7 ms·

People are quick to blame social media because there are exceedingly plausible mechanisms by which social media could cause such a phenomenon, and there is trem

People are quick to blame social media because there are exceedingly plausible mechanisms by which social media could cause such a phenomenon, and there is tremendous profit in doing so and not just of the money variety. State level actors run secret influence campaigns on facebook, and more recently, just create and control whole social media platforms without oversight. The time for skepticism about the scale of the effect of social media has passed.

2devnull 3y ago
s/social media/books/g
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- api 3y ago
  Social media is nothing like books. It's also nothing like eBooks, Wikipedia, regular discussion forums, telephones, etc. Modern social media has some completely novel characteristics that are responsible for its damaging effects on mental health. - It's optimized to "maximize engagement," which is code for making it addictive. When anyone says engagement in our industry it's usually a euphemism for addiction. - It does this by sorting content to present "engaging" content first, which due to how humans' brains are wired tends to be content that is emotionally triggering in some way. - It's primarily consumed on a device that people carry with you and that has an interface that makes infinite scrolling easy, replicating the basic design of a slot machine. There were dumb panics about books, but citing those to dismiss concerns over social media is intellectually lazy. They are very, very different things. Books don't watch you while you read them and fine-tune their content in real time to maximize the amount of time you spend reading them.
  - maxwell 3y ago
    Sounds like the rack of newspapers and magazines that have now disappeared from the newsstands, which now sell consumer packaged goods. Fair point comparing infinite scroll to slot machines. Books end, newspapers and magazines get thrown away. Always more to scroll.
  - jancsika 3y ago
    > - It's optimized to "maximize engagement," which is code for making it addictive. When anyone says engagement in our industry it's usually a euphemism for addiction. Wikipedia on its own with zero-cost internal hyperlinks was also addictive. There were people going down Wikipedia rabbit holes well before they were getting themselves into Youtube rage bubbles. That's to say-- I think it matters what one is getting addicted to. Society can bounce back from people who got addicted to studying too much of various bona fide topics like constitutional law and industrial hygiene. On the other hand, society would have a harder time recovering if a critical mass of citizens are quantized to mostly low-effort rabbit holes, like believing the earth is flat, or fiat declarations that maritime and common law are the only legally binding forms of constitutional power.
    - AlexandrB 3y ago
      Wikipedia doesn't have "infinite scrolling", you have to make a choice to look at associated content. Better still, you get to choose what you look at instead of having an algorithm choose for you. And you could even bookmark what you found and continue exploring at a later date! Social media mostly or completely removes these loci of control. You are fed "content" by the simple act of scrolling down the page and what you see is often determined by an algorithm. Because the feed is always changing it's often difficult or even impossible to get back to the same "state" so there's a sense of FOMO as well.
  - magic_hamster 3y ago
    This is barely scraping the surface. Social media might not be the only thing causing harm to society, but it is still a raging dumpster fire which can be seen from space.
LocalH 3y ago
Social media didn't cause the problem, but it very much accelerated it. I think the media aspect of it is related to the uptick in 24-hour news that began with Ted Turner and CNN, and got its own acceleration with 9/11. Social media sort of piggybacked onto that and blew it wide open.
- jdksmdbtbdnmsm 3y ago
  "The problem with capitalism is not that it creates problems for humans but that it exploits the problems that we would have regardless, drastically exacerbating the consequences." –Chris Cutrone
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    Capitalism solved many problems, like regular famines.
    - manuelabeledo 3y ago
      It also created other famines.
      - WalterBright 3y ago
        Example? Even if it did, the average height increase the world over shows that capitalism has been an enormous win in food production and elimination of starvation.
        virtualritz 3y ago
