> With video games, the online tech communities rallied against any legislation and wrote volumes about how kids were smart enough to manage themselves and not let violent video games influence their thinking.
Because there is no evidence for this. In cases where there is, like in lootboxes, we see a push for legislation.
We have enough evidence to at least build correlation between social media use and decline of mental health. This doesn't call for banning or legislating the business to oblivion, but for talks in the society. We need to talk about social media use, our representatives have to discuss measures with the scientific community and promote research so that they can legislate based on data.
One thing is for certain, what we have now is unacceptable. What we will build in the future is up for debate and should be debated.
I agree. Advertising + algorithms without regulation makes the internet a mathematical optimization for lootboxes. Advertising on the internet should be strongly regulated just like it was on television at one point. I remember when subliminal advertising was a huge scandal / scare. It was regulated on TV. There is absolutely no regulation of it on the internet, and the technology and understanding of reinforcement learning in advertising has grown tremendously since then.
Sounds like a causation / correlation mistake. Unemployed people find a way to spend their free time. Sounds to me like games are one of the most engaging escapes from the misery of unemployment.
I tend to agree with this, but I've started to wonder if that's really true. Is there any way to actually test whether correlation != causation for the link between video games and unemployment? Like, an interventional study of some kind for example.
This is even more interesting in societies where there's little pressure to work, such as nordic welfare states. A lot of men I went to school with in Scandinavia decided they'd rather stay at home and play videogames than find a job.
There is some evidence, however, that violent media tends to cause people to perceive their surroundings as more dangerous. Certainly not as bad as making people psychos, but worth a second of contemplation.
> We have enough evidence to at least build correlation between social media use and decline of mental health.
Again, eerily similar to the violent video game panic in the 90s.
The original congressional hearings on violence in video games followed record-high gun violence in 1993 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_congressional_hearings_on... ). Politicians pushed a correlation between increasing popularity of violent video games and increasing gun homicides. It sounds dumb now, but video games were relatively new at the time.
The correlation felt right to many, especially those who hadn't grown up with video games in their own lives. I see this social media debate following the same pattern where adults feel that social media is evil and assume evidence will eventually support their feelings.
> Because there is no evidence for this. In cases where there is, like in lootboxes, we see a push for legislation.
Just because violent video games isn't problematic doesn't mean social media and/or lootboxes also isn't. The relative innocuousness of marijuana doesn't dismiss the dangers of tobacco, or alcohol.
It's often not mentioned but marijuana use can result in psychosis and early-onset schizophrenia in a substantial subset of the population. It's still relatively innocuous IMO.
Yeah, I just mentioned it because it was an example of a drug that experienced a moral panic (“reefer madness”). But one drug being less bad doesn’t mean other drugs aren’t worse and more immediately harmful.
But doesn't it seem similar to past "moral panics"? I have a 12-year-old and I'm super concerned about social media and kids's wellbeing— there seems to be an obvious relationship. But there also seemed to be an obvious relationship between violent video games and violence — or with comic books and reading.
This is the best study i know about digital media and adolescent wellbeing and they find an extremely small effect size (accounting for less than 0.4% of adolescent wellbeing).
I don’t even think that violent video games are harmless. I just think the desensitization is more insidious and longer-term, maybe something with cultural and spiritual ramifications, but not something that’s as immediately harmful to public health like depression caused by social media social stresses.
Hmm. I'm thinking that if there was a graphical video game based on the book "American Psycho" where one was playing that character, maybe it could be damaging to some.
I never saw such a game. -- The FPS games I've seen, I'd compare them more with looking at a ww2 movie.
"The last of us" -- that game maybe that one can cause, like you wrote, a bit desensitization. It's more realistic brutal violence in that game than what I saw in the games i played as a kid.
Manhunt jumps to mind. There's a few games, some of which from Rockstar, that aims to be edgy and gratuitous for the sake of it. Maybe the Hitman games, since they are literally murder simulators?
