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this post was submitted on 05 May 2025
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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.
Sometimes you can't help but acknowledge the cleverness of evil.
At some point we need to start criminalizing shit like this and actually holding people accountable.
💯 Big tech companies think they’re above the law.
Thus far, they’d basically be right. Any fines are simply chocked up to “cost of doing business” expenses and since no one wants to either make solid laws against this stuff OR hold them accountable for current ones, they’ll just keep at it.
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It’s so much bigger than this. It starts young. iPad kids. Strict gender roles. Sexualization of children. Learning from parents who have been conditioned by capitalism, sexism and more. We got little girls that want skincare products and teens talking about plastic surgery. It’s bad.
Agreed though. Punish people for ruining society. I think I read a while ago that France had required social media posts to flag when images have been altered. We need more laws like this too.
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Dystopian as fuck
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.
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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.
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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.
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That's 0% surprising. FB had always been about making girls feel bad. It's in its sorce code
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This kind of shit should not be tolerated.
Just evil but you’ll never see anyone punished for it.
Gross
TIL teen girls still used Facebook.
Zuckerberg’s $330 million mega yacht may be tracked here: https://www.vesselfinder.com/vessels/details/9857511
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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.
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Facebook... now even more toxic than previously known!
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.
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Wonder how much of a bonus the sick fuck who pitched that got for the idea?
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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".
Who the fuck comes up with this stuff?
The most generous assumption is that they use statistics to determine correlations like this (e.g., deleted selfies resulted in a high CTR for beauty ads so they made that a part of their algo). The least generous interpretation is exactly what you're thinking: an asshole came up with it because it's logical and effective.
Either way, ethics needs to be a bigger part of the programmers education. And we, as a society, need to make algorithms more transparent (at least social media algorithms). Reddit's trending algorithm used to be open source during the good ole days.
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Let's not pretend that we don't have this type of thing happen to us. Maybe not beauty products but any time I slip outside of my ad blockers I'm made accurately aware that they're always listening. It's not a coincidence the ads you see, the TikToks, and the Facebook ads. It's just used for adds right now but it should scare the shit out of people.
Goddam I had to read that headline 3 times before I understood the implication!
That is outright disgusting, and such practices ought to be outlawed.
Or as Trump would say, very cool and very legal way to make money.
This type of advertising isn’t new. There is that famous (although the claims from the father have been questioned) New York Times article written by Charles Duhigg in 2012. A father of a teenage girl in Minnesota got upset for receiving coupons from Target for infant care related products. As the story goes, he later learned his daughter was in fact pregnant. It turns out Target was using some predictive algorithm to identify would-be mothers and straight up sending them coupons for infant care products. It seems ever since this article was published that they stopped doing this in such a direct manner. Again, there have people who questioned the validity of the claims for this specific story, but Target did confirm they were doing this.
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Be aware that the companies would have paid Facebook handsomely to identify users in this way. The world we live in has a sickness with greed for money at its heart.
That's some cartoon villain level shit jfc
If any of the big companies were turned into a human, they would all be Epstein
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