[BrainVirus]

>They will tell you that Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are pretty important to them.

Drugs are important to drug addicts. That's not a reason to praise the dealers for their business acumen.

Facebook and Instagram are exploitative as fuck.

[Spivak]

IG is a photo sharing site with ads interspersed and WA is E2E texting. We gotta tone down the rhetoric here.

They’ve gotta be two of the least toxic social media sites compared to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube — any why: because the format is cancer to news.

Social media itself is great — Snapchat, IG, BeReal, Radite, Discord as long as they are successfully able keep them from becoming political megaphones. TikTok has come the closest to being a general purpose broadcast social network that hasn’t been corrupted but long term I’m sure it’ll get poisoned too.

[kolbe]

Facebook and Instagram have the same ad tech behind it, and that's the most poisonous part.

[WillDaSilva]

To add to this, it's poisonous because it makes increasing "engagement" a primary goal for these platforms.

[kolbe]

Those work together. But I find the most insidious aspect of these platforms is how it allows companies to exploit our vulnerability to unhealthy behavior. Even if you grant that Instagram's content isn't toxic (which it is, but just hypothetically), the ads are terrible. I, for example, don't drink. I was never an alcoholic per se, but I had an unhealthy relationship with alcohol, and in many ways I miss it. Instagram shows me ads all the time trying to convince me how fun it is to drink, and why so-and-so drink is delicious and amazing. Now extend this to shopping additions, misinformation campaigns, et cetera.