There’s a girl hell – and it has a name - socially prescribed perfectionism. It’s reach is far and wide. It can be tied in with the much talked about condition known as gender dysphoria. I’ll talk about this in more detail in a later programme. 

Instagram’s the best social media platform to use to send girls to this hell.

Tag words: socially prescribed perfectionism; gender dysphoria; self-oriented perfectionism; Jonathon Haidt; The Anxious Generation; Cass Review cognitive behavioral therapy; CBT; major depressive disorder; MDD; social media influencer; TikTok; Instagram; Cass Review; Mean Girls;

In the song Jealousy, Jealousy, Olivia Rodrigo nails the problems that teen/adolescent girls have in container loads, since Gen Z took off from the real world and joined the cyber world. The problems were always there but its much, much worse in their cyber off-world.

I kinda wanna throw my phone across the room
'Cause all I see are girls too good to be trueWith paper-white teeth and perfect bodies
Wish I didn't care

Comparison is killin' me slowly
I think too much
'Bout kids who don't know me
I'm so sick of myself
I'd rather be,
Anyone else

There are four reasons why she feels that way. Here’s the first:

Tag words: Jealousy, Jealousy; Olivia Rodrigo; Gen Z; comparison; Jonathon Haidt; The Anxious Generation; Instagram; Snapchat; Facebook files; Frances Haugen; Mark Zuckerberg; Adam Mosseri; TikTok; Jean Twenge; Cass Review; self harm; suicide; addicted;

How can you be the best you can possibly be? Detect prestige and then copy it, better still learn from that prestige and improve on it. Animals do it. Humans do it.

But then this amazing God given tool for making us the best we possibly can be has, for many, ground to a stunning halt, been derailed, all because of Steve Jobs’ iPhone and the disastrous tsunami of social media, video games, and pornography that came as an inevitable part of it. 

Let me explain.

Tag words: Steve Jobs; iPhone; God; Rob Boyd; Pete Richerson; conformist bias; prestige bias; Jonathan Haidt; The Anxious Generation; Joe Henrich; Sean Parker; Facebook; Instagram; famous for being famous; Malcolm Muggeridge; Kim Kardashian; Kylie Kardashian; Gen Z; Louise Perry; The Case Against the Sexual Revolution; Laurie Penny; Angela Carini; Imane Khelif; The Bible; Agency; Communion; Snapchat; Tumblr;

The smartphone is the modern-day hypodermic needle, delivering digital dopamine 24/7 for a wired generation.

Now that’s provocative. What does it mean? 

In his book, The Anxious Generation, Jonathon Haidt tells us when the internet changed into the harmful thing it has become today.

A transformational shift in the nature of social media happened in the years around 2010 that made it more harmful to young people. In the early years of Facebook, Myspace, and Friendster (all founded between 2002 and 2004), we called these services social networking systems because they were primarily about connecting individuals, such as long-lost high school friends or fans of a particular musician. But around 2010 there was a series of innovations that fundamentally changed these services.

What were they? What happened?

Tag words: Smartphone; hypodermic needle; The Anxious Generation; Jonathon Haidt; intermittent variable rewards; social media; Facebook; Myspace; Friendster; like button; retweet button; share button; Twitter; Tristan Harris; Edward Thorndike; smooth of a path in the brain; Nir Eyal; Hooked: How to Build Habit Forming Products; TikTok; Instagram; Frances Haugen; Anne Lembke; Dopamine Nation; dysphoria; prestige bias;

On 28 September 2021, The Wall Street Journal published an article, Facebook’s Effort to Attract Preteens Goes Beyond Instagram Kids, Documents Show, which was based on information taken from leaked documents obtained by former Facebook employee and whistleblower, Frances Haugen. Her identity wasn’t disclosed in the article. It was disclosed just a few weeks later by her, on Sunday 3 October 2021, just before she was going to appear before a US Senate enquiry where she was to give evidence of what she alleged was the harmful nature of the way Facebook was conducting tis business in relation to teenagers and adolescents.

One of the photos that she had taken, a screenshot from one of Facebook’s internal presentations was particularly enlightening. It was from one of tens of thousands of pages of internal Facebook research that Frances had taken with her when she left.

