<story><title>Her Facebook life looked perfect. How social media masks mental illness (2015)</title><url>https://www.cbc.ca/news/trending/her-facebook-life-looked-perfect-madison-holleran-suicide-highlights-how-social-media-masks-mental-illness-1.3071302</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>motohagiography</author><text>A useful analogy is to think about social media in terms of steroid use in cycling.&lt;p&gt;An athlete on the Tour de France knows most winners cheat and the instance of cheaters in the standings clusters densely toward the top.&lt;p&gt;To even qualify for the game with cheaters, you need to either be a standard deviation better than they are without their cheat, or compromise and also cheat, which in turn legitimizes their tactics.&lt;p&gt;Social media exacerbates nascent mental illness by creating this same double bind for young people, where to &amp;quot;succeed,&amp;quot; in life by getting access to cliques and networks, school placements, job opportunities, and investment opportunities, you need to &amp;quot;play the game,&amp;quot; which today means to fabricate an image of performative conventional success and the perception you are a viable centre of attention.&lt;p&gt;They know it&amp;#x27;s wrong, everyone else knows it&amp;#x27;s probably wrong, but the whole exercise is a temporary suspension of disbelief in exchange for lottery style rewards, provided by sponsors.&lt;p&gt;Good news on both fronts is you can enjoy riding bicycles or any other sport, and indeed life, without the often horrific and spiritually hollow compromises of elite competition, which social media seems to approximate.&lt;p&gt;The greatest irony is that it is in more humble and private pursuits where most of the real stories of courage, dignity, and personal triumph that people only fake in performances on social media can truly be found.</text></comment>
<story><title>Her Facebook life looked perfect. How social media masks mental illness (2015)</title><url>https://www.cbc.ca/news/trending/her-facebook-life-looked-perfect-madison-holleran-suicide-highlights-how-social-media-masks-mental-illness-1.3071302</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>strikelaserclaw</author><text>Social media is a slow acting poison. It&amp;#x27;s extensive damaging effects will only be felt in 10-20 years. For the most part, it amplifies all the negative traits of humanity, twitter encourages ad hominem style debates and substanceless statements from all strata of soceity. Instagram&amp;#x2F;FB takes the need for human validation and the need to keep pretenses among our peers to a global scale. The next generation will be much more comfortable behind a screen where they can maintain an illusory persona than in real life. This is not taking into accounts the addictive nature of social media in general and how they employ research scientists to work on making their products more addictive.</text></comment>