I see a lot defending the researchers involved, talking about how great they are and how none of Facebook’s misdeeds are their fault.
At some point though, when data is consistently not shared, and any findings not favorable to the company are buried, what these people do is not “research”. It’s propaganda. They serve to give Facebook the appearance of valuing neutral judgement on the impact of their platform, and to provide credible sounding findings that can be spun to the benefit of the company.
None of this should surprise, of course. They are a for profit company after all. But at some point these “researchers” are complicit in the scheme.
The only comment here on HN that seems to be directly dismissive is the one that claims about the study being made with a total size of 25 people, of which a final 7 people were selected for the in-depth interview.
Everything about this study seems to be terrible. How the study was made, the reaction by Facebook of the result, the researcher who conducted the study. It seems that rather than go with a establish company that do professional surveys they went with a small scale internal study that did not show favorable results and so they hide it and here we are.
I feel like many of the same criticisms can be said of the coverage of this research. Like pointing out that the study showed a portion of teens said Instagram made them feel worse, but conspicuous omitting that twice as many reported that Instagram made them feel better.
I can understand the desire for discrete research when they (correctly) suspect that media coverage will have negative slant.
An apt comparison, considering Steven Donziger is in court again this week, after having basically endured a corporate-funded prosecution that has drawn on for almost three years, for the crime of winning a civil pollution suit against Chevron.
The children of every fed-level elected and appointed official in his jurisdiction and/or related to the case (house of reps member, both senators, judge, prosecutor) work for the law firm representing Chevron. No one forced any of these judges, politicians, and prosecutors to be complicit in a malicious/fraudulent prosecution. They chose complicity.
It happens in all forms of government everywhere, large city or small. Especially in southern california I find local city halls to be rife with corruption. The FBI has been probing Los Angeles city hall and has already arrested two former councilmen, Huizar was arrested while in office, for racketeering. In Huizars case hollywood couldn't have written a cheesier plot, it was literally cash in brown paper bags and hookers in vegas from developers. quid pro quo. That good old fashioned cronyism stuff has never left, because literally so many people are doing this stuff. Sanitation department. Water and Power. Building and Safety. LASD. Rife with open, overt corruption, and I honestly believe the press is scared to go after these agencies harder than they have with their union lawyers.
It's been a problem since lawyers were invented. If you have a system of rules encoded in language subject to interpretation by fallible humans, you have a recipe for conflict and recrimination.
The problem these days seems to be the bloat and unnecessary complexity such that lawyers are now the only people who can play the game encoded by the rules. The rest of us peons are pieces on a game board.
> The suicide rate increased 33 percent from 1999 through 2017, from 10.5 to 14 suicides per 100,000 people (NCHS Data Brief No. 330, November 2018). Rates have increased more sharply since 2006. Suicide ranks as the fourth leading cause of death for people ages 35 to 54, and the second for 10- to 34-year-olds. It remains the 10th leading cause of death overall.
>But it’s a different story in other parts of the world. Over roughly the same period, other countries have seen rates fall, including Japan, China, Russia and most of Western Europe. What is going wrong on our shores—and what lessons can we import from elsewhere?
I’ve always seen social media as a very artificial environment, it depends on the online environment. But I never associated it with more benefits especially among teenagers.
The rising teen suicide proves everyone’s favorite social critique. Declining church attendance. Declining corporeal punishment. The academic rat race. Climate change.
Whatever I don’t like about the world is why the kids are killing themselves. Having had friends struggle with this when I was a teenager, I find it incredibly disrespectful and in poor taste to leverage their suffering in this lazy and offhand way as an argument for your political opinions.
What is my lazy, poor taste or political opinion? You are attacking my post with no evidence or counter points, a emotional response that isn't based on anything other than hearsay, the first section is a strawman, and the second is how your sample bias should dismiss any other experiences. Is it not hypocritical to dismiss the effect of social media on suicide, such as by cyber bullying?
