[HN Gopher] Social media addiction linked to cyberbullying
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Social media addiction linked to cyberbullying
Author : giuliomagnifico
Score : 74 points
Date : 2021-03-30 17:44 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (news.uga.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (news.uga.edu)
| Jaygles wrote:
| I wonder if social media had the potential to be a force of good
| or if it was doomed from the start. I'd like to run an AB
| experiment where social media companies didn't optimize for
| engagement. And maybe an AB experiment where they tried to
| optimize for healthy usage, even if it harmed engagement.
| TheJoYo wrote:
| I've been using a chronological order social media for a couple
| of years now and I wouldn't trade it for a sorting algo. Sure,
| I miss some things that are likely interesting and sometimes I
| need to mute some that post too often. I think content tagging
| is what people were really asking for when they got "optimized
| for engagement."
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Is there a mainstream social media platform that still
| supports a chronological order? Twitter is the closest one
| but as far as I know they still periodically reset the feed
| to the algorithmic one, overriding your previous decision.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Old school forums. I'm a member of quite a few hobby-
| related forums and they are great.
|
| Basically anything without crowdsourced voting that affects
| placement of the message. That could be obvious things like
| reddit posts, and other things like online reviews.
| Effortless "likes" and "upvotes" produce the worst feeds.
| sefrost wrote:
| Strava brought back the chronological feed and seemed to
| get a lot of good press for it at the time.
|
| https://road.cc/content/tech-news/271757-strava-has-
| brought-...
| renewiltord wrote:
| Sure. Instagram was that. They have limiters that will tell you
| to take a break, they have a marker that tells you you've
| caught up, and the default view is subscriptions-only.
|
| I only see my friends' stuff on Instagram and it's lovely.
| Though they've recently changed to stick random stuff
| underneath the last post from a friend which does diminish the
| point somewhat.
| Syonyk wrote:
| I don't think social media was doomed from the start - there
| were many years of healthy enough communities (I'm mostly
| familiar with LiveJournal in the early 2000s) that didn't have
| all the downsides of modern social media. You saw updates in
| most-recent-first order, if you refreshed the page you got the
| same thing (perhaps with a new update at the top, but it was
| easy to tell when you'd caught up), and if you had too much
| stuff to read, you figured out how to trim some of it away
| ("FRIENDS CUT!"). The cost to operate the infrastructure was
| fairly minimal, and it accomplished most of the things we
| actually would like from social media without the downsides.
|
| What we haven't proved is that you can have social media run by
| a publicly traded, ad-revenue-funded company without all sorts
| of harmful effects (with the main interface being smartphones
| with push notifications). That's where all the nasty
| "engagement" effects come from - trying to drive eyeballs to
| ads to improve revenue. It's very much a zero-sum game - every
| pair of eyeballs has 24 hours in the day, so the goal is to
| command their attention for as many of those hours as possible.
| That's where the evil creeps in.
| naravara wrote:
| > I'd like to run an AB experiment where social media companies
| didn't optimize for engagement. And maybe an AB experiment
| where they tried to optimize for healthy usage, even if it
| harmed engagement.
|
| This is just a theory but my fear is that social media that's
| optimized for "healthy usage" probably looked more like the
| forum and blog culture that social media killed.
|
| Optimizing for engagement means you basically have a genetic
| algorithm on your hands for surfacing the content with the most
| "viral-potential." Eventually that stuff eats the healthy parts
| of the internet because people inevitably talk about the viral
| stuff that's happening, which means your healthy-use forum is
| nonetheless revolving around the conversation in the viral
| centers.
|
| From there it's a matter of time before people start going
| directly to the viral source to keep up with the context and
| conversation. And once they're there, because it optimizes for
| engagement, it crowds out their use of everything else.
|
| So there's a natural selective pressure here. Optimizing for
| engagement/addiction gets you a network effect that leads to
| overshadowing any other type of socializing. Unless there's
| some mechanism to actively select against virality and
| engagement they will naturally rise to the top even independent
| of ad-impression incentives.
| undefined1 wrote:
| > The study also found that adolescent males are more likely to
| engage in cyberbullying than females, aligning with past studies
| that show aggressive behaviors tend to be more male driven.
