Social Media & Guns

 I have been listening to reports of outrage against Instagram, because of its adverse effects on teenage girls.  And the outrage seems widespread and fierce. Instagram, it turns out, is singlehandedly responsible for the angst felt by all teenage girls, which evidently is pervasive. Teenage girls everywhere are being body-shamed daily, and all because of Instagram.  Here’s one report:

“Thirty-two percent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse,” as The Wall Street Journal reported. (Ms. Haugen provided internal documents to The Journal from Facebook, which owns Instagram.)

What exactly are we talking about here? Say you’re a 13-year-old girl who is beginning to feel anxious about your appearance, who has followed some diet influencers online. Instagram’s algorithm might suggest more extreme dieting accounts with names such as “Eternally starved,” “I have to be thin” and “I want to be perfect.”

In an interview with “60 Minutes,” Ms. Haugen called this “tragic.” “As these young women begin to consume this eating disorder content, they get more and more depressed,” she said. “It actually makes them use the app more. And so they end up in this feedback cycle where they hate their bodies more and more.”

So, see, it’s all the fault of Instagram. Teenage girls and their parents simply cannot cope and are incapable of fighting off this awful social media mess called Instagram.  I now realize that teenage girls have literally no control over their bodies, are deeply ashamed of those bodies and are incapable of resisting the lures of this social media technology that has been designed expressly to make them feel worse about their shameful bodies.

So, of course the parents and their daughters are outraged that Mark Zuckerberg refuses to take any meaningful action to lessen the damage being done by Instagram.  Here, from a Manchester Guardian article on a new bill being introduced by the British government to regulate the social media empire:

“. . . a key feature of the online safety bill will be its provisions on regulating the algorithms that constantly tailor and tweak what you view according to your perceived needs and tastes – and can push teenage girls into that vortex of esteem-damaging content. “There is a lot to be done about algorithms and AI [artificial intelligence].”

Beeban Kidron, the crossbench peer who sits on the joint committee into the online safety bill and was behind the recent introduction of a children’s privacy code, says Ofcom, the UK communications watchdog, will have a vital role in scrutinising algorithms.

“The value in algorithmic oversight for regulators, is that the decisions that tech companies make will become transparent, including decisions like FB took to allow Instagram to target teenage girls with images and features that ended in anxiety, depression and suicidal thoughts. Algorithmic oversight is the key to society wrestling back some control.”

A spokesperson for the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport says the bill will address those concerns. “As part of their duty of care, companies will need to mitigate the risks of their algorithms promoting illegal or harmful content, particularly to children. Ofcom will have a range of powers to ensure they do this, including the ability to request information and enter companies’ premises to access data and equipment.”

Apparently, all social media sites use algorithms to tweak what you see, based on what you seem to like. So, if you keep “liking” postings by Nazi’s, social media sites like Facebook will expand the amount of content you see from prominent republicans and gasbags like Marjorie Taylor Green, or Matt Gaetz.  On Instagram, the algorithms expand content that includes pictures and other media content that plays into a teenage girl’s interest in diminishing her own personal value, especially as that relates to her personal body image.  Evidently teens themselves and their parents are either incapable or unwilling to turn off harmful content. So, in this case, the government is intervening to regulate the algorithms processes, so as to reduce the damage being done to teens’ self interests.

Now, throughout this whole argument, what I see is a shifting of the blame for damage being done to teen girls to Zuckerberg et al.  Parents and the girls evidently lack any tools to control their behavior, and so none of this is their fault.  I don’t know, but I begin to detect a problem here.

And then we switch tracks to guns. Think Mr. Rittenhouse. He obtains illegally an automatic weapon that would normally be reserved for use in wars in places like Afghanistan. Then, with his mom’s permission, he travels across state lines to participate in a riot, with the aim of “protecting” private business interests. In the course of doing that, he manages to shoot three people, killing two. And not only does he get acquitted in a court of law, by a jury of his peers, but he then is elevated to honorific status by republican legislators, who wish to treat him as a person of good moral character, who acted completely ethically in protecting American private business from the predations of an unruly mob, one which our official law and order folks were incapable of constraining. No, it really required an illegally armed 17 year old to contain the mob.

And then we have another young kid, who arms himself, walks into a school and shoots his teenage school comrades.  He had been removed from his classroom earlier because of some of his writings about guns. His parents were contacted, they came to school, but they refused to take the boy home with them, leaving him to his own devices at school, after which he proceeded to shoot up the school.

This awful incident is but one of too many school shootings and other mass shooting events in this pseudo-civilized nation we call America. And I continue to await the cries of greater regulatory/legal controls over the NRA, the gun lobby and the whole issue of gun purchasing and ownership.  No, instead we roar our discontent about social media places like Instagram that promotes body shaming of teenage girls. Parents and teenage girls apparently play no role in this outrage. But on guns? Heavens, we cannot regulate guns. There’s that Holy second amendment thing. We cannot regulate guns, or gun carnage, but we certainly can and should regulate social media sites that damage teenage girls’ self-esteem.

What a place in which we live.