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Facebook knows Instagram is toxic for teen girls, company documents show

• dgdfg 5y ago
  https://twitter.com/Ert2541/status/1437773745188442124 https://twitter.com/Ert2541/status/1437773745188442124 https://www.reddit.com/r/youngboysvmanunited/ https://www.reddit.com/r/youngboysvmanunited/ https://www.reddit.com/live/17ngxvwo14e9r https://www.reddit.com/live/17ngxvwo14e9r https://www.reddit.com/live/17ngy4u3kwpnb https://www.reddit.com/live/17ngy4u3kwpnb https://www.reddit.com/live/17ngyaz2i7k58 https://www.reddit.com/live/17ngyaz2i7k58 https://www.reddit.com/live/17ngypzh6qviw https://www.reddit.com/live/17ngypzh6qviw https://www.reddit.com/live/17ngzszxejq8d https://www.reddit.com/live/17ngzszxejq8d https://www.reddit.com/live/17ngzz8prwl1c https://www.reddit.com/live/17ngzz8prwl1c https://www.reddit.com/live/17nh07dryebur https://www.reddit.com/live/17nh07dryebur https://twitter.com/Ert2541/status/1437778285874843650 https://twitter.com/Ert2541/status/1437778285874843650 https://www.reddit.com/r/chelseavzenit/ https://www.reddit.com/r/chelseavzenit/ https://www.reddit.com/live/17nh61qn74nbg https://www.reddit.com/live/17nh61qn74nbg https://www.reddit.com/live/17nh682rvcp2v https://www.reddit.com/live/17nh682rvcp2v https://twitter.com/Ert2541/status/1437773745188442124 https://twitter.com/Ert2541/status/1437773745188442124 https://www.reddit.com/r/youngboysvmanunited/ https://www.reddit.com/r/youngboysvmanunited/ https://twitter.com/Ert2541/status/1437773745188442124 https://twitter.com/Ert2541/status/1437773745188442124 https://www.reddit.com/r/youngboysvmanunited/ https://www.reddit.com/r/youngboysvmanunited/ https://www.reddit.com/live/17ngxvwo14e9r https://www.reddit.com/live/17ngxvwo14e9r https://www.reddit.com/live/17ngy4u3kwpnb https://www.reddit.com/live/17ngy4u3kwpnb https://www.reddit.com/live/17ngyaz2i7k58 https://www.reddit.com/live/17ngyaz2i7k58 https://www.reddit.com/live/17ngypzh6qviw https://www.reddit.com/live/17ngypzh6qviw https://www.reddit.com/live/17ngzszxejq8d https://www.reddit.com/live/17ngzszxejq8d https://www.reddit.com/live/17ngzz8prwl1c https://www.reddit.com/live/17ngzz8prwl1c https://www.reddit.com/live/17nh07dryebur https://www.reddit.com/live/17nh07dryebur https://twitter.com/Ert2541/status/1437778285874843650 https://twitter.com/Ert2541/status/1437778285874843650 https://www.reddit.com/r/chelseavzenit/ https://www.reddit.com/r/chelseavzenit/ https://www.reddit.com/live/17nh61qn74nbg https://www.reddit.com/live/17nh61qn74nbg https://www.reddit.com/live/17nh682rvcp2v https://www.reddit.com/live/17nh682rvcp2v https://twitter.com/Ert2541/status/1437773745188442124 https://twitter.com/Ert2541/status/1437773745188442124 https://www.reddit.com/r/youngboysvmanunited/ https://www.reddit.com/r/youngboysvmanunited/
• blakesterz 5y ago
  https://archive.is/egPlc https://archive.is/egPlc “The research that we’ve seen is that using social apps to connect with other people can have positive mental-health benefits,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at a congressional hearing... “We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls,” said one slide from 2019, summarizing research about teen girls who experience the issues. “Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression,” said another slide. “This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups.” From what researchers said in a March 2020 slide presentation posted to Facebook’s internal message board.
  • spockz 5y ago
    This shows how a statement can be factually true and completely disingenuous at the same time. Yes 1/3 are effected badly but we just say that it can have positive effects. Just omitting the fact that it often has a detrimental effect…
    • everdrive 5y ago
      It sounds like this is part of the point you're making, but this sort of statement should only be considered a lie. Some philosophers might correctly call this "bullshit," however colloquially it's the same as a lie: it intends to deceive.
      • Loughla 5y ago
        Honestly, though, when did 'technically correct' become the baseline for messaging? If you say what's 'technically correct' even if you ignore the entire mountain of steaming horse shit right behind it, you get a pass anymore. Why? Why is this socially acceptable? Is this different from the past, or are we just more aware of it?
        • __s 5y ago
          It isn't different from the past; see tobacco
        • 5y ago
• decremental 5y ago
  There should be a term for things we know on an instinctive level that we can use to guide our decision making.
  • EamonnMR 5y ago
    The term is 'gut' ask in 'I know it in my gut' or 'gut check.'
  • johnwheeler 5y ago
    Intuition “ a thing that one knows or considers likely from instinctive feeling rather than conscious reasoning.”
