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J-dawg | 4 years ago

I don't understand how you could read the parent comment and decide that it's "blaming" teen girls, unless you are deliberately arguing in bad faith.

Teenage girls are predisposed to behave in the way described, and Facebook/Instagram is profiting by exploiting that. Nothing about the explanation above is blaming them. If anything the comment makes a stronger case for Facebook's actions being immoral.

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mbesto|4 years ago

> Why are young girls so awful to each other? I don't think it's unreasonable to suspect that is has to do with "hormones," new emotions, and new social awareness, etc. But, it's also the case that from a strictly evolutionary perspective, young girls are are the most fertile and therefore the most desirable.

How could the words "I don't think it's unreasonable to suspect..." not be considered blaming them? There is definitely some nuance here (I don't think the parent comment is hard-lining to say that the victims here are 100% to blame), but they are most certainly associating some level of blame to teens and their inherent "predisposed" behavior as you say.

jhardy54|4 years ago

> Teenage girls are predisposed to behave in the way described, and Facebook/Instagram is profiting by exploiting that.

Has this been studied, or are we taking an arbitrary thought experiment as a foundational axiom?

remarkEon|4 years ago

It’s kind of amazing to me that an observation that anyone could make based on their experience as a human living on planet earth gets discounted because there isn’t some peer reviewed study from Harvard or whatever that confirms the observation. Young girls are mean to each other, that’s a fact. We don’t need an army of data scientists to “look into it”.

revel|4 years ago

Facebook studied it internally and covered it up in congressional testimony. That's literally what the article is about

mrgreenfur|4 years ago

Agreed. SOME may behave this way, but without more info who are we to say that they "are predisposed" in general. Teenage years are very hard for tons of reasons mentioned above and the way people handle those stresses comes down to tons of factors, support systems, upbringing, context, culture, etc.

Facebook is immorally exploiting that stress.