He didn't apologize, he gave a canned non-committal, non-incriminating PR response. Bah, dude is a piece of shit. His added comment that there's no scientific evidence linking social media usage to harming mental health is also completely false. Literally just search using something like, "study linking social media usage to depression or anxiety," and see the dozens of academic studies that either show causal relationships or strongly imply it.
this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2024
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It's not false, but it is exactly the same kinda bullshit that tobacco always uses. Science fundamentally cannot establish a causal relationship between social media usage and depression, because the experiment to do so would be unethical. You can't knowingly force people to use social media in the hope that they gain depression, but academically speaking that is the only way to prove a causal relationship.
Yes, we have lots and lots of evidence indicating a strong correlation between the two, certainly enough to legislate and certainly enough to casually discuss it as a given, but the bar for something to be considered proven in science is a much higher bar. Slimy ratfuckers like the Zucker love abusing that higher bar.
True, I'll cede you that technicality.
My main point is that it's virtually common sense nowadays that too much social media consumption is going to have a negative impact on mental health, similar to how it became common sense that smoking is bad. I don't think there's any point in conducting a study where you take a normal baseline person and then forcefeed them social media until they're depressed, as we're already seeing it play out in the real world with countless people. Similar to smokers getting lung cancer or heart disease at a higher rate than non-smokers.
Zuckerberg said. "Mental health is a complex issue and the existing body of scientific work has not shown a causal link between using social media and young people having worse mental health outcomes."
Non-apology followed by an actual denial. Very misleading headline.
Mark suckerberg "I'm sorry but please continue to give me complete access to your child's privacy!"
"I'm sorry that you feel that way but I didn't do anything wrong."
Apologies are free and valueless
Even more valueless if it's an apology but some regurgitated pr-speak blurb
Well if Meta is the "industry leader" of tools designed to prevent this yet it's still happening at a large scale, then he's basically admitting that there is no way the industry can solve this. I hope they get legislated into the ground.
Facebook is provenly supporting the cyberbulling and right wing conspiracies and the slave market that is going on there because they have metrics that show them this brings more money than banning it.
Oh ok. All is forgiven then.
/S