        > Even if it did, the average height increase the world over shows that capitalism has been an enormous win in food production and elimination of starvation. Source(s), please? TLDR; famines require political will to be prevented, first and foremost[0]. When you eliminate starvation, as it has happened also in non-capitalist socities, e.g. the USSR & China during the cold war, and despite horrible famines during the 20th century, everywhere, including in those two countries, height is driven by diet [1]. Specifically protein quality in developed- and protein quantity in developing countries. "Developing" says something about the standard of living, health care, access to food & water, or lack thereof. It says nothing about the underlying economic system. And any you make is at best correlation. Prooving causality would be extremely difficult and easily countered (see above, USSR & China, but there are many more examples). But as you made it, again, sources please. But what is easy to make is actually the opposite point. That late stage capitalism drives inequalities in access to food in general and healthy food specifically[2,3]. And that it developed instruments that create what amounts to devastating effects to particularly people in developing societies. Often those that are capitalist economically or authoritarian politically or, worst, both. With your meaningless counterexamples in the middle eastern countries who have immense wealth from natural resources coupled with low population density. That said: whenever I study food labels in a supermarket in the US and look at prices of food that is not highly processed and doesn't contain ingredients I would never put into my body, it is obvious that the same is true for a country that would certainly describe itself as both "capitalist" and "democratic". ;) But to go back to your point: you are linking a cause (capitalism) with an effect (less starvation -> increase in avg. height) wrongly. What do you think Victorian England was[5]? What do you think the middle ages in Europe[6] looked like, economically? Those are all examples of capitalist socities. The main force that brought down starvation would probably be a combo of humanistic thinking (and eventually the acknowledgement of human rights) and modern logistics. And the main counterforces in the 20th century be blatant ignorance of humanistic principles and wars of political systems (those two are often tightly coupled, obviously). [0] https://www.ids.ac.uk/download.php?file=files/dmfile/wp105.pdf https://www.ids.ac.uk/download.php?file=files/dmfile/wp105.p... [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1570677X16300065 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1570677X1... [2] https://progressive.international/wire/2022-08-11-capitalism-is-causing-the-food-crisis-not-war/en https://progressive.international/wire/2022-08-11-capitalism... [4] https://www.internationalhumanistparty.org/en/article/financial-speculation-generates-world-food-insecurity https://www.internationalhumanistparty.org/en/article/financ... [5] https://victorianweb.org/science/health/hunger.html https://victorianweb.org/science/health/hunger.html [6] https://www.europenowjournal.org/2018/09/04/famine-and-dearth-in-medieval-england/ https://www.europenowjournal.org/2018/09/04/famine-and-deart...
heresie-dabord 3y ago
Well said! Here is a phrase from TFA: > "the phone-based childhood" We can take this even further: it's a Phone-Based Education and Social Discourse What has happened in the "Anglosphere" is that we have opened a for-profit Pandora's Box of resentful and manipulative discourse that makes no damned sense to people who are looking to their society for sense and guidance. As you say, the system is full of manipulative actors. Not all of them are foreign.
pardoned_turkey 3y ago
People made the same arguments about violent video games (a major panic in the 1990s), about youth literature, about Dungeons and Dragons, and so on. All about depraving children and getting them hooked on smut for profit. Social media is "adversarial" in the sense that yeah, most platforms want to maximize engagement, and maximized engagement might not be best for you. But that's also the relationship you have with companies selling you sugary food or expensive shoes. They're not your friends and they want you to spend money in ways that might not benefit you. We manage. Ultimately, you have agency to shape your experience. You're not "addicted" to it any more than one gets "addicted" to chocolate or Louis Vuitton. Social media ended up replacing social life for many teens, and it's probably useful to ask why - this isn't Mark Zuckerberg's design. At some point, adults in the developed world decided at some point that it's not OK for children to play unsupervised outdoors, walk to school on their own, and so on. It's probably a function of increasing standard of living and plummeting birth rates. Just 50-100 years ago, you had multiple children with the expectation that not all of them will make it to adulthood. Nowadays, most families will have one kid - their single most important "investment" - and they have the means to tightly monitor and control their physical environment. The internet is sort of the only place where you can meet with friends and have fun unsupervised. It's an escape hatch. I don't see how banning or regulating TikTok or Facebook really solves this.
- Capricorn2481 3y ago