  • tristor 5y ago
    There is, it's called intuition. Unfortunately the new mantra in big tech is "data driven decision making", which is supposed to mean that you do research and collect data prior to making decisions, not that you A/B test everything to a local maxima ignoring intuition and the holistic bigger picture, but companies have taken it to mean the former. Intuition is the basis of taste-making and aesthetic and is one of the most important things to develop if you're doing product design, and it's absolutely something that can be learned, it's not innate. All intuition is, is your mind making inferences and extrapolations from prior knowledge to the current situation before you, which you can't adequately explain or don't follow the strict rules of formal logic / rationality. Part of wisdom is being able to apply knowledge in new situations, and this is the basis of intuition. Intuition is wisdom in action, and we ignore our intuitions as people and as societies at our peril, both in our personal lives and in business.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  • willcipriano 5y ago
    Common sense is what Aristotle called it.
  • sasaf5 5y ago
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• bob_theslob646 5y ago
  The daily usage numbers by these teens are fairly remarkable. Does any major government fund public research into social media addiction in the youth?
  • johnwheeler 5y ago
    Where have you been for the last 10 years? And it’s not just youth. It’s adults too.
    • mym1990 5y ago
      I think the number for teens/tweens is much higher compared to adults, and that is what they are getting at. Adults can(presumably) make their own decisions. Younger brains will likely have difficulty in finding the steps to break out of the loop.
      • johnwheeler 5y ago
        Much higher compared to adults? I don’t see it. Younger brains having a harder time breaking out of addiction than adults? I don’t see that either.
        • bob_theslob646 5y ago
          "In humans, adolescence, namely the period between the early teenage years and early twenties, is a time of heightened susceptibility to the effects of addictive drugs, but previous studies have struggled to explain why. Our studies support the idea that regulation of protein synthesis by eIF2 might be the underlying cause," says senior author Mauro Costa-Mattioli. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/03/160301103108.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/03/160301103108.h...
        • mym1990 5y ago
          1) Kids have less experience from which to pull from to inform them that an action might be harmful, how an action might affect those around them or when they are doing too much of something. 2) How the development of the prefrontal cortex affects decision making is a thoroughly studied topic and it is very clear that decision making ability becomes better as we mature(when looking at a significant population...again there are OBVIOUSLY outliers).
• ravenstine 5y ago
  When does a vice of society get created and the creator not know of its harmful effects? Rarely, it seems. In actuality, though, as much as I think it's obvious that Instagram was designed specifically for the mindset of teens (and incidentally the countless with Peter Pan syndrome), it's too easy for us to simply blame Facebook. We are also responsible for raising our children to a certain level of emotional maturity and ego awareness, which I believe isn't necessarily a solution but may prevent some from getting sucked into the void of social media. My parent's generation pretty much failed at achieving that with their children, and their children haven't done much better with theirs. Maybe it's an overreliance on institutions which has made us complacent and often careless; as a society we seem to only react to problems rather than be proactive, acting like a deer in the headlights long after the symptoms of the illness have manifested.
  • agent008t 5y ago
    I guess the fact that every generation seems to have moral panics about new technology (radio, tv, video games, internet), and every generation seems to complain about the decline of pop culture, led many reasonable people to adopt the heuristic that this is all just the talk of old curmudgeons, and new fads are no worse than old fads. But what if facebook, instagram, youtube etc. are actually harmful? What if modern pop culture is toxic trash compared to that of the previous decades? What if popular music has, in fact, been getting worse?
    • arvinsim 5y ago
      I think the big difference is that society transformed a lot faster compared to previous ages that most people were not prepared to adapt.
  • runawaybottle 5y ago
    It’s because every generation is very good at teaching the platform of comparison. Take just software developers for a second, we are drowning in the Leetcode unrealistic beauty standard. Young men/woman/teens are comparing and narcissistically validating on these social networks. The extra sad thing is some don’t grow out of it and keep doing it into middle age, on the same childish platforms.
• joelbluminator 5y ago
  Is it Facebook / Instagram's fault or us as a culture? As a culture we adore beauty, wealth, power...Facebook seems to be just a platform where our natural desires can have a play. Facebook hasn't created this impossible beauty ideal, it was created long long ago by Hollywood and the fashion industry. Facebook just makes it super easy for people to become obsessed with something by "connecting" with it. It used to be that 40 years ago you watched some supermodel in a commercial for 20 seconds and she was gone. The novelty with the internet is that now you can follow this supermodel and get dozens of alerts a week about her. If it's not Facebook it's gonna be TikTok or something other platform.
  • sasaf5 5y ago
    Once there are algorithms ranking the posts, they are meddling with the culture.
    • joelbluminator 5y ago
      I kinda agree maybe this can be better regulated but if someone decides to follow Beyonce or Lady Gaga (sorry I'm not really up to date with pop stars) or some supermodel, how are you gonna prevent that? As for algorithm ranking, I suppose 40 years ago it was a "human algorithm" reaching the conclusion that you better have hot chicks drinking coke on commercials, how is that different?
      • deleted 5y ago
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      • mnsc 5y ago
        I'm just going to assume you are not a teen girl. And I'm certainly not one so we can just pull things out of our asses. But I don't think that the issue is the pop star or super model any more. It's the influencers and the idea that "anyone" can be top dog now. This means that you have young regular girls following other young "regular" girls. And if you do what they do, use the same products, be as charismatic then you too can be an influencer. Maybe not a global one but at your school. So suddenly you have young girls that "expose" themselves publically for their 62 followers and pretending to be a influencer. Which makes you a very large target for bullying and "harsh truths" that will end your "influencer career" and at the same time that sliver of self esteem that a teenager normally has. And this is 100% caused by having a platform that is "democratic" and allows everyone to "compete for likes on equal terms".
