41–50 of 366 posts
"When you were in school, you only compared yourself to peers at your school and maybe one school over. Now me and my friends compare our looks, accomplishments, and follower counts to everyone within 10 years of us on Instagram"
"Social Media" seems to be a scapegoat for the underlying causes: children are in particular affected by this because they haven't had years/decades to build up mental disorders yet where they justify it to themselves that it's "okay", and the unfairness in the world through the lens of social media, taking the emotional toll head on. Children are very sensitive to their status in society, but we forget this because…
Social media takes every challenge that kids face and amplifies it.
My anecdotal experience is two daughters whose normal teenage challenges have been made worse through social media.
Social media could have been a utopian technology bubbling up unique experiences to cultivate hobbies and interests in the young. Instead the algorithms cater to our base instincts and is amplifying the risk of turning the next generation into mindless addicts.
Social media (and the attention economy) are worse for young brains than drugs. If you came up with a substance that caused young people by the millions to become totally addicted, cost them multiple hours per day, pushed them into depression and suicide, and contributed to inactivity, obesity, loss of attention span, and overall ennui, it would be banned almost immediately. Heck, if you proposed a tracking system th…
Don't most teenagers spend most of their time socializing with other teenagers?
My pre-internet teenage "social networking" was full of traumatic times. Has that not been the case of teenagers forever?
I guess this study is reporting an measurable increase above the "normal" amount? That seems like it would be very hard to measure.
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.
http://www.nautil.us/blog/studies-shoot-down-techs-harmful-e...
> A new study in Nature Human Behaviour, which looked at data from more than 350,000 adolescents, also found that digital tech use mattered little to kids’ well-being. The authors, Amy Orben and Przybylski, argue that prior research, which examined the impact of social media on teens and tweens, was based on weak correlations and insufficiently comprehensive methods, and therefore drew false conclusions.
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.
However, I wonder if the simplest strategy that works when you have to get along with everyone is that you have to become an noisy asshole that overreacts to real "enemies" over imagined slights.
The article mentions a myriad of factors that correlate with mental health issues going into adolescence. It’s interesting that the headline targets social media, as the body of the article doesn’t seem to highlight it as an especially strong correlation. As a side note, the differing trends of boys and girls after adolescence is really interesting. > However, it recognised that girls' self-esteem and wellbeing stabi…
I downvoted all the popular comments here which were ready to agree with the causation despite the research making no comment on that at all: the complete lack of critical thinking is why this gets to be the chosen headline. Pure clickbait.
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)
> One in three girls was unhappy with their personal appearance by the age of 14, compared with one in seven at the end of primary school.
That comparison doesn't support the hypothesis. It should have been compared to teenagers from 10 years ago. Otherwise, you can't rule out the effect of growing up on the mental health if these girls.