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Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents

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

#71
I'm trying to teach my 10 year old son.

He's not on social media, but does play games online with others.

I'm working really hard to enforce a sort of "If it isn't positive, you don't feel good about it... time to not do it for a while / find another game / people to play with."

I'm trying to teach him to evaluate and shape his own experiences online and make choices based on that.

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

#72
post #45

doesn't that headline essentially say "teenagers damage teenagers' mental health"? 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.

Indeed. I always find it strange when people are shocked by bullying in schools or teenagers being jerks to each other. Didn't everyone witness that? Every single person at my high school could tell you who was bullied.

At least with us geezers there's no trace of it ... now nothing gets deleted. That's a new stress for sure.

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

#73
post #40

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)

Thanks for sharing. The paper did seem a bit lacking on certain causal details.

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

#75
post #33

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.

"When you know it isn't true".

Really?

Teenagers are addicted to social media and adults get addicted to news media.

Both are based on fear mongering and the fear of missing out. Do you not see that underneath the problem is the same?

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

#76
post #50
post #40

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)

that's what I thought when I read the article. > 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.

I'm surprised its only one in three. In the 80s I would have guessed that at least half of 14 year old girls ( I was one ) were unhappy with their appearance.

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

#77
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

> Social media damages everyone's mental health it seems. Does it? I've been using social media extensively for almost 30 years now (and now building social platforms for nearly a decade), and a lot of the biggest opportunities I've gotten in my life/career have come from social media. Whatever anxiety it can cause on a day-to-day basis, I feel like you more than make back in various benefits over the long term.

You literally just said it, it causes anxiety on a day to day basis. Whether you're handling that anxiety well or not, it's not healthy to be managing anxiety on a daily basis.

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

#78
post #65
post #24

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…

I've always been a bit extreme on this but I more than ever believe that it's insane that we consider that leaving teenagers with unsupervised internet access is reasonable. Maybe I'm prude or naive but I remember vividly when I first saw a pornographic movie at like around 17. It really shook me at the time. I wasn't traumatized or anything but it made a strong impact on me. These days I expect that most teens exper…

I agree that kids shouldn’t use the internet unsupervised, but what is the alternative? We were all 15 once. It is 100% impossible to stop kids from using the internet if they want to. So what’s the alternative?

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

#79
post #65
post #24

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…

I've always been a bit extreme on this but I more than ever believe that it's insane that we consider that leaving teenagers with unsupervised internet access is reasonable. Maybe I'm prude or naive but I remember vividly when I first saw a pornographic movie at like around 17. It really shook me at the time. I wasn't traumatized or anything but it made a strong impact on me. These days I expect that most teens exper…

I’ve been saying that the internet was designed by engineers, for engineers. I don’t mean this literally, but in the sense that methodical, reasonable adults built out these systems without thinking about how the average person, let alone teenager, would be using it.

And at this point even a lot of engineers I know fall into the traps of addiction and echo chambers quite readily. I find of Tristan Harris’s “pointing supercharged AI at our brains” line to be accurate.

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

#80
post #65
post #24

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…

I've always been a bit extreme on this but I more than ever believe that it's insane that we consider that leaving teenagers with unsupervised internet access is reasonable. Maybe I'm prude or naive but I remember vividly when I first saw a pornographic movie at like around 17. It really shook me at the time. I wasn't traumatized or anything but it made a strong impact on me. These days I expect that most teens exper…

There's definitely some bad things I saw too soon on the internet but if I'd not had access at a young age to it and my own computer I absolutely would not be where I am currently. There are many bad influences, but in my case I'd take all of them for the things I learned in my journey. I'd prefer of course to find ways to minimize them but not by way of abstinence
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