It's their fault. An individual girl in 1995 who was concerned with her looks had at most a couple dozen people in her life to judge her. In 2021 it's hundreds of millions, and a large portion are more than happy to spout things they would NEVER say in real life.
Does society value beauty? Sure. Do models set "unrealistic expectations"? Sure. Are some high school girls assholes to other girls? Absolutely. But once upon a time kids would go home and those people would be gone. Now it's a 24/7 feedback loop and it's completely unhealthy.
> and a large portion are more than happy to spout things they would NEVER say in real life
This is pretty much an internet problem, not a Facebook problem. The things people say to each other on forums or Twitter or Facebook, especially when anonymous (but not always), are quite often horrendous.
Doesn't facebook & co design their service to be addictive, or, erm, "maximize engagement"? The internet is fine, as I see it, it's ad-revenue based social media that's the problem.
It's absurd to absolve a company as wealthy as facebook who optimizes for "engagement" from their externalities on children.
> Doesn't facebook & co design their service to be addictive, or, erm, "maximize engagement"?
Is there something on the internet that isn't designed as such?
Maybe weather apps... Everything else, from wikipedia to github to stackoverflow to the site you're on now is yet another automated massively multiplayer kudo ranking system. The only meaningful difference appears to be demographic; Facebook is one of the places 'teen girls' spend their time. All I see here is evidence that clicks can still be had by ascribing some concern to the fate of young women[1].
Wikipedia, Github and Stackoverflow don't really have a "feed" much less a opaque, hidden algorithm to induce addictive behavior behind the feed. They don't press you into the app and then send you frequent push notifications.
Gamification is benign compared to an interactive news feed developed to drive ad sales. I find pointing at especially wikipedia, but also github as being designed to maximize engagement comparable to social networks as silly. Neither has much to gain from having addicted users, the same can't be said for facebook, IG, or Reddit.
> Wikipedia, Github and Stackoverflow don't really have a "feed"
All three have various feed mechanisms. They all have various ranking systems. Every one of them have people employed (even if mere 'volunteers') to 'maximize engagement.' And every one of these systems have people obsessed with their profile. Every. Single. One.
They're just mostly not 'teen girls' and so the 'problem' makes for poor headline material.
"especially wikipedia"
Wikipedia is rife with obsessed 'editors' climbing the rungs of the interweb status ladder. They're easy to find. Look at their profile pages; filled with achievement badges (gamification) and vast profiles of their lives. Does Facebook have 'campaigns' for 'elections' that grant power on the platform? I honestly don't know because I spend no time there, but I know Wikipedia does, and we can only imagine the anxiety involved for these 'candidates.' Thankfully though, they're mostly not 'teen girls' so we're not going to worry about them.
I think this is just a red herring for the main discussion here. Of course that example is also terrible! Just because this discussion is about Instagram doesn’t mean we don’t care about anything else.
Speaking to your point more directly, the massive, massive difference is the primary user of Instagram and typical social media vs the primary user of these other platforms. The primary user of Instagram is shown addictive feeds non-stop. It’s really not possible or enjoyable to use Instagram without interacting with designs deliberately and literally trying to get you addicted to the platform. This isn’t true for something like Wikipedia or Stack Overflow. The primary user is going to come across a few articles now and then or search something. But they are rarely going to be interacting with an algorithm or design trying to get you addicted for hours a day.
Think about it like gambling. The only way to use Instagram or Tiktok or Facebook or anything like that is by pulling the lever on a slot machine, trying to get a dopamine hit.
The inherent design and purpose of social media platforms is to addict people so they spend as much time on the platform as possible, and then show them ads. That’s not true for Wikipedia or stack overflow. Those examples are more about policies that encourage toxic behavior or just crappy people on the internet, not a critique of the inherent platform design.
I agree with the points made here but if addiction or useless products is the problem we will have to disallow Netflix to teenagers and gaming as well. It's not clear to me we as a society are capable of doing that. Not only that, probably the whole pop culture and increased individualism is contributing to increased unhappiness. Facebook is just a symptom of a disease in our culture. Dismantling Facebook will do very little to help kids I think.
I actually think the Chinese got it right (banning gaming to teenagers above 3 hours per week or something like that), but we don't operate like that.
We've had subscription media for a while now and it's shown that that business model has it's glaring weaknesses as well, especially when it comes to ideological pandering
True, and the cat can't be put back in the bag, so it's up to the collective "us", who build the Internet, to rediscover our moral imperative to fix what's broken... and Facebook is a huge chunk of this brokenness.
I personally deleted my account but what is it about Facebook that is worse than say Twitter (also deleted) ? Twitter was a big bag of toxicity. Not saying it wasn't interested, tons of interesting people to follow; but the discussions were often rude, racist and hateful. And it poses the same problem of teens following supermodels and what not.
What I'm saying is this is about social media in general, not about Facebook which just happens to be the (currently) number 1 platform.
That is not what the data researchers currently employed by Facebook said, if you read the article.
"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."
So I suspect that their understanding of the problem is better than yours, and that there is something about Instagram that makes it worse than generic social media.
The more basic issue seems to be that (many) people are toxic. If not always, to everyone, at least some of the time, towards some other people.
The problem with social media, then, is that it allows -- indeed encourages, because "engagement" -- all that toxicity to spread so much more widely and rapidly than ever before.
You're assuming people have morals to appeal to - most don't. When everyone is connected to everyone else the asshole always prevail. The solution is to sever the connections.
As individuals, maybe, but as a society I have a hard time seeing proof when there is normalized wage slavery, the animal industrial complex, and any industry with money or power is deeply corrupted.