My experience with social media has been negative, and I have lost friend due to suicide and depression, which is why I am pointing it out. Are you suggesting that it has no effect on mental heath or is proven to be beneficial? I would love to be proven wrong if you have information on it.
https://www.newswise.com/articles/10-year-study-shows-elevat...
>Through annual surveys from 2009 to 2019, researchers tracked the media use patterns and mental health of 500 teens as part of the Flourishing Families Project. They found that while social media use had little effect on boys' suicidality risk, for girls there was a tipping point. Girls who used social media for at least two to three hours per day at the beginning of the study--when they were about 13 years old--and then greatly increased their use over time were at a higher clinical risk for suicide as emerging adults.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3477910/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_and_suicide
Social media is one of dozens of social changes in the last N years. You can line any one of them up next to any bad outcome. This is not generally being done from a place of epistemic humility or interest in establishing causation. It’s just “thing I already don’t like lines up with bad outcome, see how right I am not to like it!”
If that’s not what you’re doing, I don’t mean it as an attack on you. I just think we’re systematically abusing miserable kids as confirmation of our priors (about all kinds of things, social media is just one). We owe them curiosity about how to actually help.
Thank you for the clarification. It is a multi dimensional problem, and I have found very negative effects from social media for myself and people around me.
I do not think that social media is overall good for mental health, it has been shown to be harmful in statistics especially for women and also there is no shortage of n=1 articles on benefits of quitting it. I think it is a serious issue when the teenage suicide rates are higher in the US (pre corona) when it is a wealthy country. If you can clarify, what is the problem you have with my post? I am posting it not only from personal experience but also with data to substantiate my claims.
A lot of data counters what you're trying to put out here. I wish it weren't true, but if you would like, I can point you to studies where you can see how teen suicide in girls and the launch of Instagram, then Snapchat, then TikTok - as well, final thoughts and letters by a large amount of these young girls vary from saying that social media WAS the reason for their suicide, to saying that actions made by others (via social media) were a factor in others. I do sincerely think social media is a force for harm for everyone - as it raises division among people at rates that are hard to build responses to. Psychologists also largely agree that the effects of social media are causing a new kind of concern outside of what we've so far dealt with.
I do sort of think you might have an agenda here, for at this point you are suggesting that the thoughts and feelings of the girls who committed suicide should hold almost no weight. Maybe you're not saying that outright, but if you haven't looked into the lives of these girls before suggesting their plight is "just another generational grievance", well, yeah, we are fucked.
And plenty of people's experiences with social media have been positive.
Think of the LGBT teen in a small town in the midwest who can find a social group to discuss their. Hobby groups, pick up sports groups, etc.
Teens who were already finding 2-3 hours "and then greatly increased their use" a day for doomscrolling between school and homework probably would feel the same if they spent it watching TV.
Can you prove these statements with any data? There are of course benefits to online networking, but the US population of LGBT is 5.6% (of all ages) with most concentrated in urban areas so you are pointing out a small age bracket of a specific type of social engagement in a small population as a counter with the assumption it is beneficial, and the hobbies you describe are not social media engagement, they are online meetings that go offline, which is not the usual trajectory of users online. These sound like extreme outliers unless you'd like to prove me wrong.
I moderate four LGBTQIA+ communities and support spaces on Facebook, totaling over 395k members. I cover both my local scene and international communities.
Without the online spaces, most members wouldn't have friends. The bulk of the work is managing the news feeds and the main task is to approve posts individually. So we see them all.
Many would otherwise be totally isolated. Teens in rural America are among the most affected by this isolation. Many users create threads describing their lack of support in their physical lives or thanking the online spaces for existing, stating that prior to their presence on the group, they had no support network.
While the population of LGBTQIA+ people is concentrated in urban areas, they are primarily adults who have the freedom to move around. Teens are stuck in their hometowns and can only move around after they reach adulthood and connect or build support networks online. As you said, the US population is around 5.6% but even states like Alabama still have 3.0%. This demographic is especially relevant in this topic as its suicide rates are higher that the country's average, with trans people (without support) having rates that go as high as 40 to 50%. Online spaces provide enough support to reduce that number significantly.