• 1billionstories 5y ago
  how do employees of Facebook reading this justify their employment?
  • nodejs_rulez_1 5y ago
    More to do with sexual liberation than Facebook to be honest.
  • brezelgoring 5y ago
    Just like all the other FAANG-ites do, six figure salaries. I'll admit it, I'd also toss my ethics to the side for that kind of money. Hell, I'd do it for half of that, some people out there would for less, even.
  • Kiro 5y ago
    We used to have the CTO of Facebook post on HN but that time is long gone due to employee shaming like this. Now we just have comment threads filled with hatred instead.
• mc32 5y ago
  It may be more “toxic” for teen girls but it’s more degree than binary. It negatively affects the great majority of people involved. Keeping up with the joneses and in vs out cliques in school are bad enough things that get amplified multiple times perhaps orders of magnitude more in a setting that promotes and encourages negative social behavior. It almost validates the attitudes of anti socials.
  • runawaybottle 5y ago
    My parents keep seeing other people’s kids getting married constantly, and it’s driving them nuts. Also their relatives bought new houses recently. They are obsessed and pretty much make me feel like a loser (or worse, evil for not giving them those things), even though I have different life goals. And these are grown ass adults, so god knows how the kids deal with it. One thing I’ll say is that other people have a way of smushing this info in your face regardless of what era. They managed to do it when it was just rotary phones, and they’ll manage to do it now with whatever the internet has. In fact, the real interesting one is when someone delivers food to you in jubilation. They will manage to rub it in your face, so Instagram is at the very least an asynchronous form of showing off that you can try to avoid.
• fortran77 5y ago
  Perhaps teen girl culture is what's toxic.
  • mym1990 5y ago
    Anecdotal, but as a kid from the 90s it always felt like kids were really abusive/toxic and there were always power dynamics going on.
    • iamstupidsimple 5y ago
      Kids are brutal. I'm not sure if it's like that everywhere but it sure feels like a universal truth.
  • macintux 5y ago
    I wish I could remember where I found this, but there was a fascinating read a few years ago that helped me understand the social impetus behind teen girl behavior. In essence, they’re learning how to build communities, but some of that is expressed in gatekeeping/negative ways. Unfortunately, that bullying is amplified to incredibly toxic levels online.
  • bthrn 5y ago
    Perhaps both teen culture and social media contain toxic aspects? It is not mutually exclusive.
  • thinkingemote 5y ago
    Related: does toxic feminity exist? I think most would say no, but who knows
    • detcader 5y ago
      I think you could find many people who would agree that gender roles are toxic. Who is responsible for them is another question
• pickledish 5y ago
  > Mr. Mosseri… said the company’s plan for the Instagram kids product, which state attorneys general have objected to, is still in the works. A lot of engineers have to spend a lot of time in order to make something like this a reality. Sometimes I like to think that we’re “better” (morally) than that trope of the growth-obsessed exec who’s willing to exploit kids for an extra 5% revenue in the quarter. People will be people no matter the job title, I suppose
• clipradiowallet 5y ago
  When I was a kid, my parents worked really hard to teach my how and why to avoid things that would harm me. This ranged from discouraging behaviors like running with scissors or drinking and driving, to substances like tobacco or heroin. Social media did not exist when I was a child, or I'm certain it would have been among those behaviors taught to me as harmful, addictive, and easy to screw yourself up by being involved with. Of course...it would have been much harder for me to absorb those life lessons if my parents did those things they told me were harmful. If dad got loaded and drove around, or if mom shot up smack, it would have compromised me avoiding those things by following their example. It's tough to tell your kid to avoid social media when they watch their parent mindlessly entranced by it. Do the right thing there, remind your children that what 'Joe Influencer' or 'Jane Fashionista' thinks doesn't fucking matter. There are attention seeking idiots all around us, but they exist in spectacular high volume on social media. tldr; parent your children to avoid social media, there is limited upside and infinite downside. This may mean not scrolling meme's all night on your phone while your kid does their homework - but you can do it.
  • mym1990 5y ago
    Avoiding something completely can have very negative outcomes long term and can spur massive relapses if enough tension builds up. Realistically one would want to learn to be mindful, do things in moderation, etc... Harder said than done though.
• fortran77 5y ago
  > “When I went on Instagram, all I saw were images of chiseled bodies, perfect abs and women doing 100 burpees in 10 minutes,” said Ms. Vlasova, now 18, who lives in Reston, Va. I just logged into my Instagram. I saw a guy fixing an old "roundie" television set, someone baking food, some through-the-microscope photos of soldering surface-mount components by hand, a home-made 3D printer, and a couple of clips from musicians. What am I missing here?
  • bthrn 5y ago
    You are missing that Instagram (and nearly every other online platform) targets users based on the type of content it thinks they want to see. Instagram thinks you are more interested in tinkering and that Ms. Vlasova is more interested in other things.
    • fortran77 5y ago
      Ok. But why? And can Ms. Vlasova complain if that's what she's interested in?
