Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg apologizes to families of children harmed online at hearing
Top social media CEOs are testifying before Congress in a hearing intended to drum up support for federal legislation to safeguard children from the online world.
He didn't apologize, he gave a canned non-committal, non-incriminating PR response. Bah, dude is a piece of shit. His added comment that there's no scientific evidence linking social media usage to harming mental health is also completely false. Literally just search using something like, "study linking social media usage to depression or anxiety," and see the dozens of academic studies that either show causal relationships or strongly imply it.
It's not false, but it is exactly the same kinda bullshit that tobacco always uses. Science fundamentally cannot establish a causal relationship between social media usage and depression, because the experiment to do so would be unethical. You can't knowingly force people to use social media in the hope that they gain depression, but academically speaking that is the only way to prove a causal relationship.
Yes, we have lots and lots of evidence indicating a strong correlation between the two, certainly enough to legislate and certainly enough to casually discuss it as a given, but the bar for something to be considered proven in science is a much higher bar. Slimy ratfuckers like the Zucker love abusing that higher bar.
True, I'll cede you that technicality.
My main point is that it's virtually common sense nowadays that too much social media consumption is going to have a negative impact on mental health, similar to how it became common sense that smoking is bad. I don't think there's any point in conducting a study where you take a normal baseline person and then forcefeed them social media until they're depressed, as we're already seeing it play out in the real world with countless people. Similar to smokers getting lung cancer or heart disease at a higher rate than non-smokers.
Zuckerberg said. "Mental health is a complex issue and the existing body of scientific work has not shown a causal link between using social media and young people having worse mental health outcomes."
Non-apology followed by an actual denial. Very misleading headline.
Mark suckerberg "I'm sorry but please continue to give me complete access to your child's privacy!"
"I'm sorry that you feel that way but I didn't do anything wrong."
Apologies are free and valueless
Even more valueless if it's an apology but some regurgitated pr-speak blurb
There literally is no way the industry can solve this. Even if they implement a digital ID system that you use to verify your identity online, it won't protect kids from a first time abuser.
Facebook is provenly supporting the cyberbulling and right wing conspiracies and the slave market that is going on there because they have metrics that show them this brings more money than banning it.
Oh ok. All is forgiven then.
/S
I need to know, exactly how is it Facebook or Zuckerberg's fault that these kids were talking to insidious perverted adults online? I don't see any particular way that what Facebook offers is objectively more unsafe than any other IM provider. Facebook fucking sucks, but if your kid wants to talk to the candy man online, they'll find out how. Like, this isn't a discussion on how "social media affects kids brains", it's a discussion on how evil Facebook allowed children to be sexually exploited by predators.
The chief executives of the nation's top social media companies were grilled on Wednesday on Capitol Hill over child safety, with the tech leaders seeking to defend their companies from accusations that they've failed to protect kids from exploitation and abuse.
So again, how is this any different than the IM client that IG offers? Snapchat? Discord? Telegram? Signal? Teams? Twitter? Tumblr? Roblox? Fortnite? CSGO?
The kids don't want to speak with the "candy man" creeps will seek out children, the creep will cement themselves as a safe adult and will groom the child who likely comes from a already troubled background.
I agree with the sentiment of what you said but the framing is flawed.
The fault lays with the adult and not the child. Adults should know better, and most will not entertain communication beyond pleasantries/assistance.
Pedophilia isn't a social media issue but a cultural one, the fix isn't based around the platforms used but the predictors them selves, weather from childhood trauma or neurological disorder we need to push away the stigma and reform these cultural issues. But this isn't to say we shouldn't have safe guarding, if an account flags as younger then fb, insta, discord etc should do they're diligence in banning those accounts as well as monitoring the accounts that are actively seeking minors, parents need to be involved in the lives of they're children and must limit/monitor what the child is doing on the web.