There is a meme that goes something like:
"Why are you on Facebook? It's for older people.
- It's because your friends aren't queer."
The LGBTQIA+ internet is similar to what the internet was in the 90s. Close-knit communities where everyone knows each other, sub-communities, sub-cultures, and lots of blogs and personal sites.
I would even go so far as to say that comparing the average social network usage to LGBTQIA+ social network usage is the equivalent of comparing apples and oranges.
Thank you for your perspective. Do you think that the LGBTQIA+ community is best served in this method? For instance, art communities would have been a stand in for many before, and from my exposure it seems to have had very good effects for marginalized people who aren't mainstream due to interests, sexual orientation, or creativity and ideas that are normally dismissed. They seem to be the least polarized people I know of.
I have a question for my friend: he is bisexual so he has problems where he is invalidated by both hetero and non hetero communities, and feels very isolated and depressed, and I don't know enough to help, where do you suggest is the best place for him to get support or any resources for bisexual men?
My experience with tumblr was a very mixed bag for the non heterosexual communities such as the mixture of mental health as a focal point where some I knew got better and some got worst and self diagnosed themselves into deeper unhappiness.
> Do you think that the LGBTQIA+ community is best served in this method?
Ideally, there would be dedicated spaces because the existing spaces are generally very hostile. For example, it is common for people to create fake profiles in order to get past the first layer of verification (looking at the profile and reading the required questions). Once in, they take pleasure in contacting members to push them to suicide. Online trolling with real dangers.
There is also the fact that the mission of the platform is generally not very compatible or at least the lack of attention to the LGBTQIA+ communities creates such negative experiences.
For example, Facebook's automatic moderation detects ordinary slurs but not targeted homophobic or transphobic slurs or "dogwhistles." This often results in a troll using something like "you'll never be a woman" or calling transgender people "the 41%" or "join the 41%" (in direct reference to suicide rates).
Understandably, users get frustrated and tell these users to go away using harsh words, and also report the troll to Facebook. What usually happens is that automatic moderation does not detect the troll, responding that the comments do not violate their terms of service. However, "griefers" often report legitimate users. The recent changes make this very easy, as something as innocent as writing "why is this man here?" in a space dedicated to lesbians will be flagged as hate speech against a gender identity. Thus, the troll gets away with it and the users are banned for 30 days by the platform. Often, a troll can manage to flag enough comments to have entire groups shut down by the automatic moderation tools.
This makes these spaces unsafe for supporting vulnerable people. For example, one public page that I have access to the admin panel has such a large ban list that I'm not able to get the exact number without the admin page crashing. By playing with the APIs, I was able to get a count of 25k bans before it also crashed and returned errors.
But as you said, alternative sites can be just as dangerous. Sites like Tumblr quickly become echo chambers and a race to the bottom. They've been very helpful in providing a space, but the lack of oversight makes them potentially dangerous.
To answer your question about your friend, bisexuals are often one of the least supported and understood demographic groups. This brings us back to my earlier point about echo chambers. It is common for subcommunities to gather around hate, and the LGBTQIA+ community is no exception. There are many spaces where otherwise queer people gather to denigrate bi identities, invalidating entire labels because they don't take the time to understand them properly. I would argue that there are also a number of people who do this to make themselves feel better. "Finally someone I punch down to". Even the queer articles and literature of the 70s were hostile to bi people.
This is one of the many reasons I think there needs to be better LGBTQIA+ spaces. Moderation is important, but so is free speech. It is a fine line to walk. But one thing that's sure is that 90's style "free for all" internet can be very harmful for kids.