Right now we have a large percentage of people that refuse to get a vaccine to protect their neighbors.
I don't know many such morally-absent folks. Perhaps the perverse incentives in our system mean a bunch of CEOs are quite sociopathic, but on the whole, people seem rather good intentioned to me. The internet certainly serves as a platform for many that would be otherwise shunned IRL, but I don't think they're the general majority...just the majority that decide to voice their opinions. The rest aren't even paying attention - only a small fraction of people have a Twitter account, for example.
Even reddit, which can be anonymous, is filled with good discourse, assuming you avoid certain subreddits, and sort by top. Moderation goes a long way to mimicking our more natural IRL tendencies to turn down the assholes. Twitter and Instagram generally lack those tools, so the assholes can be louder and _seem_ more prominent than they are.
This is true but the companies choose how to build and operate these spaces, which includes things like moderation and what they promote. Part of what makes Facebook important here is that they’ve put so much effort into taking over people’s socialization everywhere with an emphasis on being where your friends and family are. The more toxic parts of the Internet used to be different places you had to seek out.
Given how profitable that’s been it seems reasonable to expect them to be involved in fixing it.
Facebook is the business that enables this problem on their platform. This problem could disappear overnight if Facebook decided to moderate their platform. Facebook chooses profitability over a safe platform for their users. This is where regulatory bodies should step in.
And yes we need regulatory help. Tens of millions in this country are experiencing mental health issues as a result of these platforms. When we understood that other industries were causing a health crisis we regulated them, the same needs to occur here.
Note. I don't know what the regulatory solution should be, but we should be having that discussion.
> It's their fault. An individual girl in 1995 who was concerned with her looks had at most a couple dozen people in her life to judge her. In 2021 it's hundreds of millions, and a large portion are more than happy to spout things they would NEVER say in real life.
I agree with the 2nd part of your comment. But this part is just dishonest, and sounds like a startup pitch about addressable market. Do you honestly believe that each teen girl is being followed by hundreds of millions, who comment on every single photo of her? Almost everyone still lives in their social bubbles, and yes, it's easier to to communicate and say mean things to each other (totally 24/7 feedback loop), but they almost exclusively come from people you know, not hundreds of millions of internet randos.
While that is true, many people (especially teenagers) curate their Instagram page as if they had tons of followers.
That doesn't come with the downsides that actually having many followers does (hateful comments, etc.), but it certainly fosters a stressful mindset where every posts success is closely monitored and the content is carefully chosen to achieve as much growth as possible.
Good point, it got me thinking about what a young person (or someone who has yet to make an impact in society) might obsess over on Instagram. Changed my mind about why this matters to people in my demographic.
Yeah, but people have a certain level of disconnect with the models, athletes, actors, and superstars you see on TV and in magazines. Facebook brings that to the next level by encouraging that sort of content from people who you can actually relate to and feeds it to you around the clock. IG is especially bad about this.
And that's just some of the content. The algorithm is also just as happy to feed you a continuous stream of outraging, extremist "punditry", manufactured drama, fake "crafting" videos, conspiracies, and paranoid, depressing "news" - anything to keep you engaged.
> Yeah, but people have a certain level of disconnect with the models, athletes, actors, and superstars you see on TV and in magazines.
I'm not really sure about it. When highschool girls wore the same clothes the Spice Girls wore, had the same haircut they had and replicated their dances, for me that's a lot of connection.
I'm sure Facebook/Instagram have a lot to be blamed for but we (not just young girls; parents, teachers, etc) need to be responsible of our actions to some degree.
The judging of other people towards these girls isn't nearly as toxic as them having a poor body image because of all the beautiful people they see online.
Those girls in 1995 got their media fix through magazines geared at women and teenaged girls, where they'd find an impossibly thin model on every other page. The Kardashians wouldn't have been well-received in the 90s, because all of them would have been considered fat by those standards.
>Yes, but on flipside said girl now can and fully expects to be courted by best boys well outside of 1995 logistic reach.
I honestly can't tell if you're joking or not, but study after study has shown that dating was far more mentally healthy in 1995 than it is today. Online dating falls into almost the exact same category of causing anxiety and making it more difficult for younger generations to form meaningful relationships - just like instagram and facebook.
I think GP is conflating an issue with online dating and the psychology of beauty. Basically, men in online dating on average get very low numbers of matches while women on average get a ton. It's a numbers game, the apps know it, and that's why they have upgrades to buy visibility etc...
It's a genuine problem, in that it is fully exploitative of men, but not related to this imo.
Please reflect on the circumstances in your life that lead you to this belief. In my experience this is a very toxic viewpoint and couldn't be further from the truth.
If anything I'd argue that more than ever both women and men are searching for authenticity in a partner. Something increasingly difficult to come by in our social media fueled world.
Sure, there is a subset on both sides that has been completely sucked in by this culture and measures each others worth by the number of followers on their instagram, but I'd actually view this as a positive. It's really convenient to be able to identify and filter out these vain individuals early on in the dating process.
Keep your head up nodejs_rulez_1, there are still plenty of good women and men out there.
You say this like it's some kind of benefit to the girl in question... IMO seems far more likely to lead to increased harassment and negative outcomes, rather than being a positive.
Also for all of the women I've seen flown out from Alabama, Mississippi, etc to NY, LA & Miami by the more affluent men in my social circles, I haven't seen a single long term relationship develop out of it. The wider net isn't leading to better outcomes.
Does society value beauty? Sure. Do models set "unrealistic expectations"? Sure. Are some high school girls assholes to other girls? Absolutely. But once upon a time kids would go home and those people would be gone. Now it's a 24/7 feedback loop and it's completely unhealthy.