|
| for a certain definition of aggression. but social media bullying
| is a Mean Girls phenomenon. it's reputation and character
| assassination, which is aggressive behavior. male aggression
| tends to be physical and they spend more time playing video
| games, while females spend more time on social media. as a
| result, girls are seeing higher rates of depression compared to
| boys.
|
| here's the research on this topic that Jonathan Haidt and other
| academics are maintaining;
|
| https://docs.google.com/document/d/1w-HOfseF2wF9YIpXwUUtP65-...
| Solvitieg wrote:
| But if you remove the ability to be physically aggressive,
| would you expect the bullying to stop?
| abduhl wrote:
| What is cyber bullying defined as in the study?
|
| I kill you in Counter Strike and drop a spray. Were you just
| cyber bullied?
|
| I kill you in COD and call you a newbie via voice. Were you
| just cyber bullied?
|
| I'm on your team in Dota and tell you that you're terrible
| and should uninstall the game. Were you just cyber bullied?
|
| I tell our mutual friend group that you're dating Jan the
| Man. Were you just cyber bullied?
|
| I tell everyone at our school that you're bad at Fortnite.
| Were you just cyber bullied?
|
| I leak deep fake images of you getting fucked by a horse.
| Were you just cyber bullied?
|
| The answer to all these questions might be yes in this study,
| especially if it's based on self reporting.
| ExcavateGrandMa wrote:
| The short of witnessing things...
|
| The scope from this mistake(social media's captiving attentionn
| not to say heritage alienation...), gonna have without preceding
| impact(s) to our societies... and this already materializing
| nowaday...
| cwkoss wrote:
| I bet internet use is also highly correlated with cyberbullying
| swayvil wrote:
| Being online leads to a deep mental disturbance that just grows
| and grows.
|
| It's like you're hungry and you're reading through an endless
| stack of menus with this weird idea that the menus will sate your
| hunger. And you just keep on reading, about sandwiches, pizza and
| Chinese food. But none of the reading helps. You just keep on
| getting hungrier.
|
| I think that the Buddhists talk about this state, in their
| version of Hell.
|
| It's only natural that this would lead to "demoniacal" behavior.
| exo-pla-net wrote:
| You're being downvoted, but studies suggest your intuition is
| correct.
|
| People engage with social media at least in part out of social
| urges. However, consumption of social media leads to increased
| feelings of loneliness: https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/is-
| a-steady-diet-of-soci...
|
| So, social media is indeed a diet that just makes one hungrier.
|
| But does loneliness lead to more aggressive / "bullying"
| behavior? This hasn't been well studied, but evidence suggests
| this is the case:
| http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/comm/malamuth/pdf/85jspr2.pdf
| ipsocannibal wrote:
| Nice to see research coming out of UGA showing up here on HN. Go
| Dawgs.
| IndySun wrote:
| Humans, their personalities and traits, have barely altered in
| 1000s of years. The internet is polarising the worst aspects.
| Humans haven't changed, but their worst behaviour is unleashed by
| anonymity.
| lbj wrote:
| I feel like every week there's a new study that implies causation
| where none is proven and has no link to a root cause.
|
| "Possession of car linked to car crashes"
| rland wrote:
| When you interact online, you fundamentally are interacting with
| only yourself. It is a solipsistic endeavor. You fundamentally
| choose which comments to respond to; unlike the real world, where
| a conversation occurs between two people, you can instantly drive
| into a conversation whenever you see fit, and leave whenever you
| wish also.
|
| Therefore, the choice of _which_ conversation, which comment, is
| entirely yours. And since the comments available are literally
| never-ending, you have the ultimate choice as to which you are
| responding. Therefore, every conversation you have is with a
| version of a person you have constructed in your head.
|
| This is what enables people to be mean and rude on the internet.
| It's because they are talking to a construct which is
| fundamentally in their own head, often times with their own nasty
| internal conflicts applied.
|
| This is also the fundamental mistake people make about the online
| world being a place where "discourse" can change anyone's
| internal landscape. It cannot, because it every discourse on the
| internet is by definition completely a subset of the ego of the
| single individual.
| inventtheday wrote:
| so basically, you are actually me? Cool.
