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Remember: someone went out of their way and put effort into programming this.
An entire team.
A study published in a medical journal showed that Facebook (primarily) along with other social media was responsible for the rise in teenage suicide in girls. Let that sink in.
I 100% believe that Facebook and friends are contributing to this trend but it’s important to note that the linked study does not conclude that causation is present:
There is an independent association between problematic use of social media/internet and suicide attempts in young people. However, the direction of causality, if any, remains unclear. Further evaluation through longitudinal studies is needed.
can’t believe a social network started by incels in college to rate girls sexually would do something like this.
Advertising targeted towards minors needs to be banned.
As with basically everything bad in the US, it’s another reminder that Reagan was a human shitstain.
Your classic 80s cartoons were toy commercials. Candy, toys, cereals started being marketed directly to children.
And I genuinely loved all that stuff as a kid, usually liking the ad (e.g., TMNT cartoon) more than the toys (e.g., TMNT action figures).
As your typical Lemmy user who loves Linux and hates advertisements, I sometimes have to remind myself about that when my son is watching today’s dumb kid shows. Teaching him about the systems in play rather than isolating him from it has been working well IMO.
The bonus is that he doesn’t watch full-on advertisements and commercial breaks like we were forced to in the 80s when it was live TV or no TV.
The bonus is that he doesn’t watch full-on advertisements and commercial breaks like we were forced to in the 80s when it was live TV or no TV.
I think the problem for modern youth is that there’s no way to tell what’s an ad anymore. Scrolling through TikTok or any social media will show you tons of advertisements which are not marked as advertisements.
The mainstream internet is driven by advertising. At least when I was a kid we could step out during the commercial breaks.
I think the problem for modern youth is that there’s no way to tell what’s an ad anymore.
Too true. Fortunately my kid is too young for full blown social media, so I have a few more years to keep teaching him.
Advertising
targeted towards minorsneeds to be banned.Advertising itself isn’t a bad thing.
It’s the state of advertising tbh. If ads were still of the “Look, here’s a cool product” variety, or even the “Look, here’s people happily using a cool product” kind then the world would probably be a better place. Even targeting isn’t so bad, when it’s broad like “We want businesses to know about our B2B product.”
The evil in modern advertising is the overly specific targeting, the lying, the psychological tricks, and the way they seem to invade every possible space.
Don’t forget about planned obsolescence, and enshittification. Two built in ways to lie to the person being advertised at.
This I agree with
Psych tricks were there since Bernays “torches of freedom” to sucker women into nicotine addiction like the men.
This is one of those bizarre Lemmy echo chamber things. I’ve never seen this sentiment that advertising is evil and should be stopped at all costs anywhere else but on Lemmy it’s super common. Idk where it comes from. I get that advertising kind of sucks but it just seems like a weird thing to get so passionate about especially considering how many other things are wrong with the world. Sorry you’re getting downvoted to hell, you’re not crazy, Lemmy is.
fake Internet points don’t matter to me my words stand by themselves
This has been a huge public viewpoint for decades. I think it was Banksy who had the quote about if you force me to view your ad by putting it in a public space then it is mine to do with a I please.
Businesses have to survive, but advertising is insidious and invasive. Could it be regulated? Sure.
That famous Bansky quote is older than Lemmy and is posted all over the Internet. There are cities around that ban all advertisements. There are movements for a ban on ads in public spaces in many cities all around the world. That really has nothing to do with Lemmy
I dont think Bill Hicks is on Lemmy.
@markovs_gun @RedditIsDeddit what’s lemmy?
extremely incorrect buzzer sound
They can put up signs inside their business windows. That’s plenty. Everything else is a blight.
It’s not 1950 anymore.
They are making billboards illegal in most places. And it’s a pretty awesome improvement I must say.
Oh they had roadside billboards in 1950. And they were a blight back then. Advertising is a cancer.
Extremism is cancer.
