571–580 of 689 posts
It's worth reading the response to Haidt and his coauthors re-analysis: https://sci-hub.se/https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-02... I haven't read all of Haidt's position yet, or the original paper, but this response is fairly convincing.
What I find so puzzling is how little talk there is about regulating social media, just like we do for instance with smoking and alcohol. With enough coordination we can push some collective control over most social trends, but now every parent is fighting their own David vs Goliath. I'm amazed the US is the same country that passed prohibition.
I am really doubtful. Everyone forgets that suicide and mental health issues are up the most for boomers, and they use social media the least as a cohort (yes, they use it less, even with FB boomer memes). I'm at -3 right now but look at the data yourself: https://afsp.org/suicide-statistics/ , scroll down to suicide rates by age range. And yes I think suicide deaths is the best measure of mental illness since it has…
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Agreed, but what’s the alternative though? Just going full Amish on them until they’re 18? 25? Look at all the Baby Boomers and older Gen X’ers that got on the Internet in the past ten years and instantly had their brains rotted despite decades of life experience. Should there be some kind of emotional intelligence test everyone has to pass to earn their internet license? This is why I think that taking steps to keep…
Children not using social media is not "going full Amish" though. To use your example, there is no safe age to start smoking. Would you suggest that just because you can't avoid it as adults anyways, we just get rid of our restrictions on smoking for children? Society needs to recognize that social media is a vice and we should treat it as such.
You can leave children to discover it on their own or you can talk them through what it is, what it can do, etc.
I had a close friend who came to drinking later than peers, but then hit it hard. He became absolutely unbearable with almost any amount of alcohol. Might've been a personality thing or predisposition to it, but felt like the circumstance of him starting drinking harshly like he was making up for lost time was a catalyst.
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Oh, I'm certainly not suggesting just giving in to it. But in contrast to the person I replied to, I think we should take teens' perspectives on their social cliques seriously, because even though the cliques don't have importance in society, they have impacts on those within, and our understanding of how cliques operate is surprisingly under-appreciated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zachary's_karate_club Now combin…
> But in contrast to the person I replied to, I think we should take teens' perspectives on their social cliques seriously Of course I take teens' perspectives seriously. There really is no reason for you to personalize things in that way. You have talked about being accepting, yet you have consistently 100% dismissed the lived experiences of parents who disagree with your opinions.
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But you do have football, sunshine, beer and Australian women which probably goes along way to resolving problems with young men
America has all those things in spades too. The Christchurch shooter was an australian (to our eternal shame). But he shot up a school in New Zealand instead of in australia because it was easier to buy guns in NZ. ( Was easier. They pushed through stricter gun controls after that incident).
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…
I had my 12 year old daughter read the article and after she argued a while I said: Ok, write up your rejoinder and I will post it and see what others think. For context we severely restrict access to social media in our house, but of course they find ways around this as expected (I don't pi-hole because I want them to learn to be hackers) ----------------------------------- *Why I think it’s reasonable for me to hav…
Text-centric social media might be a good middle ground here. I only login to the FB web site a few times a year (mostly to add/accept new friends), because I realized that I was envious of everybody in my feed living the life I wished I were living but have been unable to acquire. (Over 35 yro when I did this, for context) But I have FB Messenger on my phone, so I can still communicate with people who use FB. I have missed events, mostly general-purpose/last-minute everyone-is-invited events of a large group I was part of. But friends would often forward events to me, and obviously if it were a party that they specifically wanted me, they would notify me.
Ultimately people want to be known and valued, and being part of a general, everyone-is-invited group does not provide that. It does provide an opportunity to find the people you want to know and value, but school already provides that opportunity (and the social groups online are going to mostly be the in-person groups anyway). So I'm not sure that the value of missing general events is outweighed by the risk, and like I said, your friends will tell you about things they know you would not have seen.
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I tried to do it on WhatsApp (age limit 16 in the EU), but guess what? You can only report YOUR OWN CHILD: https://faq.whatsapp.com/695318248185629 Other Meta properties are better at this though.
> if you're not the parent of this child, then we strongly recommend that you encourage a parent to contact us using the instructions above. Given that the instructions are to prove ownership over the phone number as well as trying to at least somewhat link that to an underage child how exactly could this reasonably be accomplished by someone other than the parent? If you know enough to be confident that a given acco…
I think it's somewhat important to ask why this effect is more observable for girls than for boys, and Haidt does not seem to really reflect on that. Social media in and of itself is really just an accelerant for the particular set of social expectations we stack on girls and women around appearance and how that relates to self-worth. Boys have more capacity to transcend social media's focus on image and beauty by fi…
Sometimes we should just accept that we don’t know why.
I wonder if online dating tends to lead to similar impacts to mental health for some groups of people as social media does to teen girls. Just like in Haidt's examples, it's impersonal, phone-based, leading to constant social comparison, feelings of rejection, ostracism and ghosting. I wouldn't be shocked if a few years from now research came out showing that it has similar effects to adults, but they're just better…
I tried Tinder (and Hinge) as an average looking guy and found it to be dehumanizing. I rarely got matches, the matches I got usually didn't respond to my messages, and even when they did I could tell they weren't invested in the interaction. I've got a great job, a decent face, I work out, I've got friends, family, hobbies, and passions. I genuinely like myself; I'm satisfied with my life and my personal development…