And Now, Instagram

Facebook isn't just in trouble after former Facebook employee Frances Haugen (below) blew the whistle on its encouragement of hate speech to make money.  Instagram is now under scrutiny for promoting itself to teenage girls and damaging their sense of self-worth.

It seems that teenage girls spend a lot of time on Instagram looking at pictures of perfectly beautiful women in their early twenties - the very sort of women that teenage girls always try to emulate - and develop inferiority complexes when they realize that they can't have perfect bodies or faces like the young women they want to be like.   Many of them starve themselves for that perfect body, and some of them engage in even more destructive behavior.   Instagram has created a whole generation of teenagers - not just girls, but, I'm sure, but boys also (imagine Big Man On Campus types Instagram on making geeks feel inferior because they have the cool cars, the cool clothes, and, ironically, the hot girls) - who feel like they're the most cursed generation that has ever lived.  And for reasons having nothing to do with a dying planet.

Oh yeah, I have an account on Instagram.  I mostly use it to look at pictures of cars from automakers and pictures of scenery from friends who travel.  But without a smartphone, I can't post pictures of my own.  (People follow my account anyway.  Go figure.)  I've tried to find a way to post on it with my laptop, but to no avail.  More and more, though, I feel like I'm better off not bothering.  Many of the pictures I see are pictures those same friends have posted on Facebook.  All it's really good for is to follow and communicate with friends who depend more time there than on Facebook or Twitter.   I spend enough time posting pictures on Facebook; why bother to do the same thing on one of Facebook's sister sites?  (I never visit WhatsApp.)

And it's not only  teenagers who get depressed by Instagram.  Listen to this confession from CNN's Anderson Cooper:

"I'm on Instagram and I enjoy it.  I follow friends and look at art sites and things like that. But I gotta say, it depresses me. I mean, I leave feeling worse than when I got on.

"I feel worse about my own life, I cannot imagine what a teenager feels.  I mean, I'm supposedly an adult. What some kid feels looking at other people's lives and how their lives seem much more exciting than their own."

And when I think about it, I get a little depressed too when I go on Instagram and see other people in exotic locales such as France and Holland.  And I'm stuck in New Jersey.  If my friends who use Instagram exclusively - both of them - were on Facebook, I wouldn't go on Instagram so much.

Oh yeah, don't expect Congress, after the Senate heard Haugen testify on Facebook and its sister sites, to go after Mark Zuckerberg like a rabid pit bull.  The Z-man has plenty of lobbyists to tame them.

Antisocial Media

Facebook is in trouble.  Real trouble.

Frances Haugen, the 37-year-old ex-Facebook employee who came out and revealed herself to be the Facebook whistleblower who leaked to the Wall Street Journal that the social media platform values content that gets people enraged because it keeps them engaged on Facebook longer and thus makes more money for the platform and its advisers.  Haugen, who appeared on "60 Minutes" this past Sunday, also said that Facebook prefers profits over safety, and it  changed its algorithms to downplay and limit hate speech during the 2020 presidential election but changed them back to allow more of it once the election was over.  Gee, what could possibly go wrong?

Oh, right . . . 

And the day after Haugen came forward on "60 Minutes," Facebook and its sister platforms Instagram and WhatsApp went out for hours and its stock plummeted.  Suddenly, Americans are falling out of love with Facebook . . . but so many of them rely on it for their businesses and to open other apps on their smartphones (I have a flip phone) that many of them need to use it more than want to.  

I have long enjoyed using Facebook for pleasure.  I use it to communicate with Beatles fans and fans of the band Family, meet people who love "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" like I do, and make friends with various people, among other things.  I use it to promote my articles on a hyperlocal-news site for which I labor.  I have, of course, befriended several fashion models - many of them my high-school crushes - and I started a Facebook group page for Olympic swimmer Janet Evans (my sports crush). But even on a social-media platform on which I and others express a lot of love, there is a lot of hatred, too.  Facebook is used to stoke hate and spread misinformation about everything from COVID cases to court cases.  It's also good at organizing fascist rallies.

One thing it's not good for anymore, at least not for me, is to promote this blog and my Mark 8 VW Golf Facebook still won't let me go back to posting links to it on its platform.  Apparently, more people find my blogs offensive than calls to overthrow the elected government.

Bearing all of this in mind, I won't be so sad if Facebook gets broken up.  I just hope I keep all of my social connections.

Especially with my friends in the modeling profession. 😉 

I'm glad it's back on for now, anyway.  But Facebook and its sister sites were not the only ones acting funny yesterday. I tried to log ion to Flickr and I needed  verification code to continue.  It took over an hour to get it in my inbox, and I might not have gotten it at all. if I hadn't complained to Flickr.

Then I got ten more codes - the result of countless hits of the resend button. 😲