[___luigi]

It is disappointing to read some comments saying that "It is not FB/Insta's fault?". Those who don't see the challenges that these teens go through is clearly delusional. While there are some good things in the tech, it clearly has a negative side that impact children's mental health through unrealistic beauty standards, and trap them into dopamine loops.

I still believe that ranking/recommendation models should be open, parents/individuals should have -at least- the choice to make these algorithms less harmful.

[___luigi]

> .. I still believe that ranking/recommendation models should be open.

Today, we don't know how social media recommend posts to us, we don't know if it is biased, or good for some sub communities. There are [1] some engineering blogs where we can see that is based on some research ideas (e.g. embeddings) are prune to bias [3] and "rich gets richer" phenomena. There should be an open marketplace where institutes/researchers submit open & explainable ranking/recommender systems. This is how you democratize access to such social platforms, but the business model opposes such idea to make it reality. There is a large body of research in the area of explainable recommendation systems/Explainable AI. There are regulations today to use Explainable AI systems in healthcare field, but few of them in areas that impact our mental health (e.g. the use of Social Media).

[1]: https://ai.facebook.com/blog/powered-by-ai-instagrams-explor...

[2]: Explainable Recommendation: A Survey and New Perspective, https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.11192

[3]: https://aclanthology.org/P19-1162v2.pdf

[JohnWhigham]

I fully agree these social media platforms are problems, but they're simply catalysts that amplify what was already there. Bullying in high school existed before the Internet, and was arguably worse.

[kansface]

> Those who don't see the challenges that these teens go through is clearly delusional.

No one is debating the challenges of coming of age in the age of the Internet. I'd disagree that its entirely FB's fault as if the rest of society, kids and parents alike, lack all agency to make sound choices - that they must passively consume and be consumed by all that FB offers... or that theses sorts of problems are best addressed by literally legislating morality.

Its convenient and easy to hate FB; expedient, really...

[_bfhp]

Young girls lack agency, that's been the general consensus of the human race for a very long time save for the extreme right wing and some relatively new corners of the left. Always good to examine the structural inequality that Instagram magnifies (guardians and the media enforcing beauty standards) but children have zero responsibility in this case.

[reayn]

It's safe to assume that the majority of the people on both this specific post and this website as a whole are not teenagers, thus probably can't understand how the situation is like for us.

[cbtacy]

Yup.