  They aren't the same arguments at all. All of those things are about the occasional indulgence of a hobby vs the time sink of constantly sitting on your phone and spending time with companies that want ALL of your time. Companies that, themselves, have lots of internal reporting concluding their platforms increase division and cause mental health issues. I don't see how you can compare it to Chocolate? It's in our pocket and it's infinite.
- lancesells 3y ago
  > Social media ended up replacing social life for many teens, and it's probably useful to ask why - this isn't Mark Zuckerberg's design The algorithmic feed and what is shown is absolutely by design. I don't use social media so I don't know how good / bad it is but there's clearly intent. Comparing social media or Youtube to literature or D&D doesn't really work for me. This is more akin to a billion channel cable service where your remote only works some of the time. You use it to socialize with your friends, but you're also forcefed content that you didn't ask for, that may or may not be good for your mental health. And yes, adults have agency but this article is about teens who have agency but are still growing and don't have the experience to make good decisions.
vkou 3y ago
What about the public influence campaigns that are ran openly on television? How well have we managed to quantify the effect that has on the public? They also take place without any oversight.
- williamcotton 3y ago
  But that doesn’t happen at a global level. The medium is the message!
  - Jensson 3y ago
    Advertisements is a global phenomena. Advertisements are often made to make you depressed about your situation, so the more effective they are the more depressed people get.
    - hattmall 3y ago
      Yeah that's the whole thing about advertising is it effectiveness scales with the feelings of inadequacy that it generates.
      - nickelcitymario 3y ago
        I generally get downvoted hard when I raise my hand as an advertiser, but here goes. I think scapegoating advertising is a mistake, because I think we're missing the real problem. Yes, advertising can and often is unethical and harmful. I can't speak for other advertisers, but I take ethics very seriously. I don't participate in advertising aimed at making problems seem bigger than they are for the sake of selling a product. It's effective (in terms of sales), but I wouldn't be able to live with myself if I did that. But: What exactly changed about advertising around 2010 if we're going to say advertising is responsible for a radical decrease in mental health since that time? On balance, I don't think advertisers today are less ethical than they ever were. The same bad actors exist. There are more laws today to prevent the worst abuses, but there are still ways to legally manipulate the public that I would consider horribly unethical. Yes, we have access to more data. But from my perspective, I haven't seen data used effectively for much more than targeting, i.e. prioritizing ad budgets towards the people most likely interested in your product. It still makes me uncomfortable, but can that alone impact mental health at these levels? I don't think so. And so my problem with scapegoating advertising isn't that it's unfair to advertisers. We deserve a lot of the vitriol sent our way. My problem with it is that if we're wrong in our diagnosis, the real problem(s) remain unchecked. The vast majority of the people I know in advertising didn't want all this data in the first place. We were happy to just work on creative ideas, to try and paint a product in a new light so that the general public would take notice. What changed is social media, and the social media companies themselves. I truly believe the problem is with engagement metrics and all the crap they do to keep people addicted. Advertisers, in turn, are forced to play the game, because it's the only game in town. If you're not advertising on social media, you might as well not exist. And if you don't play the engagement game, you might as well not be on there at all. It's a trap. That's not to say there's no one in advertising who is genuinely content to do harm. They exist. They've always existed. But they didn't, and couldn't have, created the platforms and the algorithms that multiplied the problem since 2010. Further, when I look at my own use on social media, the most toxic content isn't sponsored content or ads, it's stuff that's gone viral by content creators and political actors. It's "recommended content" that should have been flagged as wildly inappropriate rather than promoted for more engagement. Saying the problem is advertising misses all of that horrible stuff. So again, not trying to say advertising is good for the soul. Not saying it's a net positive for society (although I think whether or not it's a positive has more to do with WHAT is being advertised than the act of advertising in it of itself). But let's not mistake advertising as the cause of the mental health crisis, at least not without solid evidence to back that up. I don't think the evidence in the original post would support that conclusion at all.

