Writes Laurence Steinberg in "Does Instagram Harm Girls? No One Actually Knows" (NYT).
Steinberg is a psychology professor who specializes in adolescent development. Here's his book: “Age of Opportunity: Lessons From the New Science of Adolescence.”
It's ludicrous that there's pressure to legislate when there isn't even any decent research on the subject. We've got some absurd political theater going on right now with the evil corporation, the heroic whistleblower, the secret documents, and the agitation to — quick — do something!
What happened to the idea that we must be scientific about everything? What is it that causes the erstwhile elitists to degrade into the kind of people they'd otherwise call deplorable?
The obvious hypothesis is: Political gain. The real goal isn't to help the kids at all but to increase the power of the Democratic Party. There is a noxious hope of coercing Facebook into controlling the flow of information in a manner that will serve the interests of the Democratic Party.
I don't know that for a fact. Test my hypothesis. But the presumption should be against legislating, especially when the plan is to regulate speech.
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48 comments:
AA: "The real goal isn't to help the kids at all but to increase the power of the Democratic Party."
I believe you have nailed it exactly. And everyone involved in this charade are doing their utmost to hide this fact. I'm of a certain age that I just don't understand the "pull" these platforms have on people -- especially younger people. Get a Life!
We kicked scientific method to the curb years ago and adopted 'consensus science' which boils down to:
Step 1: Five of ten scientists agree
Step 2: Ban five scientists
Step 3: 100% of scientists agree!
Difficult to believe the kids at NYT would publish the words of such a heretic. They probably let it through because they have no idea what he's saying...
Facebook has built an enormous server building down the road, requiring enough power for the electric company to build a couple new substations next to it. That's the guys' point of view on Facebook.
Girls are about feelings and interior thoughts.
At this point, I don’t believe any academic research; even in law reviews. Steinberg could be paid off by FB.
A UNL law prof just published a Marxist article in the MI L. Rev.
We do know that the academy got bribed by the Left in order to create the CAGW scam. Greatest bribe ROI ever after the funding the Wuhan lab.
I'm confused. I thought conservatives also want to regulate Facebook, et. al, albeit for different reasons. So forcing Facebook to publish every crazy conspiracy is good, worrying about teens` body image is bad?
I think it's more about the MSM losing influence to social media. One can make the point that MSM=DNC. Social media seems to be run by woke progressives so this conflict is part of the Democratic civil war that got hot when the DNC stole the nomination from Bernie Sanders.
As I recall teenage girls are brittle all on their own...
The biggest mental health risk to teenage girls is other teenage girls.
Teenage girls might be the worst creatures God created.
"...when the plan is to regulate speech."
They already regulate speech. I don't recall the US Amendment that gave them that power, but apparently it happened sometime in the last 15 years.
"But the presumption should be against legislating, especially when the plan is to regulate speech."
Red pilled?
"What is it that causes the erstwhile elitists to degrade into the kind of people they'd otherwise call deplorable?"
There is no degradation. How insulting. They are humans with the same biased tendencies as everyone else. It's just that their allies in the media give cover for their religion. Then they start to believe their own BS and become delusional. I wonder if people feel embarrassed for being so gullible as to believe it.
Consider how suddenly up to one third of teenage girls claim some form of “gender dysphoria” at the very same time social media “influencers” are promoted and put in front of the same developing girls relentlessly. Every day another beautiful person insists you see their beauty and compare your adolescent self to their perfectly prepared and curated and marketed and targeted “look” delivered to your handheld master device. Tempting. Taunting. You’d expect after two decades of Instagram and Facebook there should exist empirical studies. I mean the old “pornography creates unrealistic expectations” crowd was quite vocal! Did they die off or get paid Zuck bucks to shut up like the old farts in DC?
The lobbyists got to love it though, as well as the pleasure craft industry.
Reminiscent of the (possibly apocryphal) story of a stingy Microsoft in the '90s getting dragged in to face congress for anti-trust BS regarding Internet Explorer.
It's just a funny coincidence this time that his name actually is Mark.
The obvious hypothesis is: Political gain. The real goal isn't to help the kids at all but to increase the power of the Democratic Party.
And!
THE WHOLE BLASTED COUNTRY is agreed; that eliminating civil rights is A Good Thing...
If it will increase the power of the Democrat Party
It's ludicrous that there's pressure to legislate when there isn't even any decent research on the subject.
Well that depends on how you define “the subject” because we have tons of empirical data about how many hours of screen time kids get every day, just like all the warnings about “too much TV” we endured back in the day. There exist many surveys and studies of the effects such connectedness has on developing brains, whether you can connect these huge increases in mental instability that come with seeking approval from strangers directly to this or that app is unclear. It’s a huge ongoing experiment with children as the unwitting subjects of these cruel experiments.
