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  • Absolute demons. I've been around on the internet since irc and remember so well how FB became a thing and how fast it all went sour. As far as I remember FB rolled out these anonymous comparison "games" early on and there were also stuff where you "bought" your hot friends or bidded for them. It brought out bullies and mean behaviour out of people in ways I can't describe now and it was all downhill from there. The testing for this vulnerability was there from day one.

    And the way it disconnected us. I remember noticing how pretty soon nobody would call or text you anymore. Old "friends" saw each other less and less because "I follow you on FB, so we are connected."

    Then came IG. The number that and the modern selfies started to do on my grown-ass womans mental health was so clear in hindsight. I started to notice this when I began to see how I felt about pictures taken of me by others compared to the selfie cam filtered stuff that never actually looked like me.

    Tried to disable all the filters, tried to adjust the timeline and follow things that would harm me less, but eventually deleted my accounts and it has been one of the greatest things I've done in the last 5 years for my mental health, self-image and body image.

    I found some of these IG selfies a year or two ago from my old phone and it was legitimally kind of scary how foreing and weird they look to me now. The unnaturally big eyes, the altered jaw line, the ridiculously smooth skin. And I was willingly doing that, most of us are.

  • Other examples of Facebook's ad lechery are said to include the targeting of young mothers based on their emotional state, as well as emotional indexes mapped to racial groups, like a "Hispanic and African American Feeling Fantastic Over-index."

    Demons.

  • Giving young girls body dysmorphia at a time when they're experiencing growth spurts and higher metabolism is so fucking ghoulish. Remember when magazines started using Photoshop and the self-esteem issues that caused? These motherfuckers saw that and were like "How can we make that even more profitable?"

    AI shit isn't going to help, either. Especially as it starts to look more and more realistic. Girls will be comparing themselves to ads featuring adult women with impossible features marketing plastic surgery.

  • cool, a good/recent link to use when somebody asks why i deleted myself from the meta family of platforms.

    it rarely comes up, and last few times it did, the response was, "yeah, that's smart." then the inevitable network effect justification, "but i have a [depression pact] with my friends & family and its the only way we can all [hate our lives together in the same way]."

  • if you can't quit meta platforms, use firefox with ublock origin to browse them.

    removes ads (and some of the tracking) from your life, feels like premium internet.

38 comments