pirate wires #54 // instagram's suicide farm, media distortion, and navigating three weeks of facebook hysteria

[Picheshwar]

@dasari4kntr

 

Brace yourself, the sky is falling. A few weeks back the Wall Street Journal published a series of stories on Facebook sourced by “internal documents” (easily accessible PowerPoint slides) obtained from a “whistleblower” (who revealed no illicit activity). Welcome to the Facebook Files, the most explosive story since Watergate, in which we discover such incredible scandals as influencers on the platform are treated differently than the average person, Facebook is having a hard time facilitating healthy conversations between strangers on the internet who disagree about politics, and Sheryl Sandberg’s massive team is not growing as quickly as a few smaller teams at the company. But one story really captured the hearts and minds of America: Instagram is making your teenage daughter want to kill herself, Facebook’s own research team discovered this fact, and Mark Zuckerberg buried the damning evidence. It’s Big Tobacco the Sequel — a bombshell — and an out of control industry is about to bring this horrifying new technology to small children.

Countless takes were published from every media institution covering tech, generating not only widespread condemnation, but a Senate hearing. According to the New York Times, in a breathless, triple-bylined piece, Facebook is now in total disarray, as evidenced by the fact that a handful of employees at the 60,000-person company were angry in a group chat. Further stories were teased, with new, damning information from the “whistleblower” to be revealed!, including smoking gun evidence of what tech journalists have known all along: Zuckerberg did the Capitol Riot. Facebook is a hostile foreign power wrote one Atlantic writer in the middle of the hellstorm, should we treat them like one? Yes, she said of treatment conceived of generally as including actual murder, absolutely. A weary journalist from the original bombshell series appeared on Meet the Press looking like a war reporter in a dispatch from Kabul. This was his Afghanistan.

I’m not sure if it was the zenith of media hysterics — one can only hope — but the story peaked last night on 60 Minutes when the “whistleblower” revealed her identity. She also rolled out her new career as a talking head, with an eerily-professional marketing push including a new Twitter account, website, and newsletter. She told us absolutely nothing we didn’t already know, then shared opinions the press already holds. Zuckerberg didn’t do enough to stop the riot on January 6th. Okay. January 6th was an insurrection. Interesting. Anger is engagement, and social media companies are therefore incentivized, just as is the press, to polarizing content. Great, we’ve been discussing this obvious, problematic fact for years, including the years before the internet existed. What exactly are we whistleblowing here? Where is the damning evidence that Zuckerberg is himself purposely polarizing the country, rather than struggling to navigate the complexities of the human condition, at odds as our impulses chronically and fundamentally seem to be with our own welfare, in an ongoing psycho press environment?

This morning, my inbox was flooded with background on our newly-minted media celebrity, but I’m not interested in critiquing this person. The topic at hand, as distorted by the press as it’s been, is actually important. This is where we need to focus, and as Facebook’s epidemic of young female suicides has become the central thread of this story, that is where we’ll start.

Here’s what we know: Facebook researchers surveyed a group of young people, a minority of whom explained Instagram made them feel worse about themselves. This feeling was specifically — and importantly — attributed to self-comparison with their peers.

From the opening paragraph of the initial Journal piece:

“Thirty-two percent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse,” the researchers said in a March 2020 slide presentation posted to Facebook’s internal message board, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

Here, we might be talking about a teenager from any decade over the last fifty years. Just replace Instagram with “Teen Vogue.” The only difference is social media’s introduction of our peers into our media diet alongside our trashy magazine content, a trend that has persisted for something like two decades online. It’s also a trend worth talking about. A fake window into the perfect life of a good friend intuitively seems unhealthy. But in the first place this dynamic isn’t limited to Instagram, it’s pervasive across the internet. In the second, this dynamic isn’t limited to teenagers. We’re also not really having a nuanced conversation about the human condition here, are we?

Both in reporting, via sneaky quotes from “experts” conflating feelings and a causal link between Instagram and suicide, and in the Senate hearing, which we’ll get to in a moment, we’re being told that Instagram is causing kids to kill themselves. But where is the data supporting this notion? All the research seems to indicate is self-comparison to our peers is depressing as , particularly for people who are already depressed. Instagram is simply one way we engage in this very ancient behavior.  

In focus groups, Instagram employees heard directly from teens who were struggling. “I felt like I had to fight to be considered pretty or even visible,” one teen said of her experience on Instagram.

Isolation, alienation, a struggle with identity. This is an entire genre of 1980s coming-of-age movies. Back in the 90s, I watched a lot of Buffy. In one episode, a teenage girl felt so unseen she literally turned invisible. She then became an assassin for the CIA, but we’re getting a little off topic.

According to the research, among teens experiencing suicidal ideation 6 percent of Americans cited Instagram as the first place they considered self-harm. Again, the catalyzing dynamic here is not causally linked to social media. The only thing we know for sure is young people are reacting negatively to our extremely toxic modern culture, as young people have reacted for decades. But now we mostly experience our extremely toxic modern culture through our phones. 

