For
my last post, I looked at two social media articles.
Opinion: Does social media rewire kids' brains? Here's what the science
really says.
The
first post is an opinion piece from the Los Angeles Times by Anthony Vaccaro,
an independent journalist and postdoctoral research associate in neuroscience. With
his background in neuroscience, Vaccaro's argument is thought-provoking,
refuting the widely held claim that social media rewires kids' brains. Jonathan
Haidt's book The Anxious Generation toted the claim that social media and
smartphones are to blame for today's youth's anxiety. He correlates the rising
mental health issues in the youth to the use of social media in their formative
years of brain development. Vaccaro, backed by his scientific knowledge, points
out that science states otherwise. The American Psychological Association
Health Advisory stated that current research shows "using social media is not
inherently beneficial or harmful to young people" and that its effects depend
on "pre-existing strengths or vulnerabilities, and the contexts in which they
grow up." With his expertise, Vaccaro points out that traditional imaging
studies are broken into two categories. One that does not do a specific
behavior and one that does it more frequently. He explains that fearmongering
happens when "the mere association between an activity such as social media use
and a brain pathway is taken as a sign of something harmful on its own." It is
impossible to prove that specific pathways are bad or good, as there is no
status quo brain that everyone's health is based on. Mr. Vaccaro, with his
scientific background, points out this fearmongering about pathways led
in the past to claims about addiction to cheese, Oreos, and God.
When I was reading
articles to figure out which ones to use, one of the articles pointed out that
TikTok has a lot of misinformation. I was confused about where they have been in
the last 40ish years of the internet. As long as I have been on the internet,
there has been misinformation regardless of what site it is. I have seen it on
YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, Twitter(X), and LiveJournal. Had the
author never heard of Urban Legends before?
The other thing I came across when
reading was the continuous blame of social media for depression and anxiety in
youth. From the research, I found depression and anxiety come from a multitude
of sources. Looking at our society today, there are a lot of things speaking as
a person who has both issues that can cause anxiety and depression to soar. The
fear of dying in the classroom as politicians refuse to do anything about gun
control, the planet is on fire, and big businesses are allowed to get away with
it, a mass number of our friends and family dying from permittable disease, our
families are one always one paycheck away from losing our homes. No one can go
to the hospital or take a day off work if we are sick because we might lose our
jobs. All this reminds me of is the Simpsons Principal Skinner meme about him
being out of touch and blaming the children instead. It feels like the same shit that I grew
up with politicians blaming video games, rap, and heavy metal music for societal
issues.
The second article I read was From shrimp Jesus to fake self-portraits, AI-generated images have become the latest form of social media spam.
It was written by Renee DiResta, Abhiram Reddy, and Josh A. Goldstein. The article discusses the increasingly bizarre amount of AI images seen on Facebook in the past six months. It is bizarre in the sense that many of the images are sea creatures and Christian imagery combined. For example, one image has Jesus Christ, whose legs are now giant shrimp. There has been so much AI "art" that the Stanford Internet Observatory and Georgetown University's Center for Security and Emerging Technology have investigated over 100 FB pages for AI content. Results were posted in March 2024, but the findings have not gone through peer review. Scammers and Spammers on Facebook aren't anything new regarding the website's history, but AI is so "visually appealing" and cheap to produce (tell that to the significant environmental impact it has already left on the planet) that it has made scammers and spammers' dreams come true on how fast they can create new posts. The article's authors point out that when users react by liking or commenting on these types of posts, it informs the algorithm that this type of content should be pushed to more people. The authors viewed on their own FB feeds that even viewing any AI content "without commenting on, liking, or following any of the material – Facebook's algorithm recommended reams of other AI-generated content."
I have seen those bizarre AI
posts cross-posted to Tumblr, and they are very bizarre to look at; they are highly
uncanny valley-like. I was also following a FB group posting them; I unfollowed
them as I followed them for real cute cats, not creepy machine cats.
Reddy, Abhiram, et al. "From Shrimp Jesus to Fake
Self-Portraits, AI-Generated Images Have Become the Latest Form of Social Media
Spam." The Conversation, 24 Apr. 2024,
theconversation.com/from-shrimp-jesus-to-fake-self-portraits-ai-generated-images-have-become-the-latest-form-of-social-media-spam-226903.
Vaccaro, Anthony. "Opinion: Does Social Media Rewire Kids'
Brains? Here's What the Science Really Says." Los Angeles Times, 26 Apr.
2024,
www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2024-04-26/kids-social-media-brain-smartphones. Accessed 26 Apr. 2024.
No comments:
Post a Comment