  • whydoyoucare 5y ago
    The "targeted" content diversifies based on what FB thinks would interest you. FB is better at predicting your interests and hobbies than you do, which eventually leads to doomscrolling.
• goertzen 5y ago
  Our bodies can’t handle large doses of refined/high density compounds (sugar, alcohol, opioids, etc) or social interactions (being judged by 1000s/millions).
  • omgitsabird 5y ago
    I don't think this analogy holds. Those exogenous compounds bind to endogenous receptors. Social interactions lead to endogenous release of compounds that bind to endogenous receptors. A human body limits how much endogenous ligands it produces. There are different types of limits for exogenous ligands.
• bedhead 5y ago
  Jonathan Haidt has done a ton of research on this and it's terrifying. His thesis seems to make a lot of sense: boys bully each other physically while girls bully each other reputationally. This is likely why mental health issues for boys and girls have diverged wildly since about 2014, because as lives moved online, this was a recipe for disaster for girls since social media is so perfect for this kind of bullying, but sort of a non-event for boys who were already online playing video games all day. Social media unlocked and turbocharged all those preexisting pathologies for girls.
  • sixQuarks 5y ago
    I think you’re dismissing the fact that a lot of young boys also feel terrible about themselves when they go on Instagram. Besides the whole chiseled body thing, there’s a lot of influencers who flaunt money and wealth also.
    • bedhead 5y ago
      Oh I certainly didn't mean to be dismissive of the negative effects on boys, it's just been far worse for girls and there's lots of data showing it (eg hospital admissions for self-harm)
  • grapist420 5y ago
    boys absolutely bully each other reputationally. “Trolling”, insults, etc
• rg111 5y ago
  I don't blame Facebook (or Twitter, or any particular company) for this. We can only blame scale. Some things are much more scalable than others, and "beauty" scales. And the "occurrence of beauty" does, too. Before the advent of scale on almost every aspect of our lives, a local musician or theatre group found easy income. Now, since after the invention of gramophones, more people can listen to less and less musicians, i.e. numerically. One movie is seen across the world and then millions of times on streaming services, while your local theatre group starves. Just like that, before, some people were considered more beautiful than others as it is done now. But one beautiful girl could only make, say, 20 girls jealous and anxious. Now, with the advent of Instagram, and internet-driven scale in general, one beautiful girl makes 20,000 girls jealous. So the anxiety and jealousy is numeracally widespread. This is where beauty scales. Also, before, one average looking girl felt threatened by the beauty of one beautiful girl in her area. Now, there is the "feed", where she sees hundred girls more beautiful than her. This would not have been statistically possible in earlier times. This is where "occurrence of beauty" scales. Where, hundred years ago, a girl would see maybe 3-4 girls better looking than her, now she sees 300. ____ - I don't believe in a set standard of beauty. I don't believe that beauty is objective either. In this comment, I use "beauty", "beautiful", etc. as a short and logistically convenient way to represent "perceived beauty", "seemingly beautiful", etc. I hope this won't be an issue. - I am also aware of other sources of anxiety, one simply being money- money buys new clothes more frequently, and people in new clothes and/or makeup look more pretty. Cosmetic surgery is in similar line. Here what scales is display of wealth. - Filters, editing, etc. also might play a big part. People know this. Hence the popularity of the "Instagram vs. Real Life" meme format.
  • leokennis 5y ago
    I mean...who else but Facebook (or Twitter, or any particular company) enabled this scale? I am not advocating for any stance here, but your argument reads a bit like "I don't blame gun manufacturers for gun deaths, I blame sharp solid metal objects travelling through brains at 3000 km/h"
    • helen___keller 5y ago
      I think a more charitable interpretation is that no specific gun company is responsible for gun deaths, as long as it remains legal to manufacture and sell guns, there's going to be somebody out there selling them because the technology/profitability is there.
• dieg0 5y ago
  IMHO social media is toxic for almost everybody
• streamofdigits 5y ago
  Kinda refreshing to see WSJ suddenly care about negative societal outcomes that the "market" is unwilling to address https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/28/22554502/facebook-1-trillion-dollar-market-cap-company-business https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/28/22554502/facebook-1-trill...
• yawaworht1978 5y ago
  Not girls fault(too young too know) not facebooks (they know but don't force it on anyone, society does) fault. Parents fault. It's hard to raise kids, it's hard to be a parent, it's very hard to raise a good kid. It's always been like that, just amplified by a factor of 100k with apps being with you at all times. Kids are easy impressed by superficial things, try your best so your kid does not fall victim to this. Not by censorship, that will have adversarial effects.
  • rafale 5y ago
    I agree with this sentiment. We don't talk enough about the nuclear family and importance of structured parenting. In fact, there has been a leftist movement toward marginalizing the family in favor of centralized uniform progressive teaching. It's ultimately the parents' responsibility to shield their kids from society to a degree they deem appropriate. Not only to provide a healthy physical environment but also a digital one. And this until their personality develop and crystallize. In this case, it may involve limiting the amount of time spent on social media. And sit downs to discuss the fakery and deception involved.
  • detcader 5y ago
    Facebook can do things to reduce dynamics that they know are harmful to children, just like they remove (some) content that is clearly harmful to children but not illegal. They just don't, which is their choice.
