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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

#211

Post by pietrovismara »

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…

But these companies provide great value to the shareholders! Apparently that's enough to trump any other concern.

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

#212

Post by meowster »

linuxftw wrote: post #89
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…

It's called "parenting" which is not in vogue right now. Currently, people treat children like adults, expecting them to navigate the world as an adult would, and that's dumb. Reject a failed society. It's okay to be an individual, you don't need to be part of the collective.

I think we have different definitions of treating children like adults. It seems to me like they are barely treated as people.

Yes, parenting is not in vogue, and that's the problem. People do not know how to parent. It almost seems like many people are treating them like pets.

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

#213

Post by megaman821 »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #147
tachyonbeam wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never get anything gore shared to me, but I think it's also because I wouldn't stay friends with anyone who sends me that. I think it's weird that, as a society, we're more OK with violence than sex.

Consider how many people saw the shooting of the Trump supporter storming the capitol or the killing of George Floyd. I can't imagine that level of exposure in 2005 or earlier. And this is just gore; we're not talking about sex (also, we don't have to choose between the two, so I don't understand the dichotomous argument).

You think more people saw the shooting of the Trump supporter or George Floyd than saw images from Desert Storm, 9-11, or school shootings? They are all horrible, but I have seen a lot worse stuff pre-2005 than after.

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

#214

Post by pietrovismara »

nyanpasu64 wrote: post #122
kibwen wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To quote @mumblemumble: """ There's another side to this, though. Letting kids roam the internet can give ones who might otherwise be doomed to become misfits an opportunity to find community. Being a queer kid pre-Internet, for example, sucked, and the Web rolling out to households changed a lot of kids' lives. And we have a poor cultural memory of what that experience used to be like, because, before the rise of on…

Social media are not the internet. If Facebook, Instagram and tiktok disappeared tomorrow, the internet would keep existing. In my opinion we would all be better, queer kids included.

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

#215

Post by throwaway894345 »

throwaway2245 wrote: post #176
throwaway894345 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Phillip Morris didn't operate a sophisticated propaganda machine capable of steering national opinion in its own favor and indeed directing the course of democracy (if we are to believe that foreign actors can side-channel attack Twitter's algos to influence elections, then it naturally follows that Twitter can influence elections with direct control over its algorithms). I don't mean this in a contrarian sense (I ag…

> Phillip Morris didn't operate a sophisticated propaganda machine... What? Yes, it did, that's literally what it did do.

I wasn't using "machine" in the figurative sense of an advertising department, I meant "a literal machine", like Twitter's algorithms. I can't imagine Phillip Morris in its heyday having 1% of the influence that Twitter enjoys today.

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

#216

Post by volkl48 »

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…

As far as I can tell, the group that seems to be the most influenced by the sea of disinformation is the people who grew up when that wasn't how the world worked. I see far more of the middle aged/elderly crowd getting sucked into conspiracy nonsense than younger.

I think among people who grew up with the internet, there's less assumption that things are true just because someone said or wrote them. People can and do lie constantly on the internet and without evidence it's not necessarily worth believing.

That there's some "news" outlet just blatantly lying and making things up, even if it looks to be made "professionally" is not surprising to a younger person.

-----------

For personal anectdata:

I'm late 20s and had virtually unsupervised internet access and my own personal computer from about age 8 or so, as my father brought home old parts from work and let me tinker/assemble something, and they didn't watch me too closely. (early DSL adoption meant I wasn't limited for long by speeds, either).

I pirated and played all the violent games, I downloaded lots of porn, and while I was never into "shock"/watching real death/gore, the nature of the internet was such that you were going to run across plenty of it if you spent enough time browsing, I certainly saw a lot.

I turned out to be a fine, reasonably well-adjusted adult, as did most of the friends I know who grew up similarly.

I don't know all the details of their sex lives, but I'm not aware of any winding up with unrealistic expectations from porn. Always seemed like an action movie. Exciting, but not "real".

Most of the shock stuff felt like it just made me more cautious. "That guy got one whack in the head and he died!" was a better argument against getting in a fight than the threat of parental/school punishment is. Same regarding a lot of other potential teenage risk-taking behavior, like reckless driving or getting exceptionally drunk. Watch enough people die or ruin their lives at something and you're a lot more cautious about it.

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To be clear, I'm not suggesting that it's a net positive for kids to view those things at a young age. I'm just not sure that the harm is as large or uniform as people making moral panic claims often make, either.

Also, something like a third of people lose their virginity before 16 (although it's declining) and the median age is ~17 in the US. A lot of your peers were having real-life sex when you ran across porn for the first time. Worrying about them watching porn when plenty of them are having sex.....I don't know it makes much sense at that point.

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Looking back on that time, I'm primarily concerned with how easily I was talking with random strangers in great depth than the content I was watching. While there are some internet friends from old forums and chatrooms I've kept in touch with for 15-20 years now, that I could get to know random strangers like that as a preteen obviously had potential risks. Worked out well for me and I found great communities and interests, but still.

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

#217

Post by mtippett »

TeaDrunk wrote: post #113
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…

You got one too eh? tw sh / tw ed?

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

#218

Post by civilized »

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)

It's funny how correlation proves causation the moment the science makes headlines.

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

#219

Post by scook »

devlopr wrote: post #130
kibwen wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are upsides. From providing self estem from a different source from the local. It has raised awareness like never before. It has provided an income for some. It allows new peer groups not available locally It provides a safer space to interact with strangers. Where we got it wrong was connecting these profiles to real life names. That has ruined people's lives.

To put a finer point on one of yours, social media made very obvious the existence of violence against racial and ethnic minorities by law enforcement, among other social ills.

It's hard and slow work to gain populist support for socially progressive policy. We wouldn't be talking about this stuff were it not for the truths presented to us by the people it affects most profoundly.

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

#220

Post by CountDrewku »

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 generally dislike banning things because a few individuals can't handle it. Punishing those people that have self control seems ridiculous and I hate sin taxes for that reason. However, I think putting restrictions on stuff for younger people that don't have fully developed brains seems perfectly reasonable. If you're under 18 (21 in some cases) you cannot drink, smoke etc. Social Media should be treated the same way.

Unfortunately, laws can only do so much with out invading the privacy of citizens so it's really going to take a large campaign similar to anti-smoking ads in the 90s to get the message out about the cons and parents will HAVE to put their foot down. Although, it seems like a certain portion of our society thinks children should be allowed to make decisions themselves nowadays so I expect backlash at the thought of parents actually stopping their kids from harming themselves.

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