2devnull 3y ago

s/social media/books/g

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
api 3y ago
Social media is nothing like books. It's also nothing like eBooks, Wikipedia, regular discussion forums, telephones, etc. Modern social media has some completely novel characteristics that are responsible for its damaging effects on mental health. - It's optimized to "maximize engagement," which is code for making it addictive. When anyone says engagement in our industry it's usually a euphemism for addiction. - It does this by sorting content to present "engaging" content first, which due to how humans' brains are wired tends to be content that is emotionally triggering in some way. - It's primarily consumed on a device that people carry with you and that has an interface that makes infinite scrolling easy, replicating the basic design of a slot machine. There were dumb panics about books, but citing those to dismiss concerns over social media is intellectually lazy. They are very, very different things. Books don't watch you while you read them and fine-tune their content in real time to maximize the amount of time you spend reading them.
- maxwell 3y ago
  Sounds like the rack of newspapers and magazines that have now disappeared from the newsstands, which now sell consumer packaged goods. Fair point comparing infinite scroll to slot machines. Books end, newspapers and magazines get thrown away. Always more to scroll.
- jancsika 3y ago
  > - It's optimized to "maximize engagement," which is code for making it addictive. When anyone says engagement in our industry it's usually a euphemism for addiction. Wikipedia on its own with zero-cost internal hyperlinks was also addictive. There were people going down Wikipedia rabbit holes well before they were getting themselves into Youtube rage bubbles. That's to say-- I think it matters what one is getting addicted to. Society can bounce back from people who got addicted to studying too much of various bona fide topics like constitutional law and industrial hygiene. On the other hand, society would have a harder time recovering if a critical mass of citizens are quantized to mostly low-effort rabbit holes, like believing the earth is flat, or fiat declarations that maritime and common law are the only legally binding forms of constitutional power.
  - AlexandrB 3y ago
    Wikipedia doesn't have "infinite scrolling", you have to make a choice to look at associated content. Better still, you get to choose what you look at instead of having an algorithm choose for you. And you could even bookmark what you found and continue exploring at a later date! Social media mostly or completely removes these loci of control. You are fed "content" by the simple act of scrolling down the page and what you see is often determined by an algorithm. Because the feed is always changing it's often difficult or even impossible to get back to the same "state" so there's a sense of FOMO as well.
- magic_hamster 3y ago
  This is barely scraping the surface. Social media might not be the only thing causing harm to society, but it is still a raging dumpster fire which can be seen from space.

LocalH 3y ago

Social media didn't cause the problem, but it very much accelerated it. I think the media aspect of it is related to the uptick in 24-hour news that began with Ted Turner and CNN, and got its own acceleration with 9/11. Social media sort of piggybacked onto that and blew it wide open.