Problematically, we’re also still just talking about self-reported feelings, with no data in our teen suicide conversation concerning actual teen suicides — a presumably difficult piece of information for journalists to work into their “girls are being killed by Zuckerberg” narrative on account of, among many things, teenage boys commit suicide something like four times more often than teenage girls. As teenage boys don’t ascribe their negative feelings to Instagram as often as girls, the introduction of this information into the hysterical Facebook narrative would unfortunately force us to question what is actually driving young people to kill themselves. As the only reason we’re even talking about this legitimately important topic is it presents an opportunity to destroy Facebook, an honest conversation on the matter is of course impossible. But now you’ve got me wondering. 

Provided the feelings of 6 percent of suicidal American teens is so alarming as it has triggered a Senate hearing, is it not worth talking about — oh, I don’t know — the other 94 percent?

Among teenagers in a state of mental crisis, how many are struggling with their family? How many are struggling with their friend group, or their crush? How many are struggling in a classroom? To the question of “does high school make you want to kill yourself,” how many suicidal teenagers would answer “yes” — emphatically? Almost all of them? Next question, when are dragging the Secretary of Education in front of Congress to explain why he hasn’t solved depression?  

Speaking of Congress — 

Ma’am, it’s a simple question: how many children have you killed today? Last week, after the “bombshell” report, a Facebook executive was dragged before a handful of Senators for ritual sacrifice. Antigone Davis, Facebook’s Head of Global Safety, was for the most part questioned on two topics: first, Instagram’s now much discussed and completely invented practice of suicide farming, and second — more significant in the hearing than it was throughout much of the preceding media coverage — an in-the-works, now apparently “paused” Facebook product for children. For two hours, the “gripping, powerful evidence” (that is not) presented by the “whistleblower” (who is not) was invoked, and the conclusions of Facebook’s research team were grossly mischaracterized.

You can watch the full thing here:

https://www.piratewires.com/p/bombshell

[dasari4kntr]

7 hours ago, Picheshwar said:

@dasari4kntr

 

Brace yourself, the sky is falling. A few weeks back the Wall Street Journal published a series of stories on Facebook sourced by “internal documents” (easily accessible PowerPoint slides) obtained from a “whistleblower” (who revealed no illicit activity). Welcome to the Facebook Files, the most explosive story since Watergate, in which we discover such incredible scandals as influencers on the platform are treated differently than the average person, Facebook is having a hard time facilitating healthy conversations between strangers on the internet who disagree about politics, and Sheryl Sandberg’s massive team is not growing as quickly as a few smaller teams at the company. But one story really captured the hearts and minds of America: Instagram is making your teenage daughter want to kill herself, Facebook’s own research team discovered this fact, and Mark Zuckerberg buried the damning evidence. It’s Big Tobacco the Sequel — a bombshell — and an out of control industry is about to bring this horrifying new technology to small children.

Countless takes were published from every media institution covering tech, generating not only widespread condemnation, but a Senate hearing. According to the New York Times, in a breathless, triple-bylined piece, Facebook is now in total disarray, as evidenced by the fact that a handful of employees at the 60,000-person company were angry in a group chat. Further stories were teased, with new, damning information from the “whistleblower” to be revealed!, including smoking gun evidence of what tech journalists have known all along: Zuckerberg did the Capitol Riot. Facebook is a hostile foreign power wrote one Atlantic writer in the middle of the hellstorm, should we treat them like one? Yes, she said of treatment conceived of generally as including actual murder, absolutely. A weary journalist from the original bombshell series appeared on Meet the Press looking like a war reporter in a dispatch from Kabul. This was his Afghanistan.

I’m not sure if it was the zenith of media hysterics — one can only hope — but the story peaked last night on 60 Minutes when the “whistleblower” revealed her identity. She also rolled out her new career as a talking head, with an eerily-professional marketing push including a new Twitter account, website, and newsletter. She told us absolutely nothing we didn’t already know, then shared opinions the press already holds. Zuckerberg didn’t do enough to stop the riot on January 6th. Okay. January 6th was an insurrection. Interesting. Anger is engagement, and social media companies are therefore incentivized, just as is the press, to polarizing content. Great, we’ve been discussing this obvious, problematic fact for years, including the years before the internet existed. What exactly are we whistleblowing here? Where is the damning evidence that Zuckerberg is himself purposely polarizing the country, rather than struggling to navigate the complexities of the human condition, at odds as our impulses chronically and fundamentally seem to be with our own welfare, in an ongoing psycho press environment?

This morning, my inbox was flooded with background on our newly-minted media celebrity, but I’m not interested in critiquing this person. The topic at hand, as distorted by the press as it’s been, is actually important. This is where we need to focus, and as Facebook’s epidemic of young female suicides has become the central thread of this story, that is where we’ll start.

Here’s what we know: Facebook researchers surveyed a group of young people, a minority of whom explained Instagram made them feel worse about themselves. This feeling was specifically — and importantly — attributed to self-comparison with their peers.

