Social media itself is bad for your mental health. It encourages forming snap judgements using low quality information. Training yourself to use this kind of superficial thought process makes you easier to fool and manipulate.
this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2026
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What’s your approach to news? Do you follow certain journalists or newspapers or something else?
Right now I enjoy Tangle - but I don't obsess on the news as much as most people I know. Focusing more on other interests keeps me saner. In general I think it's healthier to have a couple news sources you peruse, rather than a "feed". You look at items that interest you and then you're done - like in the days of newspapers, when people would read what they wanted and they'd be finished with the paper. I think that sense of completion is important to mental health. You don't get that from a feed because a feed is never empty.
It took them time...
Lemmy has been ok for me. I get on it whenever I feel like it and leave whenever I can't deal with the politics anymore
Edit: grammar
It's much better here without an algorithm, but on the other hand the user base feels pretty ruthless where the blandest opinions net you down votes and angry replies. I only feel safe with jokes and factoids. I think I'm slowly reaching the point where I'll either stop using any online platforms altogether or just 100% lurk.
Social media has the power to do so much good: connecting people across the globe, enabling the sharing of information across language barriers and in circumvention of government censorship, and more. But because the world is run by greedy power-hungry pigs, we can't have social media without it being exploited to the furthest extent possible in the name of profit. The mental health of the public is not even a secondary concern - it is completely disregarded in favor of squeezing further growth out of a saturated market for a service that should be both simple and free.
Before all that - and you are right on your take - there is a more basic flaw that affects social media: people do not know how to act properly.
The anonimity emboldens the small minds that use it to mistreat, slander and ridicule others and spread lies and rumours.
Unless we can force people to act with civility - which implies people being fairly conscious of the consequences of their words and actions - social media will remain what it is: a cesspool where the worst of our species destils into a refined poison.
people do not know how to act properly
They do, in communities where rules exist and are enforced. Anonymity may lead some people to feel more emboldened to act out, but when handled properly I believe the vast majority of them will just settle down and either learn how to participate in good faith or find somewhere else to be. The bad behavior patterns we see in some places are, in my opinion, the result of insufficient social norms and enforcement thereof. This is also a situation capitalists will foster, because it drives engagement and inflates content.
Unless we can force people to act with civility - which implies people being fairly conscious of the consequences of their words and actions
So you already understand that this is a problem that only exists in places where bad actors are given license to continue acting out.
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See: Manna by Marshall Brain. In his Australia project they simply install a centrally controlled "cutoff switch" - when people are out of line their conscious brain gets switched over to a virtual reality where they can live out their fantasies while their bodies report to detention until their brain decides it wants to join "the real world" again.
That doesn't work. The average individual is too hedonistic to refrain from any pleasureable or self reinforcing loop. It's been a cautionary tale in stories since ancient times.
There's no shortage of people. If the "real world" people all get along with reasonable consensus on what "individual freedoms" mean, and some (hopefully small) percentage of those people decide they'd rather live in an alternate reality where they trample the rights of others, instead of incarceration / punishment / inadequate efforts at rehabilitation, transferring those people's consciousness to a virtual reality where they can "be themselves" would seem to me to be a far better use of their individual spirit than trying to break it or simply terminating it. Maybe most of them never rehabilitate - that's o.k. Of course, this is feeding right into a prequel for Star Trek II - The Wrath of Khan.
That is a system predicated on getting rid of the problematic, like the one it exists today, just with an added layer of distancing, to ease the rest of the population's mind. It does not solve any problem.
The inherent problem with freedom in a society is when one person's exercise of their freedom takes away from another person's freedom. Absolute freedom only exists in a society of one person (and, by extension: the more people we have in a resource/space constrained society, the less free we all must be to share the common resources and space.)
If you don't "get rid" of the problematic - what's your option? Just shrug and ignore them when they rape, murder, pillage and destroy? If you "rehabilitate" the problematic, how is that respecting their freedom?
Back in "the Australia Project" (Manna story) - the development of the overall project was kind of vague, but implied access to a lot more "space" in which people could choose to live with others in ways that each group chose to be "acceptable society." If you are more at home in one society than another, you are free to migrate. If a particular society chose to cap its size at 200, or 2000, or however many members, you were free to organize another modeled on it... The key aspect of behavior was: respect. Whatever the size of your social interaction: 2 million down to 2 people - respect the others in that society within the boundaries of local societal norms. The availability of virtual reality expanded the available "living space" many orders of magnitude.
