Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents • Hacker News Board

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

#111

Post by shadowgovt » Wed, Jan 27, 2021, 3:56 PM UTC

jefftk wrote: 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)

I also wonder how they controlled for content vs. medium.

The news of the world has been pretty bad all around, getting worse and worse over the past decade. I can't help but wonder if being online plugs someone more deeply into that news, and the actual cause of the damage to one's mental health is more exposure to multi-sourced narratives unfiltered by the editorial voice often employed by traditional news media.

What if these young people are showing signs of mental trauma because mental trauma is a predictable reaction to being informed about the state of the world, and being more online leaves one more informed?

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

#112

Post by OmniiTyler » Wed, Jan 27, 2021, 3:56 PM UTC

It is heartsickening that this is the result of current social media implementation. As others have mentioned, it is largely caused by this attention economy (as I've heard Tristan Harris of https://www.humanetech.com/ call it) - where the apps most used today are made to be addictive and consume our attention as much as possible.

I have been working on a more intimate, less addictive, social media and messaging application that I hope can be part of a trend of new apps that help solve this problem. I believe one of the features in current apps that makes them so addictive, for teens especially, is the endless stream of content they have access to - they can view hours and hours of videos from celebrities they don't personally know, content creators they have never met, brands, etc. If we can scale back the endless stream of content (which leads to doom-scrolling), that might be one approach to helping limit screen time without sacrificing the meaningful connection to friends and family that social media enables.

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

#113

Post by TeaDrunk » Wed, Jan 27, 2021, 3:57 PM UTC

jameslk wrote: post #47

These studies seem to keep contradicting each other: 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 ba…

It might make more sense to say that social media usage is just one large aspect of a child- like the presence or lack of presence of supportive adult figures, the presence or lack of presence of food security, good education, physical safety, etc.

I'm sure a teenager who runs exclusively in cutting or pro-anorexia social circles online is a much different teenager to one who primarily uses the internet to keep up to date on horse shows.

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

#114

Post by kibwen » Wed, Jan 27, 2021, 3:58 PM UTC

csallen wrote: post #102

titzer wrote: 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…

Amusingly, you could analyze anything this way if you ignore the benefits and only look at the costs. "Planes are an outrage! Imagine if you proposed a system that required hours of everyone's time, cost them hundreds of dollars, forced them to sit in cramped positions, and subjected them to invasive scans and searches of their personal materials." "How are schools allowed! They literally imprison our kids for upward…

Rather than alluding to vague upsides, can you list what upsides you want to assert that social media provides, so that we can do as you say and perform a cost/benefit analysis? As both an early adopter and former user of both Facebook and Twitter, my eventual conclusion was that whatever benefits they offered were vastly outweighed by the mental toll they took on me.

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

#115

Post by titzer » Wed, Jan 27, 2021, 3:59 PM UTC

csallen wrote: post #102

titzer wrote: 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…

Amusingly, you could analyze anything this way if you ignore the benefits and only look at the costs. "Planes are an outrage! Imagine if you proposed a system that required hours of everyone's time, cost them hundreds of dollars, forced them to sit in cramped positions, and subjected them to invasive scans and searches of their personal materials." "How are schools allowed! They literally imprison our kids for upward…

> But you can't accurately assess the whole picture without taking the upsides into account, too.

Trust me, with trillion dollar corporations pushing their propaganda nonstop and self-important, self-appointed lords of industry convincing themselves every little tweak to their website is world-changing, the "upsides" need no signal boost from me.

Sorry to be a bit of a downer, but we absolutely should be talking about the downsides instead of listening to over-powerful CEOs tell us how great their crack is.

Also, you forgot that planes emit CO2, which is not just a subjective judgment, but is objectively bad for our planet in large quantities. ;)

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

#116

Post by sosuke » Wed, Jan 27, 2021, 4:00 PM UTC

xxpor wrote: post #83

simias wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Just wondering, how old are you? I'm 30, so myspace and Facebook showed up only once I was in high school, but everything you describe was still available on the web before social media. Shock sites were huge (goatse, tubgirl, etc), and I remember watching a beheading with a chainsaw by a Mexican cartel. And of course porn was around too. The difference with social media is the "keeping up with the Joneses" except no…

I have distinct memories of a website Defvac or Defecation Vacation. Morgue photos and other terrible content. This was between 1995 and 1998 I think?

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

#117

Post by vulcan01 » Wed, Jan 27, 2021, 4:00 PM UTC

jp555 wrote: post #72

MattGaiser wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think people my age (high school) fully understand

> nothing gets deleted

Mean people say and do equivalent things on social media as in person. Although, I must say, this lockdown is probably a blessing to those who are consistently bullied at school, as now they're able to at least physically avoid them.

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

#118

Post by mumblemumble » Wed, Jan 27, 2021, 4:00 PM UTC

Zelphyr wrote: post #107

mumblemumble wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is my experience. I disconnected from social media, and my social life immediately died. Friends only communicate with each other through Facebook, so I'm really only staying in regular contact with my very closest friends anymore. Most of it I don't miss, because social media has also reduced the quality of communication to the level of gossip, but what I do miss out on is any sort of invitations to social gath…

I deleted my social media almost ten years ago and I feel like I have a stronger social network now than I had before. The key thing I think I may have done differently is that I got involved in things that provided opportunities to be engaged with people. For example; I joined my local Masonic lodge and started doing Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. Between those two things alone I find I have regular enough interactions with a…

So, it's not that opportunities to socialize don't exist. It's that an ever increasing number of them are being mediated through social media. Which means that the list of non-social-media options in one's community likely caters to an ever decreasing variety of interests.

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

#119

Post by op03 » Wed, Jan 27, 2021, 4:00 PM UTC

csallen wrote: post #102

titzer wrote: 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…

Amusingly, you could analyze anything this way if you ignore the benefits and only look at the costs. "Planes are an outrage! Imagine if you proposed a system that required hours of everyone's time, cost them hundreds of dollars, forced them to sit in cramped positions, and subjected them to invasive scans and searches of their personal materials." "How are schools allowed! They literally imprison our kids for upward…

This is not about upsides and downsides. The truth is execs in Twitter, Facebook and Youtube had no clue what upsides and downside would be produced by the system they created.

The happily took credit for the upsides and for the longest time, like almost a decade, laughed out of the room anyone talking about the downsides.

Such people are still in charge of these fucking companies.

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

#120

Post by darepublic » Wed, Jan 27, 2021, 4:02 PM UTC

simias wrote: post #65

titzer wrote: 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…

Screens are a legit drug, and unfortunately I'm a user. It's worse for kids growing up into this, at least when I was a child screen time was limited by the kid show time slots, ofc its available 24/7, several firehoses worth at all times. Not a lot of available resources to combat this, except individual efforts Im afraid.