From the opening paragraph of the initial Journal piece:

“Thirty-two percent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse,” the researchers said in a March 2020 slide presentation posted to Facebook’s internal message board, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

Here, we might be talking about a teenager from any decade over the last fifty years. Just replace Instagram with “Teen Vogue.” The only difference is social media’s introduction of our peers into our media diet alongside our trashy magazine content, a trend that has persisted for something like two decades online. It’s also a trend worth talking about. A fake window into the perfect life of a good friend intuitively seems unhealthy. But in the first place this dynamic isn’t limited to Instagram, it’s pervasive across the internet. In the second, this dynamic isn’t limited to teenagers. We’re also not really having a nuanced conversation about the human condition here, are we?

Both in reporting, via sneaky quotes from “experts” conflating feelings and a causal link between Instagram and suicide, and in the Senate hearing, which we’ll get to in a moment, we’re being told that Instagram is causing kids to kill themselves. But where is the data supporting this notion? All the research seems to indicate is self-comparison to our peers is depressing as , particularly for people who are already depressed. Instagram is simply one way we engage in this very ancient behavior.  

In focus groups, Instagram employees heard directly from teens who were struggling. “I felt like I had to fight to be considered pretty or even visible,” one teen said of her experience on Instagram.

Isolation, alienation, a struggle with identity. This is an entire genre of 1980s coming-of-age movies. Back in the 90s, I watched a lot of Buffy. In one episode, a teenage girl felt so unseen she literally turned invisible. She then became an assassin for the CIA, but we’re getting a little off topic.

According to the research, among teens experiencing suicidal ideation 6 percent of Americans cited Instagram as the first place they considered self-harm. Again, the catalyzing dynamic here is not causally linked to social media. The only thing we know for sure is young people are reacting negatively to our extremely toxic modern culture, as young people have reacted for decades. But now we mostly experience our extremely toxic modern culture through our phones. 

Problematically, we’re also still just talking about self-reported feelings, with no data in our teen suicide conversation concerning actual teen suicides — a presumably difficult piece of information for journalists to work into their “girls are being killed by Zuckerberg” narrative on account of, among many things, teenage boys commit suicide something like four times more often than teenage girls. As teenage boys don’t ascribe their negative feelings to Instagram as often as girls, the introduction of this information into the hysterical Facebook narrative would unfortunately force us to question what is actually driving young people to kill themselves. As the only reason we’re even talking about this legitimately important topic is it presents an opportunity to destroy Facebook, an honest conversation on the matter is of course impossible. But now you’ve got me wondering. 

Provided the feelings of 6 percent of suicidal American teens is so alarming as it has triggered a Senate hearing, is it not worth talking about — oh, I don’t know — the other 94 percent?

Among teenagers in a state of mental crisis, how many are struggling with their family? How many are struggling with their friend group, or their crush? How many are struggling in a classroom? To the question of “does high school make you want to kill yourself,” how many suicidal teenagers would answer “yes” — emphatically? Almost all of them? Next question, when are dragging the Secretary of Education in front of Congress to explain why he hasn’t solved depression?  

Speaking of Congress — 

Ma’am, it’s a simple question: how many children have you killed today? Last week, after the “bombshell” report, a Facebook executive was dragged before a handful of Senators for ritual sacrifice. Antigone Davis, Facebook’s Head of Global Safety, was for the most part questioned on two topics: first, Instagram’s now much discussed and completely invented practice of suicide farming, and second — more significant in the hearing than it was throughout much of the preceding media coverage — an in-the-works, now apparently “paused” Facebook product for children. For two hours, the “gripping, powerful evidence” (that is not) presented by the “whistleblower” (who is not) was invoked, and the conclusions of Facebook’s research team were grossly mischaracterized.

You can watch the full thing here:

https://www.piratewires.com/p/bombshell

one thing for sure...

mental health for teenagers is big thing....

these social media tech companies are playing with it....

not only FB, IG…etc, youtube also playing major role with kids & teenager mental health...

its going to be big challenge for modern parents..to protect their kids from this mental health related issues by big tech companies algorithms....

[no01]

emi peekaleru....worst lo worst, repu Senate/Congress mem's tho malli kurchi lo kurchopetti questions adugutharu Zuckerberg ni...veedu well prepared answers isthadu..last ki new s/w update lo konni privacy policy related changes implement chestharu...which may have very little fixes to the above prob...but overall ga today its fb/insta etc and we have tiktok from another firm....repu coming yrs lo we keep on seeing new social media apps with new content...its virus..new variants laaga eppatiki eradicate avvadu and we humans already accepted saha jeevanam with these apps.

[dasari4kntr]

 

[Picheshwar]

2 hours ago, dasari4kntr said:

one thing for sure...

mental health for teenagers is big thing....

these social media tech companies are playing with it....

not only FB, IG…etc, youtube also playing major role with kids & teenager mental health...

its going to be big challenge for modern parents..to protect their kids from this mental health related issues by big tech companies algorithms....

Modern day slavery