Then school bores them silly with adult political indoctrination interspersed with pedophile grooming (just look at the materials AG Garland’s SIL is “training” schools to use in primary schools), and scaring the bejeebus out of them insisting the planet will boil and the end of the world is nigh.
That whistle blower was more fizz than whizz… ‘
And we do this here like seven dizzles a wizzle
Fa shizzle my nizzle, the big Snoopy D-O-double-jizzle
Back up in the hizzle, Da Boss, N-word.’
Social Media harms ALL who use it.
Teen girls have been critical of themselves and their bodies since the beginning of time. I remember even way back in junior high comparing myself to "cool girls" and thinking how I wanted to look like them. Eating disorders existed way before Instagram and Facebook. It's just a thing that has always been there, and I highly doubt that social media has much to do with it. That is why I always tell my younger female relatives, you are beautiful. Your body is perfect just the way it is. I used to feel the way you do now, but when I look back on photos of myself at your age, when I thought I was fat...well now I am 60 years old and I would love to look that way again. It's probably just a mental disorder common to this age group.
The Washington State legislature banned single-use plastic bags because of the plastic pollution in the ocean. Half of that comes from lost fishing nets, nearly all of the rest comes from Asia, Africa and South America. I've seen pictures of a river flowing through Jarcarta, Indonesia that was just choked with garbage. We have very efficient solid waste systems and almost no solid waste reaches the oceans.
But, the Democrats in the legislature had to virtue signal that they were doing something to clean up the oceans. Even though their efforts would produce a nil result, even though the alternatives to SUPBs require more resources to produce and maintain. Even though those alternatives can spread disease. What matters is that the legislature was on the right side of solid waste.
I'm talking about you, Patty Kuderer, 48th district Senator.
“Imagine being in the worst aspects of junior high school, 24 hours a day, forever.”
--Greg Lukianoff on social media [President and CEO of FIRE, co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind]
On its face, that quote would seem to support harsh restrictions on social media companies, especially in regards to teenage girls where social media permits their bullying to follow them into their bedrooms. However, social media is just another iteration of the more basic problem of teenager socializing. The more fundamental question is, what is to be done to harden the 11 yr olds to the rough and tumble world of middle school politics and society. This is an artificial environment to which most children are constrained by being prevented from doing almost any outside activity, such as work, which offers objective accomplishment. Being in the "in crowd" is less critical when you can occupy your time free from that network doing something you find creative and useful in the adult world.
I'm not an expert on the girl wars of middle school, but it is interesting none of the survivors seem to have solutions to offer those just entering the fray. Although it does appear that mean girl moms pass on advice to their daughters.
Steinberg asks us to remember that Facebook "may benefit more adolescents than it hurts," but that is a ludicrous test. This is not a majority vote. Lotteries hurt more people than they help but states promote them!
Common sense tells us it social media hurts some and helps others, while merely entertaining a lot more for some short period of time.
There, what number improves on that?
The presumption should be against legislating????
Oh, Althouse, you sweet, sweet, summer child!
What made you write that, a wicked sense of humor or lack of coffee?
Anyway, it made me laugh aloud. Thanks.
Prof A: “… It's ludicrous that there's pressure to legislate when there isn't even any decent research on the subject.…”
You mean, like climate change?
You mean, like COVID vaccine mandates?
Yeah, we are always very careful to build new laws on a solid foundation of agreed data and on hypotheses that have survived our best efforts to falsify them. Science!
"The obvious hypothesis is: Political gain. The real goal isn't to help the kids at all but to increase the power of the Democratic Party."
Exactly. But that means the theater is not absurd at all. It has a purpose, and it's working. Target audience: the nice women of America. Until they rebel, Dems will win.
It's ludicrous that there's pressure to legislate when there isn't even any decent research on the subject.
This!!!
Absent a controlled experiment in which people are randomly assigned to either have or not have an experience, we are left with several uncertainties.
We cannot be sure if the experience harmed the person’s mental state (in this case, that Instagram caused teenagers to become depressed); if the person’s poor mental state led to the experience (that depressed teenagers are more likely than others to use Instagram, or to use it more often); or if some other, unmeasured variable (such as family conflict) contributed to both the experience and the mental state, creating the appearance of a direct association between the two factors.... We need much better research than that described in the Facebook documents to sort out these competing accounts.
The lack of an ability to prove the existence of "systemic racism" using a control group hasn't stopped law makers from acting as though it is real.
