> An internal memo found that 12-year-olds were three times as likely as 32-year-olds to stay on Facebook for the long term, despite the platform nominally requiring users to be at least 13; the memo concluded that Facebook “should consider investing more heavily in bringing in larger volumes of tweens”.
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100 years from now the descendants of the engineers who work at Big Tech will be looked upon by their descendants with the same shame that people nowadays look at ancestors who were involved in tobacco.
I don't think it will take 100 years, the world is already souring on big tech.
>people nowadays look at ancestors who were involved in tobacco
Huh? Does anyone actually care any more? The kind of moralizing busybodies that spend their time shaming the tobacco industry are few and far between.
As someone who had a brief stint consulting for Big Tobacco, I can assure you that people care a lot.
RJ Reynolds does not have their pick of the most elite graduates. Most of them would be ashamed to tell their friends and family, no matter the salary.
Yeah I don't know why people are downvoting. Not for one second would I or anybody I know care about someone in the family having been a tobacco farmer any more than they would care about someone growing alfalfa.
This is an outrageously dumb thing to say. BIg Tobacco knowingly sold a product that physically addicted (the only real form of addiction) its users and killed them.
Facebook is not that.
Facebook ran experiments on on unknowing teenage girls to study how being shown negative content leads to negative mental health outcomes, which has lead to suicide.
> physically addicted (the only real form of addiction)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/26318318221116042
snippet from the abstract
> Contrary to the earlier notion that addiction is predominantly a substance dependency, research now suggests that any source or experience capable of stimulating an individual has addictive potential. This has led to a paradigm shift in the psychiatric understanding of behavioural addictions.
dopamine, the little “hit” you get on social media sites or when you get a “ping”, has a massive role to play in behavioural addictions. and with behavioural addiction it basically causes the same stuff in the brain that cocaine etc does (very simplified explanation).
also, i’m a recovering drug addict. and i can tell you for sure from my lived experience that addiction is definitely not limited to physical stuff like drugs. xD
> Problem gambling (PG), also known as pathological gambling, gambling disorder, gambling addiction or ludomania, is repetitive gambling behavior despite harm and negative consequences. [0]
Addiction isn't just [chemical in blood stream] -> [addiction]. Addiction involves many steps, many of them in the brain, and many of those reactive to non-physical events.
>the only real form of addiction
gonna need a citation on that one, dawg
Gambling is conventionally considered addictive, but the user isn't ingesting chemicals. I don't think a physical/non-physical binary really stands up under scrutiny. I mean, aren't all addictions physical insofar as they stimulate the body to produce neurotransmitters?
Plus, smoking doesn't kill people; its pathological outcomes do. Similarly, looking at a phone screen might hurt a user's eyes, but it won't kill them; however, the decisions that user makes over time due to the effects of the subject matter they interact with might definitely put them at risk. And if aspects of that subject matter are deliberately amplified for their addictive properties, should platforms be regulated to control this?
Depression is not death, but it is still a loss of life.
No.