Social media is a cause, not a correlate, of mental illness in teen girls • Hacker News Board

Re: Social media is a cause, not a correlate, of mental illness in teen girls

#51

Post by marcosdumay » Wed, Feb 22, 2023, 8:27 PM UTC

BulgarianIdiot wrote: post #8

The article promises evidence, but it starts by repeating the premise half a dozen times, then offering correlations and loose theories. If there was evidence in there, I missed it. Maybe there was. But even if there was this was a badly formatted article. Why can't people succinctly describe their thesis and then have a nice outline for the fine details on the proof? Is this not something we learn at uni, or even hi…

If you go into the evidence sections, there are many links to articles with evidence there.

The structure on this article is the standard academic one, adapted to a less formal style. The authors first succinctly describe their findings so you can know if you want to read the article at all. Then they fully describe their findings, like you seem to want, and only then they talk about the evidence and how it was gathered.

Re: Social media is a cause, not a correlate, of mental illness in teen girls

#52

Post by invisible » Wed, Feb 22, 2023, 8:27 PM UTC

DevKoala wrote: post #3

I wasn’t aware that there is a media campaign to discredit this finding. Teen suicides exploded in growth YoY the moment smartphones became cheap enough around 2009.

I intuitively just believed this "explosion in growth", but it looks like the reality is that they upticked a little bit since 2009. The suicide rate (and attempts) are still lower than they were in the 90s[0].

0: https://www.childtrends.org/publications/teen-suicide-databa...

Re: Social media is a cause, not a correlate, of mental illness in teen girls

#53

Post by anigbrowl » Wed, Feb 22, 2023, 8:27 PM UTC

IncRnd wrote: post #16

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Oh my god, did you see what Stacy posted last night!" But your daughter missed it because " you didn't let her have an Instagram account!" It seems to me that such worries are well-founded. At best, she made the decision herself and still feels the pain of it.

That's letting kids parent themselves.

You're looking at it in isolation because you are not privy to the kids' social circle. What the gp is describing is a social cost imposed on the non-participant kid. If repeated often, this will lower their status within their social circle and (much like chickens) the least popular kids become the default target for emotional abuse and bullying. If they withdraw form their social circle to cut their losses, then they potentially become a general bullying target, because they are not part of a protective circle.

It's easy to be dismissive of these ideas, but there is an extensive and rigorous literature on network topology and dynamics. A good introduction with a strong quantitative/mathematical orientation is Social and Economic Networks by Matthew Jackson. Arguing on the basis of your own developmental experience in which significantly different conditions obtained (eg the non-existence/availability of social media or the internet) is equivalent to just wishing the problem away.

Re: Social media is a cause, not a correlate, of mental illness in teen girls

#54

Post by dantheman » Wed, Feb 22, 2023, 8:27 PM UTC

DevKoala wrote: post #3

I wasn’t aware that there is a media campaign to discredit this finding. Teen suicides exploded in growth YoY the moment smartphones became cheap enough around 2009.

It seems like 2009 was a minimum, but still better than 1995. https://www.childtrends.org/publications/teen-suicide-databa...

So is it really related to smart phones? What was causing the decrease?

Re: Social media is a cause, not a correlate, of mental illness in teen girls

#55

Post by aidenn0 » Wed, Feb 22, 2023, 8:28 PM UTC

IncRnd wrote: post #34

largepeepee wrote: post #23

"It also creates a trap—a collective action problem—for girls and for parents. Each girl might be worse off quitting Instagram even though all girls would be better off if everyone quit." I like this part, it is quite clear quitting social media alone is probably even worse and self-isolating than not taking part. The solution would be to address it on a societal level, but that requires pretty strong societal/politi…

No. It's not "quite clear" that "quitting social media alone is probably even worse and self-isolating than not taking part." It's clear from my experience as a parent, and from the experience of many others, that that isn't an issue. The child may whine and throw a tantrum, but that's not a reason to let the child be the parent.

I took my phone away from my daughter for a few weeks because she violated her technology contract. She literally did not meet up with friends a single time outside of school during that time because it was all arranged on iMessage.

