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

jonathanhaidt.substack.com

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

#581

Post by wizofaus »

remarkEon wrote: post #388
Adraghast wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Agreed, and that other generations also struggle with social media is additional evidence that it should be shut down, or at least heavily regulated (or regulated out of existence). There's nothing inevitable about any of this: we don't have to let malicious companies like Meta or TikTok or whoever build products that hijack your emotions for profit.

Except Facebook has since been observed as having deleterious effects on mental health even before it was available to the public, and you'd be hard pressed to describe the Facebook of that period as a malicious company hijacking our emotions for profit. Nor is it clear that they reasonably could have known the effects it was having for quite some years (to be clear, they most certainly qualify as malicious now)

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

#582

Post by mixmastamyk »

mulmen wrote: post #505
mixmastamyk wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, phones not allowed on in class. Might be able to do for 3 mins between classes while walking.

Yeah and no games were allowed on my ti-83.

Do you really think kids are “planning lunch” over social media, when they sit at the same tables every day? And the cafeteria is providing it? Sounds like you’re grasping at straws to make it seem relevant.

The kids here communicate via imessage and rarely during class.

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

#583

Post by mulmen »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #582
mulmen wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah and no games were allowed on my ti-83.

Do you really think kids are “planning lunch” over social media, when they sit at the same tables every day? And the cafeteria is providing it? Sounds like you’re grasping at straws to make it seem relevant. The kids here communicate via imessage and rarely during class.

I absolutely believe that lunch seating is a manifestation of social hierarchy and that positions are determined in advance, yes.

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

#584

Post by u801e »

verse wrote: post #161
u801e wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not all 12 year olds are in a single social group. If one is being left out because they don't have an instagram account, there's another social group they can gravitate to that has other interests besides instagram posts.

> there's another social group they can gravitate to that has other interests besides instagram posts. no, there isn't

I have a daughter who's 11 years of age and has plenty of friends at school. She doesn't have an instagram account and hasn't asked me to get her a device so that she's able to create an account and log on. So I really doubt there aren't social groups in school and other settings where instagram isn't a primary focus.

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

#585

Post by prawn »

jrumbut wrote: post #177
andrewflnr wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So much for the "play based childhood", then. (And no, of course assigned sports don't count)

In another thread I mentioned the need for organized (in the sense of same place, same time) unstructured activity. Gather at the basketball court, if practice or a game break out that's good, if not that's OK. It seems like everyone wins in that scenario, it's healthy but playful and low stress while accommodating parents' need for scheduling. Is such a thing common? I don't hear about it much.

How different is this from most out of school care? When we've had our kids in what here is called OSHC (out of school hours care or similar), it's been pretty free-form and vaguely supervised. Some kids do art, some muck around on the oval, some roam in nature play (with a supervisor in the general area), some watch a movie.

I guess you're talking about a little bit more organisation - today, muck around with racquets and shuttlecocks, tomorrow muck around with calligraphy brushes and ink.

I always remember once in unstructured art time (1980s, substitute teacher...) around the age of 11-12, we were all nailing together strips of masonite, making cross-shaped projectiles about 500mm across, and then flinging them around the oval. They would've been absolutely deadly if that wasn't shut down!

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

#586

Post by chillwaves »

Nadya wrote: post #393
SamoyedFurFluff wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this might be whataboutism. It’s clear to me the original poster was speaking exclusively on the social media aspect and the fact that social media does not have a similar causal effect of mental illness specifically on boys, and so I don’t know how addiction/obesity/etc contribute here. I agree there may be other effects on men, but it seems very clear here that the original poster was talking about social m…

The answer of why is quite obvious to many people but no longer politically acceptable. There is a large external pressure for studies to show that there are no differences between men and women while there is also demand for studies that show negative outcomes of women in comparison to men. The same problem happens again and again with these studies in that nothing explains the negative outcomes of women. Except one…

I have built my whole identity on not caring what people think of me, and of me not asking for anything from anyone.

It's lonely.

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

#587

Post by theshrike79 »

MertsA wrote: post #498
theshrike79 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's a way too common practice by kids to create WhatsApp groups with EVERYONE in their contacts as members.

Then you're just added to a group with complete randos who can immediately see your phone number and they can start posting whatever.

I've had cases where my kid has been added to a group along with older kids and their posts have not been exactly SFW. I've got zero recourse in those cases, I don't know who any in the group are. I taught my kid to remove themselves from any suspicious groups immediately and that has curbed it for now.

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

#588

Post by civilized »

fleddr wrote: post #491
lsy wrote: post #185

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…

"We" as in a total society or specifically as men do not stack any of these specific expectations on young girls. Young girls do this to each other. The influencers are girls and followed by girls. Instagram is girl territory and all the social gossip around it is girls. They're not trying to win boys' approval, instead girls' approval. Social ranking amidst young girls is natural behavior, what changed is that the l…

Indeed, I am glad someone said this. The myopic GP analysis, characterizing young women as victims of murky cultural dynamics, is decades out of date at this point, and does not consider the complex real-world experiences and tremendous personal agency of these women. I think the supposed "mid-century traditionalists" have a keener appreciation of that agency.

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

#589

Post by remarkEon »

wizofaus wrote: post #581
remarkEon wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, and that other generations also struggle with social media is additional evidence that it should be shut down, or at least heavily regulated (or regulated out of existence). There's nothing inevitable about any of this: we don't have to let malicious companies like Meta or TikTok or whoever build products that hijack your emotions for profit.

Except Facebook has since been observed as having deleterious effects on mental health even before it was available to the public, and you'd be hard pressed to describe the Facebook of that period as a malicious company hijacking our emotions for profit. Nor is it clear that they reasonably could have known the effects it was having for quite some years (to be clear, they most certainly qualify as malicious now)

I guess I don't really care. Deep down we all know it's bad, and has been since its inception even if part of that knowledge is in hindsight. I would venture to guess that Zuck knows this too, which is part of the reason he's so strongly pivoting to VR.

It's frustrating, because every time this comes up we have these long, expansive threads about what social media is or isn't 100% responsible for (as if the standard is 100%), or if we can't exactly identify the precise mechanism by which this or that algorithm is predatory, we just throw our hands up and say "well shucks, it's a tough question!" It's really not. Social Media in this current form is a net detriment to human civilization. I'm open to a steel-manned argument that earlier iterations - without the algos, without the doom scrolling, without the tracking - are okay, or even a good thing.

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

#590

Post by linalgmixer »

prawn wrote: post #574
linalgmixer wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wonder if alcohol is a better parallel than smoking here. A vice that you speak with children about and make sure that any relationship they have with is a healthy one. 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…

I agree that alcohol would be a better parallel here and I was simply using the parent comment's example.

Alcohol is considered a vice and we not only have laws which prohibit children from its consumption, at least in the US, it's culturally accepted that it's generally not appropriate for children to be drinking. In the US, I do think that straight prohibition-style banning of all alcohol from children is also not a good idea largely due to the example you've given where once children become adults and have free access to alcohol, their lack of experience with the substance can cause issues.

I'm personally planning on letting my children consume small amounts of alcohol while they are under our supervision to give them experience. That way, once they do have free access, the novelty is not so great and hopefully they'll be able to behave more responsibly. Treating social media as a vice doesn't have to mean full ban until they're adults. It just means we need to acknowledge that it is and think about how we want to deal with it.

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