| swiley wrote:
| That's a neat idea but what about people who only see each
| other in real time chats (voice or text)? You can stop reading
| but AFK you can also walk away and it's pretty much the same.
| rland wrote:
| I think texts/video calls/etc. isn't social media, it's much
| more like conversation.
|
| That's why people (in general) are not nearly as mean or rude
| on a voice call or a 1-to-1 text chat. When you hear
| someone's voice or actually engage with a real time
| conversation (like a text chat, which you can't _as easily_
| just walk away from), they develop an interiority to you that
| forces you to empathize with them. The physical world is the
| ultimate version of this: seeing a person 's body and face
| forces you to acknowledge their internal life, because the
| shared physical experience forces it. That's why it's a much
| higher barrier to bully or be bullied in the physical world.
|
| There are exceptions to this, obviously. Tight knit forums,
| irc rooms, small moderated communities have an empathetic
| cost of interaction. But those are not really "social media",
| imho.
| near wrote:
| > Therefore, the choice of which conversation, which comment,
| is entirely yours.
|
| It's not that simple though. You're likely to be part of a
| broader community and simply deciding to leave that community,
| and all of your friends, over the actions of one person, is not
| very reasonable. Often times we are forced to be around people
| we don't particularly like. When that person does something
| valuable, they get a level of protection from being reprimanded
| for their bad behavior that isn't afforded to outsiders of the
| group, so kicking out such people often becomes difficult as
| well.
| motohagiography wrote:
| So sadism, basically. Social media, it's like the internet but
| without reason or accountability.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| What I'm not seeing is what is going on in the lives of these
| people that fosters such negative behavior. These studies almost
| never ask questions like "Are you being abused by your parents?"
| or "Have you been molested?"
|
| There is this presumption that they engage in malicious behavior
| simply because they think they can get away with it, basically.
| It's an "idle hands are the devil's workshop" theory and
| generally lacks substance.
|
| Sure, people do all kinds of stupid stuff when bored and when
| they have time on their hands, but why are these young
| adolescents online all the time? Does this mean they have a
| terrible home life and no one is paying attention to them?
|
| I don't really like proxies like "Spends a lot of time online." I
| spend a lot of time online. I don't bully people.
|
| For me, the internet is a means to have a life when that wouldn't
| otherwise be possible. I earn income online. I have hobbies
| online. Etc.
|
| I really dislike the subtext that "spending time online is bad
| and more time spent online is worse." I would guess it is
| something more like "Spending time online to try to escape your
| shitty life in an abusive household means you take your baggage
| out on internet strangers because that seems safer and more do-
| able than resolving your thorny problems."
| vsareto wrote:
| >These studies almost never ask questions like "Are you being
| abused by your parents?" or "Have you been molested?"
|
| Wouldn't there be worse behavior problems than internet
| bullying if that was the case? Like, physical bullying or
| violence or worse?
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| Not necessarily.
|
| I was molested and raped as a child. Most people had no idea.
|
| I did attempt suicide at age 17 and I began making two grades
| per year below a C starting after I was raped at the age of
| twelve and I spent time in an insane asylum.
|
| But I also was one of the top three students of my graduating
| high school class, had the highest SAT scores of my
| graduating high school class, won a National Merit
| Scholarship (to UGA, in fact) based on those scores, etc.
|
| Most people are not talented at identifying indicators of
| abuse and people in abusive situations are often doing
| everything in their power to find some high road solution
| because they know they are at risk of being blamed and ending
| up in jail or some shit.
|
| When I was institutionalized in my teens, I was initially
| presumed to be a badly behaved teenager. I distinctly
| remember having a conversation with a staff member who
| assumed I was just some asshole teenager and they markedly
| changed their tune when they found out I was a victim of
| being molested and raped and I was suicidal and that was why
| I was hospitalized, not because I was doing bad things to
| other people.
| tarboreus wrote:
| Just want to say...I'm sorry all of that happened to you.
| [deleted]
| echelon wrote:
| I wonder what happens to bullies when they grow up.
|
| Do they start behaving good to other people?
|
| Do they recognize their past behavior and feel bad for it?
| tarboreus wrote:
| They sign up for Twitter, if they haven't already. Possibly
| go into politics.