I am going to repeat my point as many times as necessary until it gets through: your example is only a punishment system with an extra layer to be more palatable to the society where it is inserted.
Being free does not imply in any moment an individual can do whatever they may concieve or desire; freedom requires and demands constraint, precisely because the freedom of the other is the boundary of my own. Life in society predicates on this. There is no society of one; the individual often finds a swift end if insisting on it, by its own actions.
A society that simply represses or discards individuals because they engaged in destructive behaviour is not doing anything to in fact solve a problem. A society is as responsible by its individuals as the individuals are by their society. And a society that so simply and easily opts by fractioning itself just to allow more (blatantly artificial) freedom to its elements is not a society. It is something I lack the word to describe but a society it is not.
And I am going to repeat my real-politik question to you explicitly:
What's your grand non-punishment solution for members of society who actively harm other members of society? What to do with those who are non-compliant with "freedom requires and demands constraint"?
A society that simply represses or discards individuals because they engaged in destructive behaviour is not doing anything to in fact solve a problem.
I considered it to be implicit that society would do everything reasonable and appropriate to "solve" the problems of individuals engaged in destructive behavior, but experience has shown: the best efforts in these areas still fail to achieve 100% success. Certainly current societies all over the world (the U.S. especially) could try harder and do better, but 100% success has been historically elusive all over the world.
And a society that so simply and easily opts by fractioning itself just to allow more (blatantly artificial) freedom to its elements is not a society.
And should the entire human race be confined to a single society? Irrespective of our present predicament of cheap instant global communication I would submit: no, there is no one answer for how people should live in society. The one "basic human right" I would proffer to a universal collection of human societies is that: when someone wants to leave one society, they should be free to do so into any other society which is willing to accept them. No society should be under obligation to accept all applicants, but all societies should be required to let people leave whenever they want to, to wherever will willingly accept them.
It sounds like you're both missing the core concept here: Freedom is responsibility. Responsibility for one's self and actions. If someone is refusing to take responsibility for themselves, they are lacking self control and are not free in the first place. They are beholden to animal impulses. You get me? By not taking responsibility for their actions they are disqualifying themselves from freedom regardless of whether they're physically arrested and incarcerated. We need to stop pretending that everyone just has freedom as an intrinsic quality instead of it being a right to which they are entitled.
Freedom is responsibility
Yes, it is. And responsibility is the opportunity to fail to live up to that responsibility, and then what?
I get you: tell yourself they're "just animals" so you can cage them without a guilty conscious.
There are a lot of flaws in the U.S. foundational documents, but "Life, LIBERTY, and the pursuit of happiness for all" is a concept I think worth defending.
I get you: tell yourself they’re “just animals” so you can cage them without a guilty conscious.
Actually, no. Quite the opposite. Treat them like people who have chosen to abrogate their responsibility as humans in order to fulfill animal impulses. I'm definitely not okay with putting people in cages. Irresponsible or not, they're still people.
Great, so these people who you're not okay with putting in cages, the ones that go out and kill other people (for drama's sake), or just really grief society with constant home burglaries, maybe some drug addictions driving that, maybe assaulting people to avoid arrest, maybe "accidentally" killing someone with that gun they use to threaten the cashiers - no cages for them, either? I 100% agree, they're still people, they deserve the best possible shot at becoming better integrated members of society, rehab programs instead of incarceration when appropriate and all that, but even with the amazing money saving rehabilitation rate of psych counselling for drug convictions (which a friend of ours does for a living), they're still far from 100%. Our courts throw too many under the jail for no good reason, wasting their lives and costing the community far more money than the shot at rehab they deserve, but at some point, rehab isn't working for some of them - then what?
Of course there are literally thousands of other "common" anti-social behaviors that eventually rise to the level of incarceration as well...
It's disturbing to me how you can think of no other thing for me to mean than that I want to either murder criminals or let them commit murder. This discussion is over.
Last word: you're the one who brought up murdering criminals - I just suggested you needed to equate them to animals in your head so you could justify caging them like animals.
Criminals commit murder, about 400,000 officially recognized / classified murders per year, much higher than that in reality of course, but 400K/8B is 1/20,000 per year, more like 1/400 lifetime, average, globally, just the official ones not the overlooked ones in war zones or lawless / uninvestigated situations. It's not a problem that can be ignored or written off as insignificant.
