Facebook Conceded It Might Make You Feel Bad. Here's How to Interpret That. - The New Y... - 0 views
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Facebook published a quietly groundbreaking admission on Friday. Social media, the company said in a blog post, can often make you feel good — but sometimes it can also make you feel bad.
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Facebook’s using a corporate blog post to point to independent research that shows its product can sometimes lead to lower measures of physical and mental well-being should be regarded as a big deal. The post stands as a direct affront to the company’s reason for being
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Its business model and its more airy social mission depend on the idea that social media is a new and permanently dominant force in the human condition.
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Then came 2017. The concerns over social-media-born misinformation and propaganda during last year’s presidential race were one flavor of this worry. Another is what Facebook might be doing to our psychology and social relationships — whether it has addicted us to “short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops” that “are destroying how society works,” to quote Chamath Palihapitiya, one of several former Facebook executives who have expressed some version of this concern over the last few months.
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For several years, people have asked whether social media, on an individual level and globally, might be altering society and psychology in negative ways.
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Facebook’s leap into the ranks of the world’s most valuable companies less than 14 years after its founding can be attributed to this simple truth: Humans have shown no limit, so far, in their appetite for more Facebook.
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Though it is quite abstruse, the post, by David Ginsberg and Moira Burke, two company researchers, takes readers through a tour of the nuances on whether Facebook can be bad for you.
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The cynical take is that Facebook is conceding the most obvious downsides of its product in order to convince us it really does care.
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It showed that using Facebook more deeply and meaningfully, for instance by posting comments and engaging in back-and-forth chats on the service, improved people’s scores on well-being.
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You can see the issue here: Facebook is saying that if you feel bad about Facebook, it’s because you’re holding it wrong, to quote Steve Jobs. And the cure for your malaise may be to just use Facebook more.
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If you think Facebook is ruining the world, you should be a little glad that even Facebook agrees that we need a better Facebook — and that it is pledging to build one.