Haha what? I’m not burning billboards and slaughtering CEOs. I’m just sick to death of all these ads. Advertising is a distributed global brainwashing campaign, by the wealthy, against the working class. They don’t hire psychologists to exploit our lizard brains for no reason, and that’s why it needs to be outlawed.
For anyone that is downvoting this. Go ahead and try to run a business without advertising, let me know how that works out for you.
No, it’s… it’s pretty bad.
I know one example of advertising that I liked: the creators of Penny Arcade had only advertisements for computer games that they liked. And they made those ads in the same art style as their own comic.
Advertisements are good when they’re an honest endorsement. Any others are inherently deceptive and often invasive.
Some level of advertising is a necessary evil when you’re in a capitalist system because otherwise people have no way to get their products out ti the market. There’s a balance to be struck.
Hell even in other systems advertising is still important for finding out about cool new things even if money no longer exists
Word of mouth is the most powerful type of advertisement that no one is against.
We all know if every other way of advertising was banned, they’d start paying (or “incentivizing”) millions of people to “do word of mouth” for them.
And then we’ll have those people polluting every online space with unlabeled ads. No thank you.
Like they are already? Iol
If money doesn’t exist how do you pay for the ads?
With poetry, or perhaps a little dance. Dance 🕺
All ads suck, but ads based on user rather than content go too far.
Advertising should be illegal.
Dystopian as fuck
That’s 0% surprising. FB had always been about making girls feel bad. It’s in its sorce code
Facebook started as a Hot or Not website. Fucking creepy.
YouTube also started because the founders wanted to see the Janet Jackson nipple slip. (Which fuck them for that.)
Ya FB is,was and will forever be bad for society and woman especially
I mean,do you really think janet jackson didn’t want people to see?
I mean,do you really think janet jackson didn’t want people to see?
No, I don’t.
It’s interesting how Justin Timberlake had a career after that incident; when was the last time anyone’s heard from Janet Jackson?
I don’t see how this is different from revenge porn.
Wow, this seems like a lifetime ago…
It was 100% planned, come on man open your mind
Ya FB is,was and will forever be bad for society and woman especially
I mean,do you really think jackson didn’t want people to see
Sometimes you can’t help but acknowledge the cleverness of evil.
This kind of shit should not be tolerated.
Why do we as a species hate teenage girls so much?
We don’t hate them, it’s just that capitalism has found them to be an easy and vulnerable target for manipulation.
I agree.
I feel like the powers that b have people working overtime to ensure that most Western women feel like they need to consume to be accepted by their peers.
What’s particularly sad is it’s the exact opposite. That culture of consumption also comes with an aura of exclusivity. Most of these girls are miserable because they’ve been conditioned to consume as much as possible while thinking anyone who consumes less isn’t good enough for them.
It’s really good for putting them to work, not so good for making them or the people around them happy.
It’s mot that we hate teenage girls (and women) so much. It’s just money. Soulless, apathetic money making.
A teenager is in a vulnerable state. Some more than others. But self esteem, self worth, and existentialism are things that a teenager as, at the very least, a brush with.
An emotionally vulnerable person is more open to suggestion. Religion does this a lot. Advertising is no different.
We don’t. You’re just more squeamish about seeing them run over with the cold unfeeling tires of capitalism than other groups.
Capitalism can feed by double the negative emotions on them easily.
Just evil but you’ll never see anyone punished for it.
Teenagers should not be on social media. I rest my case.
Not just teenagers. Facebook and quite a few others should outright be banned. Not only they are scientifically proven to be a mental health catastrophe and a political threat to democracy, it’s also pretty clear now that both these things are part of their design, not bugs or unintended emerging properties.
Facebook actively contributed to the genocide in Myanmar, and did basically nothing about it because they didnt want to hire more moderators that spoke the language, so that they could adequately remove pro-genocidal content
Ok, but the genie is already out of the bottle. Arguing like this is kinda pointless.
I don’t think it will be possible to get them off social media (or the internet in general), so you need to find ways to make it work.
