IG is 100% not a drug.
And those of y’all who are promoting this pseudo-science are part of the problem. Look at what y’all did to TikTok. Wacky liberal lemmings handing the internet over to literal fascists.
Literally nobody mentioning what happened to TikTok after that sinophobic pogram. Peeps are just excited for round 2.
How is it psuedo science to compare the addicting ways social media affects people and its similarity to drug addiction? It’s an analogy, obviously no one is being 100% literal.
“IG is a drug”
This is not just pseudo-science. It’s literally a false statement. Maybe it’s a metaphor but science is not a metaphor. Metaphor’s are generally a bad foundation for actions based on reality.
It’s ok if people want to compare “social media” to a drug, but there’s any meaningful evidence for those claims either so that’s pseudo-science too. Notice how all the arguments against “social media” here are based on feelings, stories, etc. while there’s zero scientific evidence.
That lawsuit documents the case of a 19-year-old, K.G.M, who hopes the jury will agree that Meta and YouTube caused psychological harm by designing features like infinite scroll and autoplay to push her down a path that she alleged triggered depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicidality.
What the hell is everyone watching? YT recommends me Red Letter Media, Veratasium, old movies, Blender tutorials and a bunch of other stuff that’s never going to drive me to self-harm. I don’t understand. May be this woman doesn’t have ad blocker installed and is forced to sit through a bunch of soul crushing PSAs? Why is my experience so drastically different from this?
Sounds like you consume useful information. I wager she uses socials as many: to compare herself to others, perusing a mix of ego-affirming and ego-damning content. These are powerful emotional hooks and oscillating between those states can be confounding. Add a dash of fatalism, which is not hard to come by in this culture, when at a low, and I think it easy to see how one might capitulate.
There are a lot of people out there that think their personality traits are inherent and that their physical attributes are static. In fact, my brother was one of these people. He passed away at 40 years old due to morbid obesity. I attribute his downfall to capitulation by way of comparison. He came to think the hole was too big and that his genetics were too poor to make changes, despite me providing an example to the contrary. Sadly, my parents fanned the flames of his dissonance with their own identity-bound delusions.
So, my guess is that you have developed a healthy personal philosophy and have not surrounded yourself with the type of people or digital content that renders that philosophy dissonant.
edit: Check out Daniel Dennett’s book “Freedom Evolves” for an appropriate take on the folly of genetic determinism.