• earthscienceman 5y ago
  I'll make a comment that tries to be different than the range of criticism here already. Instagram is toxic for everyone. For reasons too personal to put here, I've been pretty depressed and dysfunctional lately and I've unintentionally discovered the experience of doomscrolling. The output of the instagram algorithm is absolutely terrifying. It has the perfect metrics (swipe time, profile browsing, etc etc) to prey on every impulse inside of you and to send you the perfect cocktail of content to feed those impulses. Fear, doubts, wants, etc. etc. are all inputs to the algorithm and the output is content that makes you feel those things more. I have to wonder if this type of media is similar to magazines on steroids, or other pulp media of the bygone era. No one here makes this comparison so maybe I'm off base but I do often if I'm scrolling through the worst possible version of a home produced checkout-aisle magazine. EDIT: I appreciate the comments that make this personal and are trying to help, but my instagram problem will be fixed when I manage to fix my real life problems... a much bigger task. My point is to highlight that the algorithm can suck anyone in, not just teen girls. They just happen to be the most vulnerable.
  • pantsforbirds 5y ago
    I mean it helps you auto curate content, but you can tell it what you do or don't want too. I was getting hella bikini girls for a while but a few "not interested" and they are all gone. Now my feed is just people I know and my explore page is entirely almost woodworking content with a little bit of car stuff or travel stuff. I think of it like reddit. The front page or all of reddit is absolute hot garbage that seems intentionally made to be divisive politically at this point (even on non political subreddits), but I also have a curated part of reddit with my woodworking and programming and video game hobbies i can browse happily.
    • earthscienceman 5y ago
      Sure. I know this, and it's true. But by analogy, this is like saying "heroin is only addictive in small doses if you choose to take less". Is it good advice? Absolutely. Will everyone follow it? Nope. Should we despise heroin addicts? No. We should create a better system.
  • 5y ago
• nemo44x 5y ago
  Most everyone socialized fine for thousands of years. Some people who didn't socialize well, essentially nerds, invented social media and for some reason everyone decided to begin socializing this way - the way nerds imagined it would be best. It's no wonder everyone is a neurotic, anxious mess.
  • rmah 5y ago
    LOL, that's funny because it's (sorta) true!
• mpfundstein 5y ago
  Just one more reason why my two girls won't get a smartphone until they are going to University
• elisaado 5y ago
  As a teen boy: Instagram is not only toxic for teen girls. The constant craving for likes that eventually turns into craving for attention can't be good.
• HelixEndeavor 5y ago
  lol delete the app
• everdrive 5y ago
  Facebook is an accelerant. The movie "Mean Girls" largely predated social media and highlighted many of the same issues. This seems to be a pretty ingrained issue, although I think most people agree that Facebook makes it worse. Here's a theory that's nearly guaranteed to land me in hot water: Why are young girls so awful to each other? I don't think it's unreasonable to suspect that is has to do with "hormones," new emotions, and new social awareness, etc. But, it's also the case that from a strictly evolutionary perspective, young girls are are the most fertile and therefore the most desirable. This will decline over time, and sharply as women enter their 30s, 40s, and 50s. Perhaps there's an evolutionary reason why young girls work so hard to identity and sideline any competition? If this is the period of their life where they are the most desirable, there might be an evolutionary benefit to be the most cut-throat when it comes to vying for the best mating opportunities. A few caveats: - Hopefully I don't have to explain that evolutionary impulses are not the same as desirable or positive social values. - Nor are evolutionary impulses immutable, or always expressed in the same way. (for example, sports are often observed as a peaceful replacement for warring city states.) - Further, I'm definitely aware that evolutionary psychology can sound very reasonable while being perfectly rubbish and unscientific. There are plenty of people who say things like "because hunter-gathers experienced X," that explains "dubious trend which I have anecdotally observed." Even in the case where an evolutionary psychology explanation may happen to be correct, it remains difficult to prove or test.
  • mattgreenrocks 5y ago
    One recent realization: I suspect many (read: more than just teen girls) see social media as a real-time status market. There is a constant stream of information, and the subtext of that is often status-oriented. Thus, for the status-hungry, keeping up with updates feels necessary even if it makes them feel terrible. There are elements of addiction at work here, too, but if social media was a net negative it wouldn't be as sticky as it is now. People are obviously getting something they want from it.
    • padastra 5y ago
      Tobacco was a net negative and, without regulation, would have remained super sticky. Exercise is a net positive and, for many, is horribly unstick you. How sticky something is correlated better with how well it hits up those short term dopamine surges (or how well its absence causes short term dopamine deficits) than it does with the net value it provides a person.
• ___luigi 5y ago
  It is disappointing to read some comments saying that "It is not FB/Insta's fault?". Those who don't see the challenges that these teens go through is clearly delusional. While there are some good things in the tech, it clearly has a negative side that impact children's mental health through unrealistic beauty standards, and trap them into dopamine loops. I still believe that ranking/recommendation models should be open, parents/individuals should have -at least- the choice to make these algorithms less harmful.
