Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 366 posts

Re: Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents

#31

Post by paganel »

croes wrote: post #12
twiss wrote: post #4

Loneliness damages peoples' mental health, too. Is there some chance that, for mental health, the ordering goes "in-person interaction > social media interaction > no interaction at all"? Then of course if you compare social media interaction with in-person interaction you may conclude that social media = bad, but the causality may (in part) be the other way around, as the article says: > “Those who feel worse may tu…

You can't order it by the type of interaction. "I used to think that the worst thing in life was to end up alone. It’s not. The worst thing in life is to end up with people who make you feel all alone." What makes social media so bad is that hundreds, thousands and more from all over the world can attack you. In-person thats seldom the case. On the other hand, you can more easily ignore online comments than real life…

> On the other hand, you can more easily ignore online comments than real life comments.

Not sure if I'm the only doing that but in many, many cases I just ignore the reddit red envelope (I open it in new tab and close that tab instantly with Cmd+W), I choose to which comments of mine to answer directly (if the case) by going straight to them, so to speak, and see if there's anything in there.

Granted, I'm not strong enough to do that all the time, but it helps, nonetheless.

Re: Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents

#33

Post by tgv »

OneGuy123 wrote: post #14

Lets not pretend that the current news media is any different. There is no objective fact reporting, only fear mongering.

What motivates you to reply that, when you know it isn't true? There's been news media for more than a century now, and it is not known to cause addiction and depression in teenagers.

Re: Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents

#35

Post by daenz »

ChrisRR wrote: post #8

Social media damages everyone's mental health it seems. For some reason it seems to bring out the worst in so many people, and people think it's now acceptable to post online the awful thoughts that they would've kept to themselves

The communities are too big. We're not meant to socialize frequently with people with whom there are rarely repercussions for how we treat them.

Re: Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents

#36

Post by kyrra »

mikece wrote: post #23

If you have not seen it, the documentary "The Social Dilemma" (currently only available on Netflix) goes over this in detail, with first-hand accounts from the people who created the "addiction algorithms"... as well as references to research on how self-harm and suicide attempts in teens and pre-teens has skyrocketed since the advent of social media.

There were parts of that documentary that were good, but it was also way over the top. And funny enough Netflix was never mentioned in it, because it was produced by them (Even though binge watching is a thing). It also felt like it dived into conspiracy theories without a lot of backing.

The funniest part for the entire thing is that they spent a lot of time of how do we solve this problem of social media. There was a lot of just weird things brought up in the documentary itself. But the real answer was actually in the interviews in the credit, which is where it just says to get off of social media.

It did not feel like we're trying to be honest, rather they wanted to be controversial.

Re: Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents

#37

Post by mightybyte »

bnralt wrote: post #18

I'm starting to wonder if mass media in general is bad for our mental health, and if we'd be better off unplugging as much as we can from everything - social media, TV, radio, Hacker News, etc. and spending more time with our community. I suppose the problem is, most communities are completely addicted to this stuff, so we're left in a situation where it's hard for most people to unplug for any long period of time wi…

Until six months ago, I consumed very little mainstream media or social media. I started following the news leading up to the presidential election because it seemed like this one would be more consequential than most. I can definitely say that I've been meaningfully less happy / more anxious / etc as a result. I definitely intend to scale back my news / media consumption to the level it was before in the near future.

Re: Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents

#38

Post by tgv »

pmiller2 wrote: post #29
bjt2n3904 wrote: post #15

There are entire subreddits dedicated to mocking this point, like /r/PhonesAreBad, and /r/InsaneParents. I doubt half the screenshots they post of text message conversations are even real -- but the point gets across. Phones are the most wonderful thing that keep us connected to each other, and only crude luddites living in the dark ages who don't understand the benefit they provide would take them away from a kid do…

There’s a subreddit about how phones are bad that most people probably access on their phones? I think my head just exploded.

The name of the subreddit should be read as "look at all these idiots saying that phones are bad". Or perhaps r/PhonesAreBadMKay

Re: Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents

#40

Post by jefftk »

Here's the paper: https://epi.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/EPI-PT_Young-p...

It's all correlational (observing that people with higher social media use are worse off in various ways). This approach is not capable of detecting reverse causation (people use social media more because they are unhappy) or third causes (something else causes people to both use more social media and also be unhappy)

Post reply on HN