| skim_milk wrote:
| In this field, sending out surveys with "objective" questions
| to a large amount of people to collect data is the only way to
| get your research deemed "scientific". I think everyone would
| agree that the role of the scientists and writers of these pop-
| psych articles should be to interpret the point and help
| readers come to an insightful and true conclusion like yours,
| but really everyone in the psychology and journalism fields are
| forced to run a "I'm just reporting the facts like my boss
| wants me to" mantra to keep their job.
|
| It's kind of sad that this academic system makes it so only
| well-paid therapists get to do that, because of course looking
| at the current state of affairs in the world and coming to and
| reporting on and building insight on the logical conclusion
| that only hurt people hurt people isn't "scientific research"
| because the peers in your field only allow themselves and
| others to repeat what the numbers in the excel spreadsheet say.
| The psychology and objective journalism fields are great
| examples of dysfunctional academic systems.
|
| I like Alice Miller's hot take on her field in her book "For
| Your Own Good". I'm just going to straight up copy her text:
|
| _Those who swear by statistical studies and gain their
| psychological knowledge from those sources will see my efforts
| to understand the children Christiane and Adolf [Hitler] as
| unnecessary and irrelevant. They would have to be given
| statistical proof that a given number of cases of child abuse
| later produced almost the same number of murderers. This proof
| cannot be provided, however, for the following reasons_. Alice
| Miller lists off 1) child abuse takes place in secret 2)
| testimony of victims on their own suffered child abuse is often
| very flawed to protect their parents 3) experts in criminology
| have already noted this trend in their scientific research
|
| _Even if statistical data confirm my own conclusions, I do not
| consider them a reliable source because they are often based on
| uncritical assumptions and ideas that are either meaningless
| (such as "a sheltered childhood"), vague, ambiguous ("received
| a lot of love"), or deceptive ("the father was strict but
| fair"), or that even contain obvious contradictions ("he was
| loved and spoiled"). This is why I do not care to rely on
| conceptual systems whose gaps are so large that the truth
| escapes through them, but rather prefer to make the attempt ...
| to take a different route. I am not searching for statistical
| objectivity but for the subjectivity of the victim in question,
| to the degree that my empathy permits._
| Chazprime wrote:
| I think looking for deeper motivations such as abuse will
| likely prove fruitless in these cases.
|
| A few years ago the 14-year old old daughter of a coworker of
| mine got into a lot of trouble after being revealed as the
| person (cyber)bullying two classmates because they were
| "flaunting their new iPhones on social media too much".
| Anecdotal for sure, but kids can be mean and with the internet
| still offering a veil of anonymity, incidents like this are
| bound to happen.
| [deleted]
| Wohlf wrote:
| I would bet on a large scale it's not people who are being
| abused, just people who are miserable and unhappy with their
| lives for whatever reason.
| junon wrote:
| > for whatever reason
|
| Because we've given every single person a voice and the
| promise that their opinion is just as important as everyone
| else's, despite their understanding or their qualifications,
| and it has made people collectively entitled and vitriolic.
|
| Couple this with absolutely batshit insane current events for
| the last ~5 years and you have massive divide.
|
| Then multiply that by the expansion of technology into every
| day lives, where everyone is connected and has an up-to-date,
| moment-by-moment window into literally thousands of other
| lives, and people get extremely detached from their own
| selves and their own beliefs. They stop thinking for
| themselves, almost entirely.
|
| Not to mention things like Twitter, with quirks like "you
| have to fit very heavy conversations into cute little limited
| messages" so as to even further increase the pressure on
| public discourse.
|
| All of this friction creates heat, so to speak, and people
| start realizing that outside their circles are people who are
| so foreign and different that they MUST be idiot enemies, and
| thus everyone begins to despise each other, categorizing
| people and using assumptions about their character against
| them, all formed from a few blurbs of random information
| either from context or a few textboxes on a social media
| profile.
|
| It's just like when one is unable to effectively communicate,
| they often resort to violence. I firmly believe this is the
| same thing happening online - it's just a huge, crowded
| shouting match and since nothing ever happens despite how
| loud you're screaming, you have to resort to other means to
| get a rise out of someone else.