  • ___luigi 5y ago
    > .. I still believe that ranking/recommendation models should be open. Today, we don't know how social media recommend posts to us, we don't know if it is biased, or good for some sub communities. There are [1] some engineering blogs where we can see that is based on some research ideas (e.g. embeddings) are prune to bias [3] and "rich gets richer" phenomena. There should be an open marketplace where institutes/researchers submit open & explainable ranking/recommender systems. This is how you democratize access to such social platforms, but the business model opposes such idea to make it reality. There is a large body of research in the area of explainable recommendation systems/Explainable AI. There are regulations today to use Explainable AI systems in healthcare field, but few of them in areas that impact our mental health (e.g. the use of Social Media). [1]: https://ai.facebook.com/blog/powered-by-ai-instagrams-explore-recommender-system/ https://ai.facebook.com/blog/powered-by-ai-instagrams-explor... [2]: Explainable Recommendation: A Survey and New Perspective, https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.11192 https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.11192 [3]: https://aclanthology.org/P19-1162v2.pdf https://aclanthology.org/P19-1162v2.pdf
  • JohnWhigham 5y ago
    I fully agree these social media platforms are problems, but they're simply catalysts that amplify what was already there. Bullying in high school existed before the Internet, and was arguably worse.
  • reayn 5y ago
    It's safe to assume that the majority of the people on both this specific post and this website as a whole are not teenagers, thus probably can't understand how the situation is like for us.
• OneEyedRobot 5y ago
  Put the logic and profit motive of a slot machine in everyone's pocket. What could go wrong?
• ajsnigrutin 5y ago
  This is the problem with all social networks, instagram is just the most popular. Imagine working overtime for months, saving money, paying for a hotel room at some seaside vacation place, travel in a shitty plane and in a shitty buy to that location, be tired, sleep the first of the three nights there on a shitty bed, eat shitty breakfast, go to the shitty with sewer flowing into the water 100m away... ...and then you take out your camera, pull in your stomach hard, pose in a way that hides body imperfections, hold in your hand a really shitty cocktail, that you paid half your days spending budget for, be carfeul to frame in a way, that the sewer is not visible, and click... ...you now have a perfect photo of someone enjoying their perfect vacation on the beach, drinking a good looking cocktail, enjoying themselves. Maybe even more than one, so you can post them even after you've gone back home. And what do the viewers who of course follow hundreds of people see? A bunch of happy people, enojing their lives, while they "slave away" at their shitty jobs. No wonder people get depressed.
  • elliekelly 5y ago
    According to the article Facebook’s own research found that while it is a problem for all social networks it’s a significantly more pronounced problem for Instagram in particular: > 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. The features that Instagram identifies as most harmful to teens appear to be at the platform’s core. > The tendency to share only the best moments, a pressure to look perfect and an addictive product can send teens spiraling toward eating disorders, an unhealthy sense of their own bodies and depression, March 2020 internal research states. It warns that the Explore page, which serves users photos and videos curated by an algorithm, can send users deep into content that can be harmful. > “Aspects of Instagram exacerbate each other to create a perfect storm,” the research states.
• marmaduke 5y ago
  > Plus, “We’re standing directly between people and their bonuses,” one former researcher said. Reminds me of something.. > It Is Difficult to Get a Man to Understand Something When His Salary Depends Upon His Not Understanding It Ah that’s it. Tried and trued. Interesting story of the quote here: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/30/salary/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/30/salary/
• deleted 5y ago
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• csours 5y ago
  Crack and Coffee are both stimulants, but you can live your life on one of them. From conspiracy theories to depression it seems like Social Media can be a deranging influence. Maybe we can make it more like Coffee, but simple algorithmic goals like 'engagement' or 'watch time' seem to engage with our worst impulses.
• neonate 5y ago
  https://archive.is/egPlc https://archive.is/egPlc
• dang 5y ago
  Recent and apparently related (to the same set of leaks): Facebook has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28512121 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28512121 - Sept 2021 (489 comments)
• GoodJokes 5y ago
  Facebook knows this and you do too. Don’t let your kids use anything fb touches. Don’t let yourself. Unless your salary depends on it like a wanker.
• healingfrog010 5y ago
  It's jammed packed full of nonsense meme accounts giving snake oil pop "psychology", which is extremely dangerous.
• healingfrog010 5y ago
  Instagram is jammed packed with meme accounts spreading dangerous pseudo-pop "psychology". This is a wild fire, and extremely dangerous. Facebook is corrosion.
• deleted 5y ago
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• healingfrog010 5y ago
  Instagram is jammed packed full of meme accounts pushing pseudo pop "psychology" This type of misinformation is extremely dangerous. Nothing is done about it.
• healingfrog010 5y ago
  Hey
• patwolf 5y ago
  It really blows my mind that there isn't a larger pushback against social media. I do see it here on HN occasionally, but I rarely encounter anyone in the real world that has a strong anti-social media stance. Even then, it tends to be more of an anti-facebook-as-a-company stance. There are outspoken groups for just about every real or perceived social ill, but I don't see it for social media. Maybe it is there, and I'm just not in the demographic of folks that hear about it. I speak to a lot of folks in certain religious circles about it. A lot of the things the Church is typically against seems to be perpetuated by it--suicide, pornography, materialism. This is the same group of people that were vocally against rock music, drinking, sex, and D&D at various times in the past. The reaction seems to be "yeah, social media sucks" returns to scrolling on phone. My guess is that it's now such a foundational part of modern culture that it's impossible to avoid. It'd be like trying to live without automobiles, which requires an almost monastic dedication to the cause.