jdksmdbtbdnmsm 3y ago
"The problem with capitalism is not that it creates problems for humans but that it exploits the problems that we would have regardless, drastically exacerbating the consequences." –Chris Cutrone
- WalterBright 3y ago
  Capitalism solved many problems, like regular famines.
  - manuelabeledo 3y ago
    It also created other famines.
    - WalterBright 3y ago
      Example? Even if it did, the average height increase the world over shows that capitalism has been an enormous win in food production and elimination of starvation.
      - virtualritz 3y ago
        > Even if it did, the average height increase the world over shows that capitalism has been an enormous win in food production and elimination of starvation. Source(s), please? TLDR; famines require political will to be prevented, first and foremost[0]. When you eliminate starvation, as it has happened also in non-capitalist socities, e.g. the USSR & China during the cold war, and despite horrible famines during the 20th century, everywhere, including in those two countries, height is driven by diet [1]. Specifically protein quality in developed- and protein quantity in developing countries. "Developing" says something about the standard of living, health care, access to food & water, or lack thereof. It says nothing about the underlying economic system. And any you make is at best correlation. Prooving causality would be extremely difficult and easily countered (see above, USSR & China, but there are many more examples). But as you made it, again, sources please. But what is easy to make is actually the opposite point. That late stage capitalism drives inequalities in access to food in general and healthy food specifically[2,3]. And that it developed instruments that create what amounts to devastating effects to particularly people in developing societies. Often those that are capitalist economically or authoritarian politically or, worst, both. With your meaningless counterexamples in the middle eastern countries who have immense wealth from natural resources coupled with low population density. That said: whenever I study food labels in a supermarket in the US and look at prices of food that is not highly processed and doesn't contain ingredients I would never put into my body, it is obvious that the same is true for a country that would certainly describe itself as both "capitalist" and "democratic". ;) But to go back to your point: you are linking a cause (capitalism) with an effect (less starvation -> increase in avg. height) wrongly. What do you think Victorian England was[5]? What do you think the middle ages in Europe[6] looked like, economically? Those are all examples of capitalist socities. The main force that brought down starvation would probably be a combo of humanistic thinking (and eventually the acknowledgement of human rights) and modern logistics. And the main counterforces in the 20th century be blatant ignorance of humanistic principles and wars of political systems (those two are often tightly coupled, obviously). [0] https://www.ids.ac.uk/download.php?file=files/dmfile/wp105.pdf https://www.ids.ac.uk/download.php?file=files/dmfile/wp105.p... [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1570677X16300065 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1570677X1... [2] https://progressive.international/wire/2022-08-11-capitalism-is-causing-the-food-crisis-not-war/en https://progressive.international/wire/2022-08-11-capitalism... [4] https://www.internationalhumanistparty.org/en/article/financial-speculation-generates-world-food-insecurity https://www.internationalhumanistparty.org/en/article/financ... [5] https://victorianweb.org/science/health/hunger.html https://victorianweb.org/science/health/hunger.html [6] https://www.europenowjournal.org/2018/09/04/famine-and-dearth-in-medieval-england/ https://www.europenowjournal.org/2018/09/04/famine-and-deart...

heresie-dabord 3y ago

Well said! Here is a phrase from TFA: > "the phone-based childhood" We can take this even further: it's a Phone-Based Education and Social Discourse What has happened in the "Anglosphere" is that we have opened a for-profit Pandora's Box of resentful and manipulative discourse that makes no damned sense to people who are looking to their society for sense and guidance. As you say, the system is full of manipulative actors. Not all of them are foreign.

pardoned_turkey 3y ago

People made the same arguments about violent video games (a major panic in the 1990s), about youth literature, about Dungeons and Dragons, and so on. All about depraving children and getting them hooked on smut for profit. Social media is "adversarial" in the sense that yeah, most platforms want to maximize engagement, and maximized engagement might not be best for you. But that's also the relationship you have with companies selling you sugary food or expensive shoes. They're not your friends and they want you to spend money in ways that might not benefit you. We manage. Ultimately, you have agency to shape your experience. You're not "addicted" to it any more than one gets "addicted" to chocolate or Louis Vuitton. Social media ended up replacing social life for many teens, and it's probably useful to ask why - this isn't Mark Zuckerberg's design. At some point, adults in the developed world decided at some point that it's not OK for children to play unsupervised outdoors, walk to school on their own, and so on. It's probably a function of increasing standard of living and plummeting birth rates. Just 50-100 years ago, you had multiple children with the expectation that not all of them will make it to adulthood. Nowadays, most families will have one kid - their single most important "investment" - and they have the means to tightly monitor and control their physical environment. The internet is sort of the only place where you can meet with friends and have fun unsupervised. It's an escape hatch. I don't see how banning or regulating TikTok or Facebook really solves this.