|
| I'm not a particularly happy person and I really, _really_
| dislike interacting with other people, so I can certainly
| understand why some of this happens. Life sucks for a lot of
| people, and being able to express that whilst having the
| buffer of a computer screen and ethernet cable between you
| and the other person is certainly a "great power, great
| responsibility" type of situation.
| diogenescynic wrote:
| This. It's the modern equivalent of breaking windows on an
| old building or setting off fireworks or some other
| adolescent destructive behavior. It's just they have access
| to a new platform to conduct this behavior on. These people
| always existed--people just didn't have to see it and it
| wasn't easily accessible like it is now.
| luckylion wrote:
| I'm not sure. Bullying, offline and online, is rarely done to
| random people you don't have any connection to and without
| other people. It either ties into offline, i.e. they're
| bullying someone they know, or it's an online community thing
| where some people from some community have fun together
| bullying someone they might not know.
|
| My point is: in both cases it's not "I'm miserable and
| unhappy", it's either a community-building thing, or it's a
| social status thing. If you're bullying someone in school,
| that's a power move to assert status. They're not unhappy,
| they're just trying to get ahead; under different
| circumstances, they'd just mug people to take their money.
| Now they bully them to get more status.
| colloq wrote:
| I don't think it's only adolescents. You can see rich Google
| employees bullying poorer developers on Twitter in the name of
| social justice. Some of the bullies must be at least 50 years
| old.
|
| Social media and Twitter are bad because you can form virtual
| tribes and yield to age-old instincts.
|
| The more individualistic people are, the less they join those
| tribes. Individualists tend to be grumpy though, for which they
| are bullied by the perfect Twitter moralists.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| In recent years, I have found my internet experiences
| enormously frustrating because I used to have real friends
| via internet.
|
| We exchanged Christmas presents. They helped me sort out how
| to raise my challenging children. I always had someone to
| talk with any time of the day or night when I was having
| insomnia or whatever.
|
| And I haven't had stuff like in recent years. I just thought
| it was me because I spent a few years homeless.
|
| But then I run into comments like this one that posit people
| can _either_ connect socially and be assholes _or_ have a
| mind of their own and (implicitly) no friends and be grumpy.
|
| I don't know what the hell is going on in the world, but
| maybe my internet life going to hell isn't just about my life
| going to hell. Maybe there's something else going on and it's
| sort of "coincidence" that my internet life went to hell at
| the same time that my actual life went to hell.
|
| But in my experience life does not compel you to either have
| a mind of your own or have social connections. And having
| social connections doesn't compel you to go along with being
| part of a lynch mob or some shit.
|
| That's never how my life worked. I used to have friends _and_
| a mind of my own. I still have a mind of my own, but I 've
| mostly not had friends in a long time.
|
| I kept thinking "I must be doing it wrong," but maybe not.
| Maybe the internet isn't what it used to be or something.
| Shared404 wrote:
| I think partially it's that mainstream social media has
| become a hell-hole.
|
| I've found HN to be much better for discussion in general
| (recognizing that this is not the case for everyone), and
| have participated in IRC rooms and whatnot where if I spent
| more time I could probably consider the people there
| friends, while still retaining individualism.
|
| I tend towards grumpy isolationism however, so I may not be
| a good standard.
| v_london wrote:
| I think your observations are accurate. I've also noticed
| the problem, and that private-ish group conversations
| like WhatsApp groups and small Discord servers are so
| much better than Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and co. The
| only problem is discoverability -- because groups like
| these are private, it's very hard to discover the ones
| you'd like to join.
|
| I'm currently working on an early-stage startup on this
| space, and we're specifically trying to solve the
| discoverability problem while keeping the group chats
| themselves small and private (or at least private
| enough). Do you think you could see yourself using
| something like this?
| Lammy wrote:
| My personal rule of thumb is that I don't trust anybody whose
| Twitter profile picture is a photo of themselves.
| Sodman wrote:
| This is wild to me, as my rule of thumb is the exact
| opposite! I assume anybody whose profile picture isn't
| themselves is either a bot, a troll, or a throwaway account
| they use for comments they know will be controversial. It's
| the equivalent of having a username like "@John448172312".
| (Not that you should really trust either group to argue
| anything in good faith on Twitter).
| echelon wrote:
| That's an unfortunate heuristic. What is your basis for
| this?
