[emteycz]

But does it exacerbate the problem more than other ways of social interaction?

As opposed to a real life social interaction, I can simply hit Unfollow on Facebook (so we stay Friends but I don't see your posts unless I look for them)...

[k_sze]

Maybe social media gives you a much more concentrated feed of things that can trigger your inferiority complex, compared to normal, real-life social interactions?

And if you have to resort to unfollowing, you’re basically agreeing that it’s a problem.

[emteycz]

I don't see how that proves anything specific to social media, I'm "unfollowing" people IRL all the time, it's not like I want to hear everything someone has to say, especially not if it makes me sad.

[k_sze]

> especially not if it makes me sad.

Now I wonder whether you're pulling my leg.

[emteycz]

I just can't see the reason why this is about social media, and not about personal relations in general. Someone makes me sad IRL - I don't listen to them. Someone makes me sad on social media - well I don't listen to them. Where's the difference?

I can understand the scale argument, but I can't see why it's a problem after I've unfollowed the problematic accounts.

At one point in my life, I unfollowed literally every FB friend I had - because I wanted to follow my groups but my friends' posts were too political and this kind of talk had a bad effect on me. I can't see why people just don't do that when social media makes them sad.

[dwringer]

I don't know how much of this is reality, but to me the argument is as follows:

Let's say seeing a certain type of post makes someone sad, and that this causes that person's mind to wander, slowing or stopping their feed-scrolling for a moment now and then when they see such content. This means they're now stopped on the feed at a potentially vulnerable moment. There is now a monetary incentive for the feed curation algorithm to continue doling out the kind of posts that make the user sad, as well as placing targeted advertisements right with them - ideally ones that exploit the negative emotion in some way.

I realize not everyone reacts the same way. Maybe they speed up their scrolling instead. The kinds of behavior that social media feed curation algorithms track and act upon is opaque, and I think that lack of transparency and accountability can easily have unfortunate consequences.