as grossly unhealthy" requires more than an example of (ab)use of a particular oil.

skocznymroczny 5y ago

I disagree. The "disinformation" is exaggerated. Many conspiracy theories turn out to be true after time. The problem is, there is a vocal group of people, who take the government/big corporation official stance as gospel, and anyone who even dares to question the status quo is branded as a harmful influence.

culopatin 5y ago
So you think the Earth will be proven to be flat and the vaccines will be proven to have nanobots and 5G modems in the future?
- golergka 5y ago
  I think that Covid will have been proven to come out of Chinese virus lab. Which doesn't sound as a crazy conspiracy theory right now, but for a time during 2020, was suppressed just as the conspiracy theories you've listed. Have you considered a possibility that may be, the outright idiotic conspiracy theories that you're talking about don't actually have that much supporters, and could be used as scrape-goats to excuse the censorship and information control which would actually be targeted at much less insane stuff?
  - Sohcahtoa82 5y ago
    I believe COVID came out of a Chinese virus lab, but I also think that the leak of the virus was done out of incompetence, not malice.
    - golergka 5y ago
      That's reasonable. Also, I _think_ that it came from a lab, but it's still 80-90%, not 100% for me. And then there are some theories that I don't agree with, as I think that their probability is 5-20%, but it's important that those theories, too, aren't silenced, as they're completely different from 0% "Earth is flat" BS. Edit: Actually, strike that: I think that none theories should be silenced, including flat Earth. Exactly because of what I described in this thread.

bjourne 5y ago

What's your view on video violence and internet porn?

GLGirty 5y ago

> The people making money knew exactly how dangerous it was and the problems it caused Wow it didn't take long for evidence of that to surface: https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-knows-instagram-is-toxic-for-teen-girls-company-documents-show-11631620739?mod=rsswn https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-knows-instagram-is-tox...