I don't regret what I did, but it definitely was isolating. Granted this is not my most socially pro-active kid (the most socially pro-active kid used a friend's phone to sign up for social media and meet up with strangers).

Re: Social media is a cause, not a correlate, of mental illness in teen girls

#56

Post by antod » Wed, Feb 22, 2023, 8:28 PM UTC

barbazoo wrote: post #11

warner25 wrote: post #2

I'm still reading it, but this is great so far. As a father to four little girls, though, it makes me feel really defeated. I can already see that social media has eroded my wife's mental health. I just don't know what to do in the next few years when our girls approach the age when everyone else will get an iPhone and have an Instagram account. I want to say no, but that leads to many other issues, including what th…

It must be frustrating to see this problem approaching and not knowing what to do. I wonder if at some point the only way out is to radically change one's family's lifestyle. Maybe homeschooling, very limited technology at home, living in a community with like-minded people, something like that?

As a parent of a 13yr old girl, we've tried with mixed success during her preteens to find her interests/activities she liked where she could get good at something and have a source of self esteem that came from somewhere outside her peer group interactions.

But yeah, the interest dies away a bit by 13 and we're not fully sure it worked. But we can see that her peers that didn't have earlier hobbies/skills had even lower self esteem. Shrug

Re: Social media is a cause, not a correlate, of mental illness in teen girls

#57

Post by farmaway » Wed, Feb 22, 2023, 8:29 PM UTC

[flagged]

Re: Social media is a cause, not a correlate, of mental illness in teen girls

#58

Post by api » Wed, Feb 22, 2023, 8:29 PM UTC

anoonmoose wrote: post #46

api wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been calling social media companies "the tobacco companies of the mind" for quite a while. The effects are most obvious with teens but I see this stuff as bad all around. Social media algorithms have really driven today's insane political polarization, and there's lots of examples of adults having their brains sucked out by social media rabbit holes. Here's one pile of examples: https://www.reddit.com/r/QAnonCas…

conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists existed long before social media did.

That's not the point. Social media algorithms amplify every form of madness and toxicity, because it draws people in and gets their attention. Crazy sorts of conspiracy theories, radical ideologies, cults, memetic mental illness, you name it... the more toxic it is the more it drives engagement.

This phenomenon isn't fundamentally new. Media has understood "if it bleeds it leads" for hundreds of years. What I think is new is how tight the optimization loop is, how personalized it is, and the way crowdsourcing the inputs leads to a firehose of content that isn't even attempting to be accurate or sane. It's a machine that automatically curates randomly sourced content for maximum inflammatory response and maximum addictiveness.

Here's another pile of examples unrelated to conspiracy theories:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ElsaGate/

This is what you get when you run the recommendation algorithm on random crowdsourced kids' content.

Re: Social media is a cause, not a correlate, of mental illness in teen girls

#59

Post by concordDance » Wed, Feb 22, 2023, 8:29 PM UTC

DevKoala wrote: post #3

I wasn’t aware that there is a media campaign to discredit this finding. Teen suicides exploded in growth YoY the moment smartphones became cheap enough around 2009.

Eh?

That isn't an accurate picture you paint, at least in the UK: https://www.ons.gov.uk/visualisations/dvc2132/heatmap/datado...

Teen suicides first peaked in 1998 at 6.1 per 100,000. The numbers are noisy but it looks like it declines to a lower level of 3-4 in the 2005-2013 period (with an all time low of 3.1 in 2010 but still low at 3.6 at 2012), then starts to increase again to the 4-5 range, before covid gives it a giant spike to 6.5.

Teen suicides in the 90s were higher than the 21st century at between 5.0 and 6.1.

Social media and cellphones, if they are a factor, aren't dominant enough to be distinguished from the noise.

Re: Social media is a cause, not a correlate, of mental illness in teen girls

#60

Post by paulpauper » Wed, Feb 22, 2023, 8:30 PM UTC

It's not just girls and teens. Fitness influencer culture promoted unrealistic expectations, body dysmorphia, etc. It's all bad. However, at the same time, social media is not the same as 'influencer culture'.