Mark Zuckerberg personally rejected Meta’s proposals to improve teen mental health, court documents allege::Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has personally and repeatedly thwarted initiatives meant to improve the well-being of teens on Facebook and Instagram, at times directly overruling some of his most senior lieutenants, according to internal communications made public as part of an ongoing lawsuit against the company.
So basically, he wants kids to be mentally unstable so they keep coming back.
Considering how their service majorly depends on being mentally unstable…
This dude started with an online ‘Hot or Ugly’ site at his college. Online toxicity is his bread and butter; always has been; always will be.
Ditched all Meta services years ago. My life instantly improved.
Never looked back.
Yep. The more I reduce using Instagram, the more I feel better mentally. Instagram has become a rat race for people to show who has a better life.
Haven’t been on social media for years now. I feel so much better now, focusing on enjoying my life instead of convincing everyone I’m enjoying my life. Small but big difference.
I’m also a big digital privacy nut and I can’t begin to fathom just broadcasting all my shit to the entire internet… Particularly through a company that is actively analyzing and monetizing it
for people to show who has a better life
And a large portion of that ‘good life’ is a complete fabrication. So it becomes a rat race to see who can fake it better.
Meh. Other than shutting it down I don’t think there’s much Meta could do to help teens. The entire model of posting up your fake life online for everyone to see is bad, with or without beauty filters or notifications. Sounds like he objected to some empty initiatives that were more about PR than actually helping anyone.
You could change the experience in significant way by adjusting the algorithm of suggested posts.
How would you adjust it? The whole concept of ‘social networks’ is just posting your life for everyone to view and expecting some validation/confirmation. I don’t think algorithm can change that. There’s plenty of other platforms/tools already where you can… you know, do other things like read news, post comments anonymously, play games and stuff. People who post selfies on instagram specifically want to be judged by other people. I don’t think there’s a healthy way to do it.
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Worked fine in what sense? Teen weren’t getting getting depressed from watching perfect, fake lives posted by influencers? They weren’t bullied? I doubt it. I mean, you’re right, you can make social networks less toxic but in the end the entire concept is just silly, useless and harmful. The only way to win is not to play.
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I’m definitely old enough to remember it, I just never used it. But maybe you’re right. I remember the early youtube, before google took it over and yeah, it was very different. I’m just not sure if it turned in what it is today because evil corporations monetized it or because people are just stupid assholes. Probably little bit of column A, a little bit of column B.
Mostly column A imo
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Easiest way to make it less toxic, is to make it just chronological - that’s just the most basic example.
A downvote button. Companies dread the downvote button!
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I wonder if any of these billionaires secretly harbours the desire to subjugate humanity.
I wonder if any of them don’t.
The reason they behave such a way is to reach the tres comas level you have to go through lot of shitty greedy people and most of human beings are greedy af. So now when they finally made it and they know nobody can touch them, they do stuff like this.
They say power corrupts, but not really. Power liberates. By removing consequences of out actions it allows us to be our truest selves without compromise.
After I defacebooked my phone years ago, the desktop site wanted my phone number to affirm my identity. Noped out right then and there. Haven’t missed FB in the slightest.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has personally and repeatedly thwarted initiatives meant to improve the well-being of teens on Facebook and Instagram, at times directly overruling some of his most senior lieutenants, according to internal communications made public as part of an ongoing lawsuit against the company.
Zuckerberg vetoed a 2019 proposal that would have disabled Instagram’s so-called “beauty filters,” a technology that digitally alters a user’s on-screen appearance and allegedly harms teens’ mental health by promoting unrealistic body image expectations, according to the unredacted version of the complaint filed this week by Massachusetts officials.
Despite Zuckerberg’s conclusion, the proposal had enjoyed broad support, the lawsuit said, including from Mosseri; Instagram’s policy chief, Karina Newton; the head of Facebook, Fidji Simo, and Meta’s vice president of product design, Margaret Gould Stewart.
A year after the beauty filter decision, in August 2021, Clegg pressed Zuckerberg to make “additional investment to strengthen our position on wellbeing across the company,” citing a staff recommendation to address issues of addiction, self-harm and bullying, according to the complaint.
Zuckerberg’s rejection of opportunities to invest more heavily in well-being are reflective of his data-centric approach to management, said Arturo Bejar, the former Facebook engineering director and whistleblower who leveled his own allegations last week that Instagram has repeatedly ignored internal warnings about the app’s potential harms to teens.
A 2020 internal presentation discussed in the complaint described how Instagram meets teenagers’ desire for “novelty seeking” with “a dopamine hit” through intermittent notifications about comments, follows and other bids for attention that can convey a sense of “approval and acceptance [that] are huge rewards for teens.”
The original article contains 1,294 words, the summary contains 268 words. Saved 79%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Teen mental health does not earn him money. People who are glued to Facebook like crazy do.
What a disgusting pos
he only gives a fuck about profits. improving teenagers well-being is against his rules as this only wastes his money. it’s capitalism mates.
When I was a teenager (before smartphones were widespread although they were just arriving), I was the weird nerdy kid because I spent a lot of time online and many of my social contacts were online.
Today, everyone, especially teenagers, uses the Internet a lot. I feel weird because I don’t use many of those things like Instagram and TikTok and Snapchat. I don’t even know anymore where to meet new people on the Internet; on forums people tended to gradually get to know the other people, but on reddit and lemmy people somehow don’t tend to recognize usernames.
I also was a teen as smartphones came into the mainstream.
I think that Facebook groups have largely taken the place of forums for online community with familiar users. On Lemmy and Reddit I feel the smaller subs tend to have more of the user recognition factor. On forums there are also the signatures and fairly prominent user panels next to posts that make a user stand out and be remembered. On Lemmy and Reddit there is only the username and it is not meaningfully different that the rest of a post header. I like that the user is less notable than the content they provide; it always was silly how a forum user would have a giant sig with all sorts of colors and animations closing out a single sentence post.
He doesn’t want to just go down alone. He must’ve been there himself (and probably still there), otherwise he would have some sympathy for others, especially kids. Fuck this dude!
I also thought they had figured out that anger and discord in FB brought people back more than pictures of kids, families, and community goodwill. This is the drug they push, hate their neighbors, and cling on to anger and hate, they come back for that.