That photograph’s reproduced in Jonathan Haidt’s book, The Anxious Generation. It’s of a young woman at the centre of the picture with a dotted circle that surrounding her, with three bubbles to either side of her, and one above, with the one of the following words in each bubble: “Novelty”, “Reward” and “Emotion”. The caption to the image says:

Teens' decisions and behavior are mainly driven by emotion, the intrigue of novelty and reward. While these all seem positive, they make teens very vulnerable at the elevated levels they operate on. Especially in the absence of a mature frontal cortex to help impose limits on the indulgence in these.

This is a great acknowledgement that the social media companies, well certainly Facebook, are aware that children at this stage of their development have not fully developed and should not be exploited. 

But in what Jonathon Haidt, in his book The Anxious Generation calls the “Race to the Bottom”, it’s an absolute imperative for it and all of the large social media companies, to come for your kids, because if they don’t the other ones will. Today I’m looking into what this imperative for social media companies – to get more users – even users that shouldn’t be using the internet because of their age means for you and for your children.

Tag words: The Wall Street Journal; Frances Haugen; Facebook; Jonathan Haidt; The Anxious Generation; TikTok; Snapchat; Instagram; Valleywag; Ryan Tate; Steve Jobs; Adam Mosseri; JoJo Siwa; Guillaume Chaslot; David Anderson; OnlyFans;

For businesses that earn their money from selling advertising on the internet, social media, video games and pornography, and from businesses advertising on those platforms that are three imperatives:

1.    Get more users;

2.    Get users to spend more time using the app; and

3.    Get users to post and engage with more content, which attracts other users to the platform.

So how are these goals achieved, and what are the tricks, mainly exploiting scientifically discovered human vulnerabilities? Besides tricks, the awesome power those companies have over politicians is seeing all sorts of concessions being made to them, being facilitated by legislation that doesn’t cramp their style.

Tag words: social media; video games; pornography; human vulnerabilities; Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act; COPPA; Democrat Edward Markey; Instagram; Facebook; Mark Zuckerberg; Jonathon Haidt; The Anxious Generation;

Tristan Harris knew what harm the internet could do to people. I’m sure he could have guessed Alexis Spence’s story because she was an outstanding example of what uncontrolled use of the internet could do to adults, with children being infinitely more vulnerable still.

Alexis Spence was born on Long Island, New York, in 2002. She got her first iPad for Christmas in 2012, when she was 10. At first she used it for Webkinz. Webkinz was a soft toy manufacturer selling a line of stuffed toy animals, along with an electronic game that let children play with a virtual version of their stuffed animal. In 2013, when she was in fifth grade, some of the kids teased her for playing such a childish game. She should be on Instagram they said.

Her parents were very sensibly careful about letting their daughter onto the internet without controls and limitations. She and her brother had to use their screens in the living room – never the bedroom. Alexis’ parents checked her iPad regularly, to see what apps she had. Instagram was banned.

By this age what Alexis’ peers said mattered, was more important than what her parents said. The kids knew how to gey around what parents wanted. She secretly opened an Instagram account herself. She ticked the useless box that confirmed she was 13, which she wasn’t/. She was 11. by stating that she was 13, even though she was 11. She downloaded the app, used it for a while, and then deleted it so her parents wouldn't see it. Then the other kids under 13, taught her, how to hide the app on her home screen under a calculator icon. Now she didn’t have to delete Instagram every day. Her parents eventually found that she had an Instagram account. They began to monitor it and to set restrictions, Alexis made secondary accounts where she could post without their knowledge. What could go wrong? I’ll tell you at the end of this programme.

Tag words: Tristan Harris; Alexis Spence; Google; A Call to Minimize Distraction and Respect Users' Attention; the Center for Humane Technology; email apnea; Android; Gmail; Google Search engine; Jonathon Haidt; The Anxious Generation;

Jonathon Haidt, in his book The Anxious Generation tells this chilling story:

One morning, on a family trip to Vermont in 2016, my six-year-old daughter was playing a video game on my iPad. She called out to me: "Daddy, can you take the iPad away from me? I'm trying to take my eyes off it but I can't." My daughter was in the grip of a variable-ratio reinforcement schedule administered by the game designers, which is the most powerful way to take control of an animal’s behavior short of implanting electrodes in its brain.

At the end of my last programme I talked about psychologist Edward Thorndike putting hungry cats into "puzzle boxes."