Capricorn2481 3y ago
They aren't the same arguments at all. All of those things are about the occasional indulgence of a hobby vs the time sink of constantly sitting on your phone and spending time with companies that want ALL of your time. Companies that, themselves, have lots of internal reporting concluding their platforms increase division and cause mental health issues. I don't see how you can compare it to Chocolate? It's in our pocket and it's infinite.
lancesells 3y ago
> Social media ended up replacing social life for many teens, and it's probably useful to ask why - this isn't Mark Zuckerberg's design The algorithmic feed and what is shown is absolutely by design. I don't use social media so I don't know how good / bad it is but there's clearly intent. Comparing social media or Youtube to literature or D&D doesn't really work for me. This is more akin to a billion channel cable service where your remote only works some of the time. You use it to socialize with your friends, but you're also forcefed content that you didn't ask for, that may or may not be good for your mental health. And yes, adults have agency but this article is about teens who have agency but are still growing and don't have the experience to make good decisions.

vkou 3y ago

What about the public influence campaigns that are ran openly on television? How well have we managed to quantify the effect that has on the public? They also take place without any oversight.

williamcotton 3y ago
But that doesn’t happen at a global level. The medium is the message!
- Jensson 3y ago
  Advertisements is a global phenomena. Advertisements are often made to make you depressed about your situation, so the more effective they are the more depressed people get.
  - hattmall 3y ago
    Yeah that's the whole thing about advertising is it effectiveness scales with the feelings of inadequacy that it generates.
    - nickelcitymario 3y ago
      I generally get downvoted hard when I raise my hand as an advertiser, but here goes. I think scapegoating advertising is a mistake, because I think we're missing the real problem. Yes, advertising can and often is unethical and harmful. I can't speak for other advertisers, but I take ethics very seriously. I don't participate in advertising aimed at making problems seem bigger than they are for the sake of selling a product. It's effective (in terms of sales), but I wouldn't be able to live with myself if I did that. But: What exactly changed about advertising around 2010 if we're going to say advertising is responsible for a radical decrease in mental health since that time? On balance, I don't think advertisers today are less ethical than they ever were. The same bad actors exist. There are more laws today to prevent the worst abuses, but there are still ways to legally manipulate the public that I would consider horribly unethical. Yes, we have access to more data. But from my perspective, I haven't seen data used effectively for much more than targeting, i.e. prioritizing ad budgets towards the people most likely interested in your product. It still makes me uncomfortable, but can that alone impact mental health at these levels? I don't think so. And so my problem with scapegoating advertising isn't that it's unfair to advertisers. We deserve a lot of the vitriol sent our way. My problem with it is that if we're wrong in our diagnosis, the real problem(s) remain unchecked. The vast majority of the people I know in advertising didn't want all this data in the first place. We were happy to just work on creative ideas, to try and paint a product in a new light so that the general public would take notice. What changed is social media, and the social media companies themselves. I truly believe the problem is with engagement metrics and all the crap they do to keep people addicted. Advertisers, in turn, are forced to play the game, because it's the only game in town. If you're not advertising on social media, you might as well not exist. And if you don't play the engagement game, you might as well not be on there at all. It's a trap. That's not to say there's no one in advertising who is genuinely content to do harm. They exist. They've always existed. But they didn't, and couldn't have, created the platforms and the algorithms that multiplied the problem since 2010. Further, when I look at my own use on social media, the most toxic content isn't sponsored content or ads, it's stuff that's gone viral by content creators and political actors. It's "recommended content" that should have been flagged as wildly inappropriate rather than promoted for more engagement. Saying the problem is advertising misses all of that horrible stuff. So again, not trying to say advertising is good for the soul. Not saying it's a net positive for society (although I think whether or not it's a positive has more to do with WHAT is being advertised than the act of advertising in it of itself). But let's not mistake advertising as the cause of the mental health crisis, at least not without solid evidence to back that up. I don't think the evidence in the original post would support that conclusion at all.