  • deleted 5y ago
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  • hamzakc 5y ago
    I totally agree with you. I am constantly asked by my two boys (11, 14) for a smart phone. In our mind they don't need one at this age. The issue is that everyone seems to have one in the school. When I pick them up I see it for myself. I don't understand why the school does not just ban them and discourage usage. If we want to change the use of social media in teenagers and younger, we as parents have a responsibility to control access to these kind of sites and the internet in general.
  • jacquesm 5y ago
    I wrote this: https://jacquesmattheij.com/the-social-media-problem/ https://jacquesmattheij.com/the-social-media-problem/ Which has a bit of a different angle, but my conclusion is that social media as a tool can be useful but that in the aggregate right now it is a serious problem for which we are ill prepared as society.
  • JohnWhigham 5y ago
    Because many, if not most parents are not good parents and don't give a fuck. Phones and tablets are handed to kids to get the kids to shut up for a couple hours while the parents do the exact same thing.
• GDC7 5y ago
  If this is the principle we should abolish the Forbes rich list to secure the mental health of teen boys and young adults. The 0.00001%ers are out there, in any realm of life. The genie is out of the bottle and it's not about social media, people are curious about extremely rare things, so they'd be digging them out on blogs and vlogs if social media didn't exist. The answer to make people feel better isn't to censor the 0.00001%ers but to show them that they are monodimensional individuals who excel at that particular thing and are world class bad at others See Bill Gates entrepreneurial abilities vs. social skills
  • nix0n 5y ago
    > The 0.00001%ers are out there Actually, on Instagram, they're not. It's Photoshop. Also, we should abolish the Forbes rich list, but in a different way and for a different reason. There's a limited amount of resources on the planet, so it shouldn't be allowed for some to have billions while others starve. But that's off-topic here.
• Grustaf 5y ago
  Since everyone else in the world knows it, it's not surprising they do as well.
• ElectricMind 5y ago
  Stop blaming random companies. Control your daughters maybe. Facebook has no moral obligation to 'protect' your teen girls. Funny how people wine about "others" rather than controlling what they can.
• Sohcahtoa82 5y ago
  IMO, A simple social media site focused on pictures wouldn't be nearly as damaging on its own. What's really causing the issue are the filters and photo editing, which has caused "beauty" standards to hit extremely unrealistic levels, and their self-esteem plummets. I put beauty in quotes because many of those filters are extremely unattractive, making their skin look like plastic and lips look cartoonishly large. Sometimes, they don't even look human. And it baffles me that everyone knows the photos are altered, and yet they somehow expect themselves to look like them.
  • Salgat 5y ago
    My wife has many friends who use filters on all their pictures and these people look nothing like their original selves. Imagine you're even a decent looking kid and every damn photo you come across online are these unrealistic fake images that are portrayed as real. I know photo editing has been done in marketing for decades, but the biggest difference is that you knew those were professional models and people you'd never meet in real life, but this, this is pervasive down to the level of "normal" people, skewing what "normal" is supposed to be.
    • Sohcahtoa82 5y ago
      A few years ago, my sister-in-law posted a picture of herself on Facebook, and so many people were commenting on how beautiful she was. And I'm over here thinking "Oh my god this photo is so clearly filtered." The color in her eyes had added saturation, eyebrows filled in, skin tone smoothed out, skin texture basically completely removed... The worst part is, she's already a nice looking woman. She didn't need the filters. And yet she felt the need to use them anyways.
• swayson 5y ago
  Facebook has no integrity.
• aspartate 5y ago
  How about we start adding a tag like "[gatekeeped]" to articles behind a paywall/register wall?
• Bettyb007 5y ago
  Thé issue has always been there, but it is now not only easily accessible, but pushed on us through ever adaptive personal in-app adverts. Search thinspo and it gets scary very quickly. Note : Don’t forget but this is affecting boys as well, with increasing anorexia and muscle dismorphia
• tqi 5y ago
  I'm not familiar with this particular set of findings, but generally speaking internal research at Facebook are generally either large scale in-app surveys (which suffer from response bias) or small scale (often ~10 participants from a single city) in-person interviews. It's useful for informing product roadmaps, but I don't think we can really draw bigger conclusions from it. Put it a different way, if this research had found that Instagram was NOT toxic for teen girls, would anyone buy that?
  • blobbers 5y ago
    You're claiming a company that has over 20% of the WORLD POPULATION is informing themselves based on 10 participants from a single city? Are you making fun of their internal research team? Yes, if a rigorous study found that social media helped girls, and there were replications of said study, then people would buy that. This is how research works!
    • tqi 5y ago
      Most UXR is not the same as a rigorous (ie peer reviewed) study. Not every qual study is in person interviews, but based on the part about users bringing topics up unprompted I'm guessing that's what at least some of this was based on.
  • bryan_w 5y ago
    Interesting point you bring up. If this research claimed the opposite result, people here would be ripping it apart, but since it confirms their biases, they double down on it and accept it as ground truth.
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• ramon 5y ago
  The problem is values, body is being treated as a product. People are being treated as disposable. We need to reshape these values into better ones for a better society in the future.
• deleted 5y ago
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• gunfighthacksaw 5y ago
  Lets not forget that Facebook was founded as a platform to rate people on looks. Also, Facebook is a case where a somewhat immoral but acceptable behaviour (judging people by their looks) has been warped and focused by technology to such a degree that 1/3 teen girls (and who knows who else) are suffering real effects from it.