Sounds like a society that exists only because it tramples the rights of others. Nah, fuck that.
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Attention Everyone.
Grass is green.
Fork found in kitchen.
Water is wet.
Sky is blue.
Thank you for your time.
Yet no one wants to leave social media.
I left it last year and feel so much better. No FB no Whatsapp, no Insta, no Tictok, no nothing.
You’re on a sm rn….
This comment is not the slam dunk you think it is... Lemmy isn't owned by corp interests, it's not algorithm driven and it isn't 92% bots from fascists, oligarchs and foreign influence agencies. You can as much control as you want here. You can talk to actual people here.
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Does lemmy do the whole algorithm thing? I don't think so, but I could be wrong.
Algorithmic social media is pretty much what we're talking about, I'm sure.
Of course it has an algorithm, but I think you're referring to an algorithm that includes personalized or demographic parameters.
Regardless of whether the algorithm includes that (or rather, to which degree), let's not forget that bad actors can use the knowledge of the open source algorithm to identify the optimal way to manipulate the platform to bring their content on top.
Fair. Have you seen an example of this?
In my limited imagination, bots that flood a topic has a tendency to do that. The the "ask reddit" bots I see in "All".
Is this social?
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There are lots of us that wanted to leave and did. There are lots that want to and can’t find the will power to do so. It’s definitely addictive. It was hard for me to quit, I have an addictive personality, but I’ve also given up drinking and smoking entirely without councilors or pharma aids. I think it’s time we regulate it like a dangerous addiction until there’s a change to how the algorithms function, which may be never.
In today's episode of "fucking obviously, duh,"... fine-tuned digital brainwashing algorithms do in fact have generally 'bad' effects on the human mind.
Some say they may even be addictive and habit forming!
More at 11!
Y'all, this is one of those articles worth reading right quick. The title is... well, bad. They were looking more at the "quality" rather than quantity of social media usage. The findings were more about the reinforcement of the user's state rather than social media itself being bad. Sure, the algorithm will push things, but your algorithm is primarily gonna push what it needs to keep you engaged with itself, and what you engage with will be influenced by your state of mind/mood. If you're already depressed, you're probably gonna reinforce that via the algorithm. Same deal with positive outlooks. Neuroplasticity and all that.
The researchers also bring up a good point about calling into question the recommendation to limit the amount of time on social media with the idea of mitigating the negative effects. Much like [alcohol] prohibition in the US, a ban on social media usage does nothing to teach us a more wise and healthy approach, nor is it something realistic for the general population.
In fact, if we practice abstention in such a way, those that would use it for malignant purposes would make it worse. I think a good example of that is cryptocurrency. Crypto isn't inherently bad, but boy did it get super maligned by any left-leaning space. There are plenty of useful things we could do with crypto, especially now with the hostile behavior of many currency-issuing states, but since crypto was mostly abandoned by leftist spaces, scams, commodification, speculation, and other hyper-capitalist bullshit abounds in the crypto space.
Do we really want to cede the further development of social media to malignant dickheads via unwitting abstention? Or will we take the time to actually learn how to wisely approach the tools we have right in front of us?
Howabout this:
All social media algorithms that direct content flow to users are required to be open source, in perpetuity, at least for viewing, so that actual unbiased folks can audit them. Maybe make a new liscense class for this, if need be, so companies can still own the code, but it just has to be publically reviewable.
Would you install blackbox code on your pc?
Well, would you let a blackbox determine what information is fed into your own brain?
Mandate systemic transparency.
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Crypto isn’t inherently bad, but boy did it get super maligned by any left-leaning space.
Crypto isn't inherently bad, deceptive pump and dump / Ponzi schemes generally are considered to be bad by those not on the receiving end of the bulk of the funds.
At its outset, I thought it was the left-leaning (non-conservative) spaces that were religiously championing crypto for its' subversion of the financial industry. Of course it wasn't long before the financial industry and traditional grifters learned how to turn Crypto to their usual tricks as a new source of income...
Do we really want to cede the further development of social media to malignant dickheads
If you haven't noticed, a lot of people who have a lot of money/power are malignant dickheads, and putting SM-A backed by their type up against SM-B promoted by the "fairness to all, don't hurt anybody" crowd, which one do you think is going to corner 90%+ of the market share: A or B? B just doesn't have the promotional juice (cash) to compete for mindshare.
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