I do think that communities and social media aren't necessarily the same. Communities have existed before social media. I grew up on CompuServe, which had a few LGBT groups as far back as 1997, and forums chat rooms have been around for as long as that. "Social media" in these terms, tends to be surrounding anonymous behavior and how people abuse anonymous behavior to hurt and even cause physical harm - which has similar effects in your communities. We can shun the daily posting, swipe-right, anonymous aspects of social media without removing communities - as proven by their existence prior to social media.
That "40 to 50%" trans statistic is incredibly worrying. Can you share where it's from so I can reference it in the future when these discussions come up?
It sounds worrying, and it is. But it's important to make one distinction.
It's not "transgender people inherently have a 40% suicide rate". It's "transgender people are in situations where their suicide rates climb to as high as 40%".
It's also important to understand the difference between "suicide ideation" and "suicide attempts" which are two different numbers that are often mixed up.
To answer your question, here is a source I am familiar with as a Canadian:
"Among trans Ontarians, 35.1 % [...] seriously considered [...] and 11.2 % attempted, suicide in the past year."
"Lower [...] transphobia [...] was associated with a 66 % reduction in ideation [...] and an additional 76 % reduction in attempts among those with ideation."
US numbers are higher: the National Transgender Discrimination Survey (NTDS) found that 41% of 6,450 transgender respondents said they had attempted suicide. I don't have the source other than a PDF saved on my local machine, but you should be able to find it easily enough.
It's also very important to look at the sample pool of such studies. I remember that one number that was widely used in debates was actually done on the transgender women population of a men's prison in south america. Of course the people there are miserable but the numbers won't be representative of the larger population. It stopped being used as much after people pointed out that fact.
Was the 2008 NTDS for all ages or just adults? Did it control for mental health? Does asking a single question about attempts without follow-up interviewing ("Have you ever attempted suicide?") have any effect on the reliability of the data? [1] Why say "40 to 50%"? How can a rate "go as high as" 40% to 50% -- do you mean, when you add more variables besides identifying as trans?
I think the point is, there are plenty of signals that increase suicide rate. Without full and proper analysis (e.g., control group, etc.) tying social media to suicide rate is correlation.
And as presented, that comes off as opinion.
Note: I'm not taking sides. I'm only wanting to answer your question :) please don't shoot the messenger.
I can see that viewpoint. Data is imperfect but it isn’t a random correlation like cell phones associated with fungal infection. There is no shortage of self reported data, but cyber bullying attacks directly cause suicide attempts for instance. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6791504/
Um. Actually, cyber bullying (probably) correlates with suicide. That is, the suicide victim likely has other contributing causes. Maybe that depression? Maybe it's being abused as a child. Etc.
I am by no means belittling suicide (note: a close family member used that exit), nor am I belittling bullying. It's evit. But it's rare such things can be traced to a single trigger. Life is complicated. Sometimes we're too willing to oversimplify.
Yes there is enough media attention it may be overly skewed but it’s like coronavirus statistics, did they die of corona, oxygen deprivation, or inflammation? They said in the study that once that was taken out the stats are way less skewed to negative.
Your overall point is valid, but this last comment is unnecessary.
> I find it incredibly disrespectful and in poor taste to leverage their suffering in this lazy and offhand way as an argument for your political opinions.
I find it odd that's one of the conclusions you drew from the parent's comment. You're making a baseless claim that the OP has a political agenda (I didn't get this sense at all) when they were clearly demonstrating that there is potential causation and providing insight/opinion to it. You make it sound like we can't even have discussions about suicide because "we're leveraging suffering". I don't think you meant to direct that at the parent but rather politicians, otherwise your comment is far more distasteful and not posted in good faith.
Remember the moral panics around Dungeons and Dragons? [0] Or the "Hyper Realistic violence of Doom"? [1]
Social Media is the next in line. In 20 years people will laugh at the articles and news report about it.
Something I wonder too is if suicides aren't just better reported today because there's less social stigma around mental health than in previous decades (for an extreme example, just look at the 1950's...).
Facebook is global, the fact the suicide rate only grew in the US and not worldwide is a point in its favor. Not to mention the increase in suicide rate is higher for older generations who use social media less, according to the data.
