The tragic suicide of former Miss USA shows how social media can be bad for people.
Cyberbullying killed a young, accomplished, and well-educated beauty queen. It’s time to treat Big Tech like Big Tobacco: name and shame it, sue it, and pass laws to protect public health.
There’s a lot of evidence that social media is bad by design, that Mark Zuckerberg is a psychopath, and that online-induced suicides are seen as little more than “collateral damage,” but people don’t pay much attention to them.
What else should happen? Is anyone else going to die for Congress to show that it can do something?
People who use Instagram have body issues that get worse for one in three teenage girls.
According to The Facebook Papers, a set of internal documents that the Wall Street Journal published last September. This is based on what they said.
Everyone knows this. Nobody cares.
There are more young people who are anxious and depressed because of Instagram, according to the paper. “No one asked for this reaction, and it was the same for everyone.”
He told Congress last March: We’ve seen that using social apps to connect with other people can have good mental health effects.
Then, smoking makes you fat, too.
A long time ago, cigarettes were shown on TV to sell them. Following a report by the Surgeon General on smoking, that was banned in 1964.
Social media can be dangerous, but where is our national report on the risks?
We already have one, because Facebook paid for it in secret. Try to hide it.
Her parents were in tears when she came to them the day before Mallory Grossman, 12, hanged herself in 2017. She had a cell phone with her when she did this. She’d never been so angry.
People at school have sent pictures of Mallory to her mother, who says she is “the most all-American little girl in the world.”
The poor Mal. It said: “You don’t have any friends.” “When are you going to kill yourself?”
It’s easy to figure out which kids aren’t allowed to use the Internet. Mark Zuckerberg is the owner of this.
He was working on Instagram Kids for kids who were 13 and under until a few months ago.
Following Facebook’s internal report, even though it found a link between how much time teenage girls spent on Instagram and suicidal thoughts and eating disorders as well as anxiety and depression, they still spend a lot of time on the app.
There was also a report that found that teenagers don’t like what Instagram does to them very much.
When someone inside the company reads the documents, they say that “they often feel like they’re addicted.” They know that their mental health will suffer, but they can’t stop themselves.
Zuckerberg didn’t think this was a bad thing, but a sign of how well he had done.
Ex-Director Tim Kendall told Congress that Facebook “took a page from Big Tobacco’s playbook” when it came to making its service addictive at the start.
Teenagers in the United States spend seven to nine hours a day on screens, according to a study by Common Sense Media in 2019. That doesn’t include time they spend on schoolwork.
Selena Gomez used to be the most popular Instagram user in the world, but now she isn’t. She told the New York Times in 2017: Every week, I remove the app from my phone. You keep your attention on the negative comments. Not: “You’re ugly.” Like they want to cut you open. Imagining all the things you already think about yourself and having someone write a paragraph about them all.
She wrote about it last year, when online bullies made her feel old and ugly at the age of 30 because they didn’t like her looks.
How many times have I deleted comments on my social media pages that said things like, “You’re not pretty enough to be Miss USA,” or that my muscular build was actually a “man body.”
When Kryst went to school, she got both a law degree and an MBA at the same time. When she worked for Extra, she was a correspondent. She lived in a high-end apartment in Midtown Manhattan.
Kryst was beautiful, smart, ambitious, successful, had friends and family who loved her, and had a lot of things to give back to the world. None of this helped her online.
There’s been a lot of talk about how technology helped us get through the pandemic. There’s some truth to that. In Year 3, it’s clear that we’re more at risk from Big Tech than ever. All this short-term isolation, this lack of interaction, is making us less human.
We aren’t fighting just one global public health crisis. We’re fighting two at the same time. Our best thinkers came up with vaccines in less than a year.
So why can’t we stop Big Tech?