That's a cool site. I wish there was something similar for video games. I've always been on the side of "entertainment doesn't cause real violence", but it would be nice if I could easily point to real research to actually back it up. Of course, I'd also be happy to be proven wrong. It's the fact that all I can do is state an opinion that bothers me.
In 1993 it seems like pushing legislation for reduced violence on TV shows (not video games, as the wiki page you linked says) was a good. And it's a good call to push legislation for kid's social media now as well.
You make a good point, how would we tell the difference though?
If social media as it stands causes unreasonable harm to society, how would we know for sure? And how would we know we aren’t making the same mistakes made with demonizing video games?
Not only that but anyone that has used social media can say that to you, specially younger people.
Meanwhile studies show there was no correlation between violence and videogames. And except for lag you can't really find a lot of people that will tell you videogames made them violent.
(https://www.psychologicalscience.org/publications/observer/o...)
There weren't studies back then. Just correlation. We have quite a few studies that show the damages of specific kinds of social media and specific practices by social media. Hell a genocide happened because Facebook fell asleep at the wheel.
There are many ways to regulate social media:
- Determine constraints and objective statistical goals the ranking algorithm must meet
- Blocking and marking fake content
etc.
Facebook could choose to rank positivity higher but it does the opposite since it increases engagement.
> We have quite a few studies that show the damages of specific kinds of social media and specific practices by social media. Hell a genocide happened because Facebook fell asleep at the wheel.
Do we actually have these, or are you inferring we do from the general tone of the media conversation around this topic? I'm aware of some correlation studies, and think the topic bears keeping an eye on.
Would you mind sharing one of the "quite a few" causal studies you're referring to?
> Hell a genocide happened because Facebook fell asleep at the wheel.
This is a non sequitur. Facebook didn't cause the genocide any more than Marconi caused the Rwandan genocide or AT&T caused Watergate. Widespread communications technologies and platforms are deeply fundamental to human interaction in the modern age; the only model that marks Facebook as at all causal of Rohingyan persecution requires giving them a nonsensical amount of undue credit for the human interaction that occurs across their platform. Eg, you'd have to make obviously absurd claims like that Facebook is responsible for legalizing gay marriage in the US (activists heavily use FB and other social media platforms to organize).
To be clear, I think criticism of FB from the UN et al on the topic of Myanmar is warranted. The nature of the platform is such that the capability can be built out to direct and constrain the conversations that are had, and it's fair to say that Facebook needs to expand the manner in which it does so.
But this contradicts your point: the salient difference is the ability to control communication so that it stops violence, which in your framing is a _positive_ of social media.
(Note that I'm personally close to an unrestricted speech maximalist, but I'm taking your framing for granted in the above paragraphs)
Um, there actually is a fair amount of evidence that violent video games influence people's thinking.
Just as a quick gut-check, ask yourself this: if they didn't change your thinking, why would you play them? Assuming they don't offer any level of excitement or entertainment, what is the point?
Evidence: the US army uses FPS to train people for combat, and there is a longer history of what it takes to train people to shoot people: switching from round targets to human-shaped targets makes it a lot easier for soldiers to aim the gun at a person before pulling the trigger.
Now clearly most people who play violent video games don't turn into mass killers, but to say that the deep immersion of a FPS doesn't change your thinking is farcical on the face of it.
> Um, there actually is a fair amount of evidence that violent video games influence people's thinking.
Then feel free to post the research. This was the core topic of my studies, and to my knowledge there simply is zero evidence of a causal relationship.
The US indeed has a big violence problem, but there are actual, established causes, e.g. the high wealth inequality, which is a big predictor for violent crimes in most countries.
Because there is no evidence for this. In cases where there is, like in lootboxes, we see a push for legislation.
We have enough evidence to at least build correlation between social media use and decline of mental health. This doesn't call for banning or legislating the business to oblivion, but for talks in the society. We need to talk about social media use, our representatives have to discuss measures with the scientific community and promote research so that they can legislate based on data.
One thing is for certain, what we have now is unacceptable. What we will build in the future is up for debate and should be debated.