Later on in his book Jonathon Haidt returned to the disturbing experience his daughter had experienced with her game, saying:

When my daughter found herself powerless to lift her eyes up from my iPad, what exactly was going on in her brain? Thorndike didn't know about neurotransmitters, but he correctly guessed that the repetition of small pleasures played a big role in laying down those new paths in the brain. Now we know that when an action is followed by a good outcome (such as gaining food, or relieving pain, or just achieving a goal), certain brain circuits involved with learning release a bit of dopamine — the neurotransmitter most centrally involved in feelings of pleasure and pain. The release of dopamine feels good; we register it in our consciousness. But it’s not a passive reward that satisfies us and reduces our craving. Rather, dopamine circuits are centrally involved in wanting, as in "that felt great, I want more!" When you eat a potato chip, you get a small hit of dopamine, which is why you then want the second one even more than you wanted the first one.

In my next few programmes I’m going to be talking about how the companies supplying the social media, video games and pornography have studied how to exploit us and how they have made ruthless use of that knowledge with little or no attempt by governments to restrain them.

Tag words: Jonathon Haidt; The Anxious Generation; variable-ratio reinforcement schedule; social media; emails; video games; pornography; Tristan Harris; God; Google; the Center for Humane Technology; Steve Jobs; gmail; Facebook; Bad Forecasting; Intermittent variable rewards; slot machines; Pinterest; Twitter;

Beginning 2010, smartphones and social media began the systematic destruction of the tail end of the millennials, a significant part of Gen Z, Generation Alpha and ongoing generations. Smartphone technology made it possible, and apps developed in a child brain killing way, thanks to unscrupulous social media companies and app developers. You have to ask do the people at those companies have their own children when you learn something like this.

This is what happened next, particularly with the social media sites, which, in order to make the mega bucks that they do, exploited scientifically discovered vulnerabilities in human psychology. They’re consciously exploiting those vulnerabilities to get our children hooked. If you don’t believe me, here’s what Sean Parker, the first president of Facebook, said in a 2017 interview:

I, Mark Zuckerberg, Kevin Systrom (cofounder of Instagram), and others understood this consciously. And we did it anyway. God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.

Which was followed by an implied, if not stated, but who cares as long as the money keeps rolling in. No wonder Mark Zuckerberg kept his children off Facebook.

How did we get to this – from the launch of the iPhone in 2007 to today when we have the social media companies offering advertisers dirty deeds done dirt cheap.

Tag words: Smartphones; social media; millennials; Gen Z; Generation Alpha; apps;  Sean Parker; Facebook; Mark Zuckerberg; Kevin Systrom; Instagram; iPhone; Steve Jobs; app providers; free-to-use; advertising-based; Samsung; Android operating system; Apple; iPhone 4; front-facing camera; selfies;Jonathon Haidt; The Anxious Generation; human psychology; Chinese Communist Party; social media; Meta; TikTok;  Snap; Dr Hilary Cass; gender dysphoria; Patricia Weerakoon; The Gender Revolution; teen brain; synapses; neuroplasticity; social brain; Edward Thorndike

Jonathon Haidt, in his book, The Anxious Generation says:

When Steve Jobs announced the first iPhone in June 2007, he described it as "a widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, and breakthrough internet communication device." The first iteration of the iPhone was quite simple by today’s standards, and I have no reason to believe it was harmful to mental health. I bought one in 2008 and found it to be a remarkable digital Swiss Army knife, full of tools I could call on when I needed them. It even had a flashlight! It was not designed to be addictive or to monopolize my attention.

This soon changed with the introduction of software development kits, which allowed third-party apps to be downloaded onto mobile devices. This revolutionary move culminated in the launch of the App Store by Apple in July 2008, starting with 500 apps available. Google followed suit with the Android Market in October 2008, which was rebranded and expanded into Google Play in 2012. By September 2008, the Apple App Store had grown to hold more than 3,000 apps, and by 2013 it had more than 1 million. The Google Play store grew right alongside Apple, reaching 1 million apps in 2013.

This is the story of Pandora’s box.

Tag words: Jonathon Haidt; The Anxious Generation; Steve Jobs; iPhone; iPod; Android; Google Play; App Store; Apple; Tim Cook; Andy Hertzfeld; Bill Atkinson; Steve Wozniak; Walter Isaacson; Palo Alto; Microsoft; Steve Ballmer; Nokia; ROKR phone; Art Levinson; Phil Schiller; iTunes Store; AOL; CompuServe; Prodigy; World Wide Web; Ryan Tate; Valleywag; Bob Dylan;