Mark Zuckerberg personally rejected Meta’s proposals to improve teen mental health, court documents allege
(www.cnn.com)
from L4s@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world on 09 Nov 2023 02:00
https://lemmy.world/post/7994678
from L4s@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world on 09 Nov 2023 02:00
https://lemmy.world/post/7994678
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.
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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.”
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Think about this anytime this asshole appears on Lex Fridman trying to launder his image.
I don’t know much about Lex Friedman or how he became so popular but I watched a few parts with him gushing over Musk and it annoyed me to no end. It was hard for me to watch other parts with that in my mind.
You mean their meme review episode? I stopped taking him seriously after that. It’s so bad it has it’s own cringe value.
What a disgusting pos
So basically, he wants kids to be mentally unstable so they keep coming back.
Considering how their service majorly depends on being mentally unstable…
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I once watched IG Reels for about 10 min. It feels just like I’m some kind of test subject, evaluated based on my reaction and fed triggers that would get the best test result. How is it “social” when you have nearly 0 control over what you get?
It is very concerning. It feels no different to a slot machine. I try my best to not sound like a douche christian mom shitting on MTV but something needs to be done.
Its not any different than a slot machine. But no gambling allowed for under-aged folks. Only a social “tool” weaponizing peer pressure and all the worst parts of Western individualiam/alienation is good enough for our children
The site was always built on “The Skinner Box” model, where you get those sweet sweet dopamine hits. Even back in 2010-2011 it was like that, my girlfriend was literally addicted to checking Facebook. She couldn’t go more than about 5-10 minutes without checking her wall/feed.
I had an account back when I started to open up in 2005-2006 and it’s a completely different beast now. At least back then it was about social interaction with people at your university and not a virtual drug machine.
Sad when you think about the fact that he himself has a daughter probably around 9 years old now.
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!
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.
Who is really supprised? He is an asshole and we’ve known yhis forever. If it weren’t for friends and family I would have left Facebook years ago. Unfortunately it’s a really good wsy to stay in touch with people and that’s the only reason I still ut it…
I only signed into Facebook again for the first time in years. I moved to a new city and couldn’t find any singles groups/social groups on MeetUp or the like. The one I found is on both Instagram and Facebook so I was forced back into the cesspool. My feed on Facebook is filled with “sponsored posts” and “people I might like”, GTFO of here with that bullshit. It was bad before, but I honestly don’t see how people in “first world nations” that don’t need it for commerce and general communication still use it.
It’s become so much worse… I really hate it. Funny thing. It actually tried to make me watch republican bs. It showed me some really extreme far right shit and I was like… OK where do you think I am politically…? It sucks because people that are not aware might actually fall for that crap.
I think we really gotta stop lying to ourselves when we say “it’s a good way to stay in touch with people”. It’s a way to stay in touch, but most of the shit you see on Facebook these days have little to nothing to do with the people you actually care about.
There are much better ways to stay in touch with others. For example, friend or family discord communities is a far superior way when compared to any Meta platform.
I get your point but this one I’ve got to disagree on. You need to get your friends and family to use that, and that’s not going to happen lol
Not with that attitude.
Remember when you had to get your friends and family to use Facebook? I do. Most (may be all) social media platforms are opt in. People are not born with a Facebook account.
This is not a reason, but rather a means to absolve yourself from engaging with a platform you know is toxic.
My brother has ASD. He has decided Facebook is how he wants to communicate. I don’t want to lose what little connection I have with my brother.
When someone has ASD and is set on something, getting them to change is not a matter of your attitude.
Seriously, fuck this guy.
I haven’t shared anything on Facebook in over 5 years, but I definitely shared this.
And no one saw it because your contacts had their feed filled with sponsored ragebait content
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
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.
I wonder if any of these billionaires secretly harbours the desire to subjugate humanity.
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.
I wonder if any of them don’t.
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.
Easiest way to make it less toxic, is to make it just chronological - that’s just the most basic example.
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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.
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I know about it but I don’t think a program aimed at teenagers would stop Myanmar genocide…
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What? The post says ‘thwarted initiatives meant to improve the well-being of teens’. You’re jumping out with Myanmar and I’m the one moving goalposts? Delusional much?
Mostly column A imo
A downvote button. Companies dread the downvote button!
I remember when I worked in tech years ago, about the time Facebook was formed, it was common to avoid things like this because they only become lose/lose for the company. Once you engage in a program to help people’s mental health or really anything vague and not part of your core business, you’re tying an anchor to yourself.
People start writing articles about your failings and petitioning changes, etc. Everyone becomes a critic of your methods, and then it becomes possible for every blogger to come up with a story of someone experiencing a mental health crisis using your product to blame you for whatever happens to them. Eventually, this thing you were convinced to implement out of a sense of communal good becomes the pitard you’re hoisted upon.
Better to just say “Not my business” and let people tut about your unwillingness to help for a news cycle than spend hundreds of thousands just to get bad press everytime the program fails or someone feels like writing a different critique for how they would manage the program.
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.
Teen mental health does not earn him money. People who are glued to Facebook like crazy do.
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 only gives a fuck about profits. improving teenagers well-being is against his rules as this only wastes his money. it’s capitalism mates.
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.