• standardUser 5y ago
  It used to be that if you were queer - in any sense of the word - and lived in one of the countless small, conservative, traditional communities in this country, you were shit out of luck. Now, thanks to the internet, there exists inclusive and positive communities for people of every type of background and experience. This simply did not exist for most people just a few decades ago, but now it's accessible to almost every young person in the country. I don't mind bashing the bad about social media and the internet, but I am kind of sick of people overlooking the good.
  • tester756 5y ago
    How about numbers / net outcome? If we trade 10 good things for 10 000 terrible, then is it worth?
    • stickfigure 5y ago
      According to another commenter here, the research that spawned the WSJ article said Instagram made 41% feel better, 31% worse, and no impact for the other 28%. I haven't found the original material to verify, but if this is accurate, seems like the net outcome argument works in Instagram's favor.
      • ethanwillis 5y ago
        It doesn't necessarily work in Instagram's favor. If the 41% and 31% had a baseline of both feeling "ok" then you took 72% who had a baseline that is acceptable and polarized them into groups who felt better or worse. Is it more favorable to have more people who have a stable baseline or to have one group have a good baseline and another similar sized group with a bad baseline?
        • stickfigure 5y ago
          I don't know, but at the very least the article title is grossly misleading.
    • 5y ago
• SavantIdiot 5y ago
  Instagram filters creep me the hell out. Can you imagine posting altered pictures of yourself all day long, and then looking in a real mirror and not seeing what you have acclimated to? Talk about technologically augmented body dysphoria. Maybe getting rid of in-app face-tuning filters would be a start.
• futureproofd 5y ago
  What are the rules / law for identifying an instagram post as an ad? If this isn't enforceable then young people don't stand a chance against the insidious nature of marketing. In the 90's, "cool-hunters" would hire street promoters to hype brands one-on-one, directly to the consumer. These promoters were often friends of the consumers, who essentially became walking adverts for <insert big brand here>. Sounds a bit like the company "Influenceter". It's always been a goal of advertising to capture the minds of the youth culture. Facebook just does it to scale.
• pattisapu 5y ago
  Are there any teenage girls here on HN who could comment from personal experience?
• mensetmanusman 5y ago
  We also know the advertising industry is toxic for teen girls; I shop at TJs just to bypass exposure of my children (girls) to the cover of Cosmo.
  • smabie 5y ago
    it's ok I'm sure their friends will show them soon enough
    • mensetmanusman 5y ago
      This sounds like an argument against the effect of dose. e.g. ‘They will eventually be exposed, ergo it doesn’t matter if they are exposed more.’ This is likely wrong. People that consume more TV media have more body issues and more depression. e.g. In our part of the woods, most of the senior girl’s sports teams are on anti-depression medication.
• andrewla 5y ago
  Isn't this really "Facebook is concerned that Instagram is toxic for teen girls" -- I don't think we can point to this conclusively and make any statement about "toxicity" because that's a subjective concept. But that Facebook is aware of it and is investigating further I think is all that is noteworthy here; it's not like they are accused of using this data and attempting to make Instagram more toxic for teen girls, which would be a much more shocking allegation. The idea that we (humans) can engineer engagement somehow is a misguided one; we stumble upon things and try to optimize things, but we don't have a theory of human behavior that will naturally give us concepts like this -- it's not even clear that such a thing could exist in any generality anyway, and if we had it, then it would naturally become ineffective because everyone would use it.
• voidnullnil 5y ago
  Time for a history lesson: 1. Teens had their stupid magazines and MTV before this smart phone crap. 2. The media hyped potential problems of "negative self image blah blah blah" exactly as much as now. 3. Nothing happened. It was all concern hype.
• ChicagoDave 5y ago
  Social networks have become the gateway to the seven deadly sins. We know which one IG represents.
  • khazhoux 5y ago
    Which one? Lust, sloth, greed, pride?
    • ChicagoDave 5y ago
      Pride. Vanity.
• sizzle 5y ago
  From the article: “Some Instagram researchers said it was challenging to get other colleagues to hear the gravity of their findings. Plus, “We’re standing directly between people and their bonuses,” one former researcher said.” “Facebook executives have struggled to find ways to reduce Instagram’s harm while keeping people on the platform, according to internal presentations on the topic.” Sums up the problem succinctly. Attack the revenue if you want results, legislation is the only tool we have to truly compel and affect change in a company that willfully ignores the societal harms they are uniquely perpetuating at scale to dizzying public health epidemic levels (population level mental health decline across demographics, Facebook echo chambers radicalizing people and affecting voting/eroding democracy, etc.) Enough is enough.
• khazhoux 5y ago
  Sorry if I missed it, but what's the proposed solution, short of shutting it all down? Banning pretty girls? Allowing pretty girls but banning ridiculously-hot girls? Banning photos shot from balcony of tropical hotels? Quite seriously, I don't see how to put the toothpaste back in on this.
• mudil 5y ago
  “The twentieth century was the bankruptcy of the social utopia; the twenty-first will be that of the technological one.” — Nassim Nicholas Taleb
• bob229 5y ago
  Social media toxic for everyone in that that it is destroying society. Delete it now