> Facebook is global, the fact the suicide rate only grew in the US and not worldwide is a point in its favor.
Not necessarily. To oversimplify things to make a point, suicide may have two ingredients: Facebook and something else. The US has an increased rate because has both (Facebook and the other ingredient), while the other places don't because they only have one ingredient (Facebook) and are missing the other. It's not a point in Facebook's favor if it is one of many ingredients in a recipe for suicide, and Facebook may be the easiest ingredient to eliminate.
And that's totally plausable. The US has many unique cultural factors (e.g. highest rating of individualism of any country).
That is assuming that facebook usage is globally homogenous.
Social climates, sex and age play a huge factor. Young insecure girls that are bombarded with how they should look, and what their friends are doing without them will not be affected as the boomer who only goes onto facebook marketplace to sell, talk with family, or the kind that posts trump memes. Heres some interesting data. https://www.smartinsights.com/social-media-marketing/social-...
I don't think usage of instagram is much different here in western europe and the results regarding teen suicide are not the same seemingly. So I'm not sure of what to think.
Open to being proven wrong about instagram usage in the us vs europe. I haven't really looked into it. But it seems all teens and preteens here are hooked on it.
It is multidimensional, it does not mean that social media is going to have the same effect even among the same country with the same usage. Widespread anti-semitism for instance in the US did not cause the holocaust as it did in Germany. The culture in parts different parts of western Europe is different than it is from southern US and northern US.
You will find no shortage of people quitting social media and reporting benefits around the world, the algorithms on instagram will also vary with what is shown. Without enough data I cannot quantify it but other factor such as wealth are also associated with suicides, low income and high income communities have lower suicide rates. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_r...
> Over roughly the same period, other countries have seen rates fall, including Japan, China, Russia and most of Western Europe. What is going wrong on our shores-and what lessons can we import from elsewhere?
Keep in mind a 17 years old in 1999 was born in 1982. These were interesting years in Russia, Japan and China to say the least (total collapse of the Soviet Union, for a start, with all the insecurities that ensued) and a pretty nasty economic crisis in Japan [0].
I am not saying this is the cause, because I’m not American, but maybe Americans use it in a more “harmful” way. Where I live people mostly use Facebook to buy used stuff on the Marketplace and to post memes in their hometown groups.
Interesting that a "33 percent increase" is the same thing as 0.105% to 0.14%. Those latter two figures are both a lot lower than I would have guessed.
Yeah it’s only high percentages because the numbers are already pretty low for suicide. It would be a 200% increase in shooting if there was only one shooting before.
As a person looking in from the outside, I observe that there are many worse things going on in American society than Facebook that could cause rising despair and suicide. I’m not saying it’s blameless but the overall picture there is not of a healthy society.
Now apply a distortion that allows everyone to to make their life seem much better than it actually is, and it’s not difficult to believe these platforms cause mental health problems.
100. There were plenty of campaigns over the past decades to "expose the fakeness" of Hollywood actors that are portrayed as role models. For the same reasons we're discussing now.
Where are these campaigns now? The ones designed to "expose the fakeness" of your BFFs insta.
Policy & regulation are a dead end. I suppose Facebook et al know this, that's why our ATTENTION is there.
The real change comes in the form of massive settlement to fund these PSAs and further gambling-tobacco-esque taxing to keep those campaigns funded.
The argument is social media is not a neutral platform but __amplifies__ the extremes, thus reducing the "Visibility" to a rat race of envy, by design.
If it were as simple as you suggest, the studies would not be pointing out the biased slant of these platforms being harmful as much as they have been.
Also add in a 'revenge' and 'pettiness', for lack of a better term, style posting. I just shudder at thinking what some of my peers would have posted about me and others when I was younger. They barely kept it together normally. But sitting behind the 'safety' of a screen... It would have been awful.
It's other people's lives, plus selection bias. It doesn't make other live visible equally, because people post more of the best moments (plus photo filters to look even better).