E.g. minors can not be advertised to, no algorithmic content, no doom-scrolling, and heightened data protection. I think teenager should get access to as much as possible to reduce the “risk” of them trying to go around it. “Their” version of social media might even be the superior one in the end.
If the world wasn’t on fire at the moment, people could calmly discuss possible solutions and propose laws in every country to actually protect their children from e.g. the stuff mentioned in the linked article. Sadly, this isn’t going to happen …
The thing is that social media have an oversized influence that makes a calm discussion of possible solutions very hard to have. When the US recognized the implications of letting a foreign power exert so much control over their people, they tried banning TikTok, or breaking it up so their US operation would be under US control.
Facebook should also be split and its EU operation purchased by a European company, that could then spend more time implementing the other changes you mention (doom-scrolling, data protection) and less time lobbying to get all these pesky EU regulations removed.
And yes, it does feel heartbreaking to count the US as a threat to national security, but China has never threatened to annex Greenland with military force, so what would have been paranoia and extreme anti-americanism last year is now the sensible, level-headed thing to do.
Ya!
Important to keep a semi-reasonable option in the major app stores, unless we want Social-Media-Tor dot Mirror or something to become the new hotness
How isn’t it possible? Just don’t give them phones, it’s not that complicated
Ok, when was the last time you saw a working payphone? 2010? It isn’t safe for teens to not have a phone because payphones don’t exist any more.
You can walk into any Walmart in America and buy a cheap smartphone for $30.
This approach is even less effective than “just don’t give them drugs”.
Ok, but you also need a data plan to go along w/ it (or regular visits to top up; is that still a thing?), plus hide it from parents, or you’re going to have a bad time.
Drugs are a different story. You can often get drugs from friends (free to start), can buy them a little at a time, and you don’t need to stash any at home. For a phone to be useful, it needs to be readily accessible, which means you’ll have it with you everywhere.
It’s possible, but it’s going to take a fair amount of work to hide a phone from a parent who’s paying even a little bit of attention.
The real problem here is parents. Parents need to step up and do a better job. Source: am a parent.
Prohibition never works; people will always find other bad — maybe even worse — things to do. The human pressure to have social interactions may lead to creating terrible IRL friendships, ones that can be much more dangerous.
Instead, I would strongly advise for honest, mature conversations about the risks that social media comes along with. This can lead to a highly positive impact, especially if you teach how to observe interactions between people through social media, even if not interacting, yourself.
Prohibition works… temporarily. If you believe your child is not ready for SM, then prohibiting them from it until they are can work.
So yes, have a mature conversation with your kids, set boundaries, etc. That’s something that should happen between a parent and a child, not between a government and a child.
I actually agree with you, especially in the last sentence. Knowing the Cambridge Analytica Scandal, governments are definitely willing to manipulate children through control of information.
Look, maybe it’s true that parents should be doing a better job here. The thing is, that’s an individual solution. This is a systemic problem. How kids (and adults) interact socially and consume media is fundamentally changed over the last thirty years and we’re going to have to find ways to adapt to that as a society.
Yeah, in any particular individual case you can probably come up with a list of things the parent could have done differently. The reality is that this is a problem for tens (hundreds?) of millions of parents.
You can hand wave away any problem that affects children with “parents should do a better job”. It didn’t work for obesity, it didn’t work for child traffic deaths, it didn’t work for fentanyl overdoses, it didn’t work for school shootings, it didn’t work for measles, and it’s not going to work for this either.
I’m just going to copy/paste what I wrote in a previous comment in a similar thread:
Everybody is so quick to blame the parents in these situations. Maybe there is some truth to that, but people also need to reckon with the fact that kids (and adults) are being constantly inundated by Skinner box apps, and “platforms” full of engagement bait designed to be as addictive and attractive as possible. All run by corporations with functionally no regard for the safety of their users.
Yeah, sure, if you’re giving advice to an individual parent, they should probably be keeping a closer eye on what their kids are doing.