Cal Newport had a good take on this on his podcast the past couple of weeks. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/deep-questions-with-cal-newport/id1515786216?i=1000536736367. At some point if a lot of users, especially kids, are reporting harm, it’s fair to take them at their word and try to address the harms they’re reporting.
His book Digital Minimalism is very good on the role technology and smart phones should play in a healthier lifestyle.
Field Marshall Freder Frederson: "I'm confused. I thought conservatives also want to regulate Facebook, et. al, albeit for different reasons. So forcing Facebook to publish every crazy conspiracy is good, worrying about teens` body image is bad?"
Its very important for all good leftists/marxists/Maoists/LLR's to begin every conversation completely misrepresenting arguments of the opposition and constructing straw men by the oodles.
Freder can always be counted on doing just that. Thankfully, he is isn't bright enough to execute that strategy effectively.....and I do not discount the possibility that lack of skill stems from plain old stupidity.
Perhaps time will tell.
"The obvious hypothesis is: Political gain. The real goal isn't to help the kids at all but to increase the power of the Democratic Party. There is a noxious hope of coercing Facebook into controlling the flow of information in a manner that will serve the interests of the Democratic Party. "
I think that the abuse of science for political gain by the Democrats is rather self evident. Only certain science is useful for that and all other science that conflicts with that end is called "misinformation" to be censored.
Its why no one at the FDA/CDC is talking about people who've gotten COVID having superior immunity than the vaccinated. Its why no one is allowed to talk about ivermectin or hydroxycloroquin being used in other countries to successfully to treat COVID, but instead push vaccines as the only answer. These are only recent instances.
I thought that limiting the free speech of social media is a non-partisan endeavor. Is is Trump that sued Facebook for exercising its free speech rights.
"I don't know that for a fact. Test my hypothesis. But the presumption should be against legislating, especially when the plan is to regulate speech."
Shorter Althouse: "Should I believe my lying eyes?"
"I'm confused. I thought conservatives also want to regulate Facebook, et. al, albeit for different reasons. So forcing Facebook to publish every crazy conspiracy is good, worrying about teens` body image is bad?"
I am not surprised you are confused, Freder- low IQ will do that to you. What conservatives want is for platforms like Facebook to choose between being a publisher or being an open forum. Facebook has the best of both worlds- it can censor at will and yet not be legally liable for the content its users publish on the platform. Additionally, all the social media platforms coordinate with each other to stifle political dissent from the right- this is the equivalent of all the newsprint paper manufacturers deciding to not sell paper to a conservative paper or magazine.
So, to sum up- I am quite ok for Facebook to censor all conservatives, but they have to give up the blanket protection against getting sued for libel and slander. Additionally, they have to be opened up for anti-trust lawsuits when they coordinate policy with their "competitors".
I know if I had children, boys or girls, they would not be on social media at all to the extent that I could control it. I am sure it would make them pariahs in the eyes of their peers, but I do think the damage from social media is that great. Besides, one needs to learn that being out of the in-crowd isn't a death sentence.
I don't recall the US Amendment that gave them that power, but apparently it happened sometime in the last 15 years.
They are not the government, therefore they are not bound by the 1st amendment. This didn't happen in the last 15 years, but over 200 years ago. Oh, for the good ol' days when the right was celebrating Reagan eliminating the fairness doctrine.
1) this was Facebook's own internal research. It was harmful to them. That is a good reason to give it more credence.
2) It's a classic quant move to announce that without an experimental design (assign some girls to the Instagram group, others absolutely no Instagram? GOOD LUCK WITH THAT) there can be no meaningful findings. I look forward to that highly experimental design subsequently failing replication in 7 years after it's been published and tested.
3) Very clearly both Republicans and Democrats have expressed massive concern about what the whistleblower said and that Facebook needs to be accountable. So give me a break with this conspiracy theory that this is all about Democrats wanting power. Let me give you an alternative conspiracy theory, to explain the huge gap that's opened up between conservatives and republican politicians -- Republicans hate this because of it's toxic effects. Conservatives like it because their reaction driving content does the best of any content on Facebook, and want nothing to change about the platform.
4) there is zero functioning free speech on Facebook. They choose what to elevate, eliminate, suppress, recommend. They ban who they want, when they want, for how long they want. If you're concerned about Facebook as a place for free speech, then regulation is the place to start, not the thing to block.
"They are not the government, therefore they are not bound by the 1st amendment."
One last time- they should be bound by libel and slander laws.
One last time- they should be bound by libel and slander laws.
First off, there are no laws against "libel and slander", those are strictly civil torts. And of course, they are subject to such civil actions.