Will these Senate hearings be theater only, like previous ones with large corporations and the government? Where is the action and what laws are improving these situations?
Until society and governments considers mental health as equal to physical health (improving, but still working on it) I don’t see any government acting to curb online environments in the same way tobacco companies were dealt with.
It’s easy to show a photo or X-ray of a diseased lung and see damaged caused by smoking. It’s not as easy to convey the emotional damage caused by depression, until it’s unfortunately too late.
All Senate hearings seem like theater in the present.
Personally, when i look back at archives from the past and either read the record or watch the recorded hearings from say, the 2008 financial crisis, does it show that it is a little more than that.
It is a forum to voice these positions that are ideally meant for us as a society to learn from.
Politics being politics, it has turned into a forum to raise issues and a sinkhole for precious legislative time.
Any woman with an instagram account could have told you this. Doesn’t matter how confident or healthy you are at a baseline, spend enough time on IG and you will start to feel like shit about yourself. I refuse to use these godforsaken products and it’s painful to watch my beautiful, smart friends (even in their 30s) worry so much about how every facet of their lives appears on social media.
As much as I don't like social media and Zuck in general, I think social media get a lot of undeserved blame. The biggest culture shock I had coming to North America, how materialistic, exhibitionistic and keeping-up-with-the-joneses the whole culture is. Sure, social media has made it worse. Before you can broadcast your fancy car to your neighbors, but cannot broadcast your fancy dinner to the whole world. With social media it's possible to broadcast not only the fancy dinner also glamorized miniscule details of your life.
So, the social media has made things worse. But the culture of materialism and obsession with status was there well before social media has come into the picture.
> But the culture of materialism and obsession with status was there well before social media has come into the picture.
This is a pretty gross generalization of an entire country filled with diverse people, a significant number of whom do not match this description at all, now or before social media.
On what are you basing this? This sounds like the kind of conclusion you might draw by using social media as a measuring stick.
My evidence is only anecdotal, but as someone who grew up in, and lived all over America, and lived abroad, I couldn’t agree more with OP. My friends in London, and their friends, many of whom grew up quite wealthy, were nearly indistinguishable from anyone else in London. They rarely bought anything (except drugs), even on vacation (I traveled with a few a couple different times).
In America, people proudly declare shopping a hobby.
In the rural Pennsylvanian I grew up in, the multimillionaire family that owned the town plant went to the same church as most of the rest of the town (excepting catholics), sent their kids to the same public school, and generally socialized freely with the rest of the town. One of their daughters was the same age as me and, although not a friend, was a close acquaintance for as long as I can remember up until the end of highschool when I moved away. That family was as you describe, 'nearly indistinguishable' from the rest of the town. Nearly indistinguishable, except there was no mistaking who they were because the plant was named after them, as was the highschool's football field (which they apparently paid for.) Also, the nearest "shopping mall" was about half an hour away. Shopping as a hobby was alien to me, nobody I knew did that until I went to college.
Point is, America is a big place. If you think you understand America after watching a bunch of American movies and TV shows, you probably don't.
> In America, people proudly declare shopping a hobby.
In America, some subset of people declare shopping a hobby. And in the social media era, that subset amplifies that preference via their online presence.
To be clear, I’m not saying consumerism doesn’t exist; it clearly does. But if we’re going on anecdotes, I’ve generally experienced the opposite of what you describe. Not because what you describe doesn’t exist, but it doesn’t seem to play a major role in the lives of most people I come in contact with.
The wealthy people I do know don’t flaunt it, and would prefer to just live normal lives. They see wealth as a path to freedom, not stuff & things.
Social and news media both skew our perspectives on the world.
I agree with most of what you’re saying here, but something that I didn’t communicate well is how far reaching this consumerism is.
‘Everything is bigger in Texas’ is actually a legitimate characterization. Bigger portions, bigger houses, bigger vehicles, etc. (I grew up there, live in NorCal now)
Bigger => more consumption. You naturally buy less when you run out of places to put things. Europe is tighter. Public transit is better. Groceries are walkable, so you buy less more often, and only what you need => less waste.