But there are systemic problems here that can’t be fixed with individual action. By laying the blame solely at the feet of the parents here, you are in effect putting individual parents up against dozens of huge corporations, each with armies of expert advertisers, designers, and psychologists working to build these products. It’s hardly a fair fight.
You don’t need a data plan if you can access wifi. There is public wifi and I don’t think most parents even know how to check the devices using their home wifi.
It’s not hard, and parents can easily change the WiFi password if they don’t know how to check the leases if they suspect something is up.
I’m very much in the camp of no filters and building a relationship on trust, but occasionally verifying if that trust is misplaced.
I’m a GenX that works with IT. I can tell you that none of my coworkers that are the same generation would know how to do any of that.
I agree that parents should be more involved with their children, but when do we hold a company responsible for the harm it causes?
I wish I could ban old people from it as well because when their mental processing ability declines, so does their ability to detect bullshit news from bots
They shouldn’t, but also PSA to any parents but modern parenting advice typically is to let your kids use social media if they choose, and guide them through the social and emotional difficulties with good communication. Don’t blanket ban it because they’ll just use it anyways without guidance, and be unprepared the moment they turn 18.
It’s a case of: 99.9% of kids are smoking cigarettes so yours will too. Better to show them how to use a weekly cigar without inhaling, than just ban it which won’t work.
Humans should not be on social media.
Fixed.
No one should
That’s sounds like blaming teens for the actions of the adults behind Facebook.
That’s a fallacy. Teenagers are the victims here. So I’m obviously blaming greedy corporations, lack of good parenting and proper regulation from authorities.
So teens should be allowed to go anywhere adults make it dangerous because it’s the adults’ faults? I hope you don’t have kids.
You will all make fine parents if you choose. Just slapping in some positivity and love here lol.
I hearby petition an amendment for an expansion of the child protective laws to widen the definition of abuse, neglect, and reckless abandonment of children to include:
“letting children browse without ad blockers”
TIL teen girls still used Facebook.
Instagram too according to the article.
I get Instagram (lots of creative types there), Facebook is a bit surprising though.
Instagram is considered for old folks now???
Where were you for the last decade? I’d think tiktok is starting to wind down by now, but me and my shaking stick wouldn’t know that.
Not on Instagram and not keeping up with what preteens do, that’s for sure.
Just visited a university. Tour guide said they used Instagram, discord, slack in that order.
Facebook… now even more toxic than previously known!
Gross
Happy I got AdNauseam after uBlock Origin. Deleted my facebook a year ago, shit is an AI slopfest built upon the greed and manipulation of every part of the chain. Defcon 31 has a good talk that brings this up. “Disenshittify or die” by Cory Doctrow, cann recommend to watch.
I support the use of AdNauseam. Not sure if there are any more extreme alternatives, I now choose to be actively hostile towards advertising/tracking rather than just passively blocking it.
My dad has been talking about wanting something like AdNauseam for years, i was very happy when i found it. The extra mile would probably be to expand it with a VPN and constantly spam clicks, clear cache, switch IP and obfuscate data. Now we just wait for someone with enough time to build it…
I stopped using mainstream social media in 2019 but my accounts are still active so I can snoop on random people I went to college with and holy shit every time I get on Facebook it’s so much worse on ways I don’t even understand. Most recently I got on to look at something and my feed was completely unrecognizable because it was all AI generated slop from pages I have never heard of and not any updates from people I know. It’s crazy what people will accept if it’s done slowly enough I guess. I legitimately don’t understand why anyone would use Facebook as it exists today. At least when I quit I could at least understand why people used it.
The more time you spend glued to your screen the less you notice slow changes. I assume this is part of why user retention is so important…
What’s AdNauseam?
An extension of uBlock Origin. It does the same thing but also clicks on every ad before it removes it.
lol, Jesus. It is like what a screen writer would come up with for a movie that contained a terrible company run by terrible people doing stuff so outlandishly terrible everyone watching would think “the absurdity of the terrible is how you know it is made up”.