| Lammy wrote:
| Unwarranted self-importance. Bonus points if it's a photo
| of them on a stage holding a microphone with that open-
| palm I-am-giving-a-TED-talk gesture :)
| ryandrake wrote:
| This is probably a pretty decent heuristic actually! My
| guess, as an armchair psychologist, is that narcissism
| and a toxic need to generate attention and drama are
| highly correlated with constantly taking selfies and
| sharing them. Look for the profile picture and just a
| quick glance at the feed, and if it's full of selfies,
| you probably have a pretty good idea of who you're
| dealing with.
| raffraffraff wrote:
| I know someone who hates pictures of herself, never took
| a selfie in her life, but switched to a picture of
| herself and used her real name simply because it's less
| likely she'll say something stupid/inflammatory in the
| middle of an argument. If you're using some random name
| like chickenslippers1981 and have a pic of a cat, you
| might feel less like being thoughtful. You can always
| walk away from chickenslippers1981/cat, but you can't
| walk away from yourself.
| endisneigh wrote:
| I've thought about this problem a lot - I want to create a social
| network that has the following attributes:
|
| - $1 a year to participate
|
| - You must read posts/articles to reply. Imagine the mechanism in
| which this is determined to be "perfect."
|
| - No pictures
|
| - Karma is gathered by writing posts that are read a lot, as
| opposed to comments that have a lot of "upvotes."
|
| - Upvotes/downvoting doesn't exist.
|
| From my experience the social media addiction is heightened by 3
| attributes:
|
| 1. pictures
|
| 2. how controversial something is
|
| 3. trolling
|
| The issue though is that a social network like I described would
| be something people wouldn't want to use, so it wouldn't really
| serve to be a place people could go to that's a healthier
| community. It's a tough nut to crack.
| jancsika wrote:
| Alright, "hackers":
|
| How the fuck do I use the adtech delivery system you generously
| gifted to me in order to read the body of a research article[1]
| from this public institution of higher learning?
|
| [1]
| https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/23727810.2020.18...
| yesenadam wrote:
| Hmm the only way I can see right now is to pay US$45 (plus
| local tax) for the 13-page PDF. Which sounds insane.
| grawprog wrote:
| My opinions not so much on the study itself, but the topic of
| general shitty behaviour people seem to display on popular social
| media platforms.
|
| Personally, I think it has less to do with things like anonymity,
| up/downvotes and other gamey systems employed that tend to get
| blamed and more to do with the communities themselves.
|
| Specifically, their size. But also, the willingness of moderators
| to enforce a few basic rules of civility.
|
| I think they suffer from that same phenomenon that makes cities
| on a whole, less friendly than smaller towns and communities. I
| realize there's exceptions, but speaking generally this tends to
| be the case.
|
| To further the comparison a bit, you're also more likely to have
| the police respond with favourable results to personal and petty
| crime in smaller towns.
|
| You can see the same things in smaller internet communities.
| Whether they're pseudonymous or not or whatever kinds of upvoting
| systems they have or not, there's less people, moderators tend to
| respond more quickly to personal attacks and things and usually
| in more reasonable ways than automated algorithms.
|
| Again, generalizing, but when communities are small enough all
| the people participating are recognizable and when moderators are
| active in enforcing those basic rules of conduct, people tend to
| behave a little more reasonably.
|
| As a sidenote, I'll throw HN in as an exception to the size
| thing, because it's a pretty large community, but dang and the
| mods are like super human or something so manage to keep the
| conversation pretty civil most of the time here.
| robbyking wrote:
| > I think they suffer from that same phenomenon that makes
| cities on a whole, less friendly than smaller towns and
| communities.
|
| There is data that shows the opposite is true[1]. While the
| pace of life is faster in urban areas -- which may be jarring
| to people aren't accustom to it -- living in areas with high
| population density teaches people to be courteous and
| respectful.
|
| [1] https://thepointsguy.com/news/are-new-yorkers-friendly/
| superkuh wrote:
| This is so trivial it's useless nonsense. This is like saying
| that that existing in reality is linked to bullying. Yes, sure,
| you have to exist in physical space to be non-cyberbullied. And
| you have to exist in a digital space to by cyberbullied.
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