Paper towels aren’t even really a thing over there. Of course they exist, but no one buys 24 packs. They use rags. Same story for toilet paper. They use bidets.
Most Europeans grow up playing football (soccer) or rugby and take up running as later life exercise. Americans are much more likely to exercise in ways that requires a bunch of purchases. They have space for home gyms that Europeans wouldn’t dream of, often even if they’re not wealthy.
There are fewer public spaces, so people seem more likely to consume during leisure time in whatever way suits them (like aforementioned shopping, nails, bowling, movies, gun range, etc).
Anyway… all of that to say my original comment was light on content, but there are massive cultural differences that go way beyond the way a few wealthy people present themselves that contribute to my sense that Americans are generally much more consumptive.
Did I make claims about entire countries, or did I readily admit that I was only sharing my own small taste, explicitly stating that it shouldn’t be sufficient for broad conclusions?
> The biggest culture shock I had coming to North America, how materialistic, exhibitionistic and keeping-up-with-the-joneses *the whole culture is*
And you replied
> My evidence is only anecdotal, but as someone who grew up in, and lived all over America, and lived abroad, *I couldn’t agree more with OP*
You then went on to share your anecdote, seemingly to back up your opening statement. Maybe it wasn't your intent to make broad claims, but when reading your comment in the context of the parent comments, it's easy to conclude just that.
That’s fair. I appreciate the effort you put into the clarification.
I do agree with OP, but I do not believe either of us have provided sufficient evidence to establish our assertions as indisputable, and wouldn’t have expected my comment to be convincing.
It would be impossible to communicate the life experience that has led me to my belief in a written comment, so I guess a better response to the person who responded to me would’ve been: “I did not arrive at my conclusion in the way that you have suggested, but I do stand by my broad belief.”
Consumerism, in which purchasing is "related to the display of status and not to functionality or usefulness" was used to describe the American economy at least as far back as 1955.
While this connection is tenuous at best, according to Hofstede's Cultural Dimensions Theory [1], the US is a pretty heavily "Indulgent" culture. In a comparison I did on the website between the US, Germany, Japan, and Egypt [2] the US (closely mirrored by the UK in fact) scores much higher on "Indulgence" than the other listed cultures. There's nuance here because the results for South Africa, for example, are pretty different than Egypt, but it does go to show that the US is a pretty indulgent culture which I can credibly see correlating with a consumerist mindset. That said, there aren't enough studies on this out there, and I think it would be interesting to conduct this kind of research. (And if there is research here I'd love to be offered papers to read!)
> This is a pretty gross generalization of an entire country filled with diverse people, a significant number of whom do not match this description at all, now or before social media.
It's a generalization that probably has legs, though. IIRC, surveys show US culture is uniquely extreme in some areas (e.g. most individualistic in the world). Exceptions don't disprove a broad outline.
The entire US economy is built around materialistic consumerism. To be fair, pretty much every developed economy is like this, but the US is kinda the poster child of waste and excess.
The sample bias is social media itself. What is Facebook filled with? It changed the focus exponentially, wealthy countries tend to have more virtue signaling and programs that are luxuries, and broadcasting it.
I think you're kinda right but its not exclusive to US. Social media did not happen in a vacuum, there was a whole fertile ground prepared for it with decades of couch-potato consumer behavioural conditioning, which has been a global phenomenon for at least 50 years or so.
Is the name “social media” doublespeak? Comparing the online or digital equivalent or approximation as a simulation of reality has either created a false hyperreality at best but usually that of a poor imitation.
Sometimes they're real, and sometimes they're idealized projections put forth by said people. This will happen in any setting but social media seems to encourage it for whatever reason.
Not to discount your point, but to add on that "Platforms that greedily optimize content distribution should be regulated to prevent an unhealthy incentive structure kicking in"