Its very important for all good leftists/marxists/Maoists/LLR's to begin every conversation completely misrepresenting arguments of the opposition and constructing straw men by the oodles.
Freder can always be counted on doing just that. Thankfully, he is isn't bright enough to execute that strategy effectively.....and I do not discount the possibility that lack of skill stems from plain old stupidity.
So rather than counter my argument, you just throw out insults.
They are not the government, therefore they are not bound by the 1st amendment. This didn't happen in the last 15 years, but over 200 years ago. Oh, for the good ol' days when the right was celebrating Reagan eliminating the fairness doctrine.
No, they are operating under Section 230, which exempts them from liability for anything said on their platforms and says that they are not publishers. That makes their platforms the equivalent of telephones. But, they become publishers when they selectively approve/disapprove content. That violates Section 230 and makes them liable for the content they publish.
Yancy Yard says -- One last time- they should be bound by libel and slander laws.
Care to give an example of a factual claim they published that you believe was objectively false?
AMDG,
Teenage girls might be the worst creatures God created.
Enh, I remember being a teenage girl, and I did no harm to anyone beyond one thoughtless remark to a fellow-player in the UC Symphony at Berkeley. (Mika Hiramatsu, should you be reading this, I honestly didn't realize I had given offense!) I kept to myself, mostly, and to the extent there were girl-cliques at my HS, I was their brunt, not an instigator. College, ditto.
That makes their platforms the equivalent of telephones. But, they become publishers when they selectively approve/disapprove content.
I don't know how eliminating 230 and making them liable for what a third party says on their sites is going to make them less likely to censor. Do you think Althouse would continue to publish comments if she could be held liable for them?
Freder Frederson,
First off, there are no laws against "libel and slander", those are strictly civil torts. And of course, they are subject to such civil actions.
What you mean is that there aren't any criminal laws to be enforced. This doesn't mean that "there are no laws against libel and slander." How could you say that? Any Internet search for "libel law" shows a vast body of law. It's civil, not criminal, but it's law.
I am curious about this view of law you have, in which anything not actually criminalized is therefore legal. I don't recognize it.
Jim,
It is a matter of federal law that no one can sue Facebook, Twitter, Youtube etc. for libel and slander by the users of their platforms. I don't have to find instances where they, themselves have done so, but some are actually trying to sue them- Alex Berenson, for example.
If the NYTimes publishes a third party's letter or op-ed that libels someone, the paper itself, as a publisher, can be sued and found liable. This is what has to happen to Facebook and Twitter (and other social media platforms) if they insist on claiming the right to censor their users. The 230 exception was written in to promote free speech on such platforms, but the social media companies are taking what benefits them from the law while tossing out what benefits their users and society itself. Like I wrote- they can give up that protection against being sued, and I will not criticize them for censoring whoever they like. You don't see me complaining about the NYTimes refusing to publish anyone- I understand that the paper is publisher and free to publish what they want- they get no special advantages in tort law, at least not yet.
Freder, I don't know why I bother with you- you are simply too fucking stupid to understand anything.
I didn't write nor imply that eliminating 230 would make them less likely to censor, you dumb piece of shit. I wrote that eliminating 230 would make it ok with me for them censoring whoever the fuck they want to censor. What isn't acceptable to me is for them to use rights and powers of a publisher while escaping the restrictions of tort law that applies to all other publishers.
Social science researcher here. There is no way on God's Green Earth that any ethical review committee (Institutional Review Board, IRB) would approve a randomized controlled trial on these kinds of harm to children (teenage girls) by social media.
Putting that up as THE STANDARD we have to meet before thinking, hey maybe this isn't a super cool idea to fool around with vulnerable (minors, by definition) people, is not only a profound absurdity but an open door to horrors. Read a bit about Willowbrook.
Freder, it's a tossup as to whether making social-media providers responsible for the content they present makes for freer or more constricted content. But it's obviously a difficulty when (e.g.) Facebook is accused of "spreading disinformation." Either the content is none of FB's business, and therefore they have no responsibility; or else they are responsible, in which case they are on the hook for whatever "their" writers choose to put up there.
Are you angling for the middle position? I mean, the one in which FB provides a platform for all manner of speech, but is responsible for none of that speech? Because, sure, that's super-cool, and yet I have to say that it's The Mother Of All Cop-Outs. I am myself kind of keen on the idea of FB as "common carrier," actually, but that means that it literally is like phone lines or the mail; it has no jurisdiction at all over what passes through its conduits. Are you agreeable to that?
So Facebook tries to shut down the dissemination of conservative political ideas. And the Democrats try to shut down Facebook for not being liberal enough.
Loving it.
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