Social Media can be very dangerous

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Social Media can be very dangerous. It is filled with bullies and the heartless.

A Malaysian teenager reportedly jumped to her death after social media users voted in favor of the decision in an Instagram poll she posted.

The unidentified 16-year-old girl jumped to her death on Monday several hours after she posted a question to her Instagram Story asking her followers “Really Important, Help Me Choose D/L,” referring to the choice between Death or Life, according to Reuters, citing Malaysian police.

Police Chief Aidil Bolhassan told the outlet that 69 percent of the girl’s followers voted in favor of death.

Source: Malaysian teen jumps to death after Instagram users voted in poll: report

This morning, I came across an interesting editorial concerning her death.

Some in Malaysia want those who voted "yes" prosecuted for abetting the suicide of a minor, which in Malaysia is punishable by 20 years in prison or the death penalty.

Social media: I've been using social media since the mid-2000s, and I cannot decide if it's a net positive or net negative for society. Almost all of the news I consume comes from stories that pop up in my Facebook and Twitter feeds. Because these feeds are tailored toward my interests, they are an incredibly efficient way for me to keep track of current events. Social media is also great for maintaining contact with friends with whom I would otherwise lose touch.

On the flip side, social media has made it incredibly easy to defame and libel people. Being smeared and harassed is a routine part of my daily existence as a writer. I've even received death threats. I'm unsure if the tremendous pain and anxiety that social media has caused in my life is outweighed by the benefits. I imagine this is true of many people, including for the girl who killed herself.

The banality of evil: What sort of sick person encourages a teenager to commit suicide? Given just a little bit of anonymity and the distance afforded by electronic communication, humans can be incredibly heartless and vicious. In this case, it wasn't just one or two people; it was 69% of this girl's Instagram followers. How could so many people engage in a cruel, pointless act of evil?

This phenomenon was coined the "banality of evil" by author Hannah Arendt. She argues that the average person, like the average Nazi during the Holocaust, is capable of incredible acts of evil through a combination of indifference and stupidity. Every human being, it would seem, is capable of behaving in this way.

Mental health: Any person who posts a poll on social media asking if she should commit suicide is obviously struggling with mental health issues. It is quite possible that this teenager had already made up her mind to end her own life and was seeking some sort of justification for her decision. Of course, a person in this fragile state should be encouraged to seek help, not egged on.

Policy: The trickiest question may be what, if anything, should society do about all this? People who struggle with mental illness can interact with hundreds of mean-spirited, ill-willed people within a matter of minutes thanks to social media. Before the mid-2000s, something like that simply couldn't have happened.

The article then offers the following word of advice
the Scottish minister Ian Maclaren coined what became the common axiom, "Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle."

So what do you think? What policy decision would be appropriate for this instance?

Source: What Sort Of Evil Person Encourages A Teenager To Commit Suicide?

The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy got it seriously wrong when it wrote:
"Earth: Mostly harmless."

My position on the inhabitants: Avoid wherever possible.

Evidence is emerging that limiting time on social media helps kids improve their grades. Five years ago, it came out that Steve Jobs and other Silicon Valley greats were actually low tech parents. Whether they encouraged others to do so or not, the tech billionaires recognized and avoided the dangers for their own kids.

But what exactly are the dangers? What’s different today from the cafeteria gossip mills of the past? In an excerpt from his upcoming book, The Social Media Upheaval (May 28, 2019), University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Harlan Reynolds explains why he considers Twitter, in particular, a virus of the mind:

Social media is addictive by design. The companies involved put enormous amounts of thought and effort into making it that way, so that people will be glued to their screens. As much as they’re selling anything, they’re selling the ‘dopamine hit’ that people experience when they get a ‘like’ or a ‘share’ or some other response to their action. We’ve reached the point where there are not merely articles in places like Psychology Today and The Washington Post on dealing with ‘social media addiction’, but even scholarly papers in medical journals, with titles like ‘The relationship between addictive use of social media and video games and symptoms of psychiatric disorders: A large scale cross-sectional study’. One of the consulting companies in the business of making applications addictive is even named Dopamine Labs, making no bones about what’s going on.

Using engineering terminology, he makes the point that, whereas the blogosphere has been a loosely coupled system where craziness in one venue had little impact on another, new social media are tightly coupled systems, prone to maximal disruption:

The ‘retweet’, ‘comment’, and ‘like’ buttons are immediate. A retweet sends a posting, no matter how angry or misinformed, to all the retweeter’s followers, who can then do the same to their followers, and so on, in a runaway chain reaction. Unlike blogs, little to no thought is required, and in practice very few people even follow the link (if there is one) to ‘read the whole thing’. According to a study by computer scientists at Columbia University and the French National Institute, 59 percent of people who share a link on social media don’t read the underlying story. I’m honestly surprised the number isn’t higher.

One outcome, he observes is that people are more likely to believe and spread misinformation they hear on social media. Ironically, Twitter—used widely by social and political leaders—is particularly bad for “thoughtless polarization” which spreads like a virus into the majority of the population that does not use Twitter. He himself left Twitter (“a breeding ground for thoughtlessness and contempt”) in the fall of 2018 but he does not see that as a solution for political discourse because “With Twitter, you can participate and be driven crazy – or you can stay sane, and lose influence. That’s a bad trade-off.”

Source: HOW DID TWITTER BECOME A “VIRUS OF THE MIND”?

So be a little cautious when using social media and understand that it can skew your perception of reality.

[Skew definition - to change (something) so that it is not true or accurate. - to distort especially from a true value or symmetrical form.]

This is my only form of social media.

I only use anonymous stuff.

,"can", "should" and "will" are different


Social media is not as "safe" as it seems, just because you are behind a screen


Does not mean it is "very dangerous"

Yeah this person was obviously unwell if they were 1 prepared to ask the internet whether to kill themselves and 2 prepared to go ahead with it. In a world without social media, they might have tossed a coin over it or something. Should've been receiving care before that point.

Just because social media is not completely "safe", does not make it "completely dangerous"


Spectrum


Autism spectrum


And if they were to have "tossed a coin", does that mean, the coin is "very dangerous

That's very sad. I don't understand what anyone gets out of telling someone to hurt themselves. Preying on someone in a fragile state is especially bad. Those people need help too, if it's even possible.

Social media is not as. " safe "or awesome as "most people" act like it is


But seriously, please do not blame social media for this suicide