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Social media can be a ‘profound risk’ to youth, surgeon general warns

nytimes.com

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Re: Social media can be a ‘profound risk’ to youth, surgeon general warns

#501

Post by Jedd »

nostrebored wrote: post #421
Jedd wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No they're not. Yes, they are. But rather than merely gainsay, I'll support that by observing: a) here in Australia we regularly, consistently, have zero school shootings each year. Can recommend. b) you are probably misunderstanding the meaning of regular, and conflating it with frequent. Halley's Comet is regular - at once every ~76 years. But obviously not frequent. (I'd argue, as per (a), that the USA has too h…

Maybe if you had the same attitude about bus fatalities this would be grounded in reality. If we relax the rules to school bus related fatalities there are almost an order of magnitude more.

How are bus fatalities related to a misunderstanding about what 'regular' means? (And/or how regular is not a synonym of frequent.)

Re: Social media can be a ‘profound risk’ to youth, surgeon general warns

#502

Post by meghan_rain »

ChicagoBoy11 wrote: post #462
meghan_rain wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

did you notice any advantages of the kids that had delayed exposure to social media? ie smarter, better focus, better motivation, better emotional iq? it would be HUGE news if this were the case, very curious about your reply

Anecdotally, yes. We have some students who are very vocal about how they perceived having a more structured early use of social media once they get to nearing the end of high-school. Having said that, I'll caution that this is hardly any sort of statistical evidence, as its that students who suffered because of it (because of not being ostracized, not part of the cool kids who have phone, etc.) didn't feel bothered…

thanks

Re: Social media can be a ‘profound risk’ to youth, surgeon general warns

#503

Post by jiggywiggy »

v0idzer0 wrote: post #459
jiggywiggy wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Come on. What point are you arguing? I know you are most likely anti school shootings. But whats the point of trying to deny it's impact with statistics? Whatever statistics you try to conjure. 52 in one year is way too much. And 1 in 150 kids being on a school with a school shooting is a lot.

Statistic don’t affirm or deny impact. They are facts. The rest is left to you. Why are you trying to exaggerate its impact by suggesting we suppress statistics (facts)?

You are decide to cherry pick a statistic and conclude based on that the impact is minimal. There is nothing factual about that.

Re: Social media can be a ‘profound risk’ to youth, surgeon general warns

#504

Post by ianai »

sundvor wrote: post #446
lumb63 wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> School shootings are such a regular feature of American life […] Media certainly amplifies the awareness of problems Case in point: in 2022 there were 51 school shootings [1]. Certainly more than I’d like there to be, but in a nation with about 129,000 schools [2], I certainly wouldn’t call them a “regular feature”. If students are in school for 18 years, let’s say, to include pre-K, Kindergarten, and an undergrad…

If you wonder why the rest of the world looks at USA funny, here's a counter point: There are 9614 schools in Australia, and since 1992 there's been a total of six shootings resulting in a sum of 3 deaths. The deaths were at universities, so strictly speaking no children were lost. There have been no more school shootings since 2012, a year that took no lives. By US standards we could have 3-4 shootings per year and…

I would caution you still. Enjoy that you don’t have the blight we have in the US - but also be on guard against any forces towards such politics. It can happen anywhere with the wrong element propping up harmful policies entering the political sphere.

Re: Social media can be a ‘profound risk’ to youth, surgeon general warns

#505

Post by nullsense »

lumb63 wrote: post #441
nullsense wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, you know, compare the number of school shootings to literally any other country in the world? The fact that there are school shootings for the media to report on at all is so crazy to me.

Why do you care so much about school shootings specifically? Shouldn’t be the goal to reduce overall child mortality? In which case it doesn’t make sense to focus on school shootings. They’re a rounding error in child mortality. Compare actual death rates between first-world countries to see what I mean; the US lags behind its Western peers, but the presence of school shootings, which is generally referred to as a de…

Maybe because I'm from one of the countries that doesn't have school shootings, so everytime I see that shit on the news I think I sure am relieved I can send my kid to school and not have that particular anxiety hanging over me. It's just so senseless. It's less about the raw numbers and more about how bloody horrific such an event is for everyone involved.

Re: Social media can be a ‘profound risk’ to youth, surgeon general warns

#506

Post by Aromasin »

bart_spoon wrote: post #128
Aromasin wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The last 20 years haven't just seen an increase in social media usage though; it's seen a decrease in socializing between kids outside of school. It's easy to remove access to their socials. It's very hard to replace that with a function social life outside of school. That's a recipe for resentment and rebellion. That's not going to happen without input at a every level of society to bring back that mall/skate rink/p…

> it's seen a decrease in socializing between kids outside of school Because of social media. Sports teams and after school clubs didn't go anywhere. Parks didn't go anywhere. Malls are in decline but the period of time they were an active social location was the 80s and 90s, which is a blip in the grand scheme of things. Community centers still exist, churches still exist, libraries still exist, basements and backya…

Exactly my point. Because of social media. It is both the reason people stay at home, and the reason we have nothing to go back to. I'm not suggesting social spaces don't exist. I'm suggesting that the culture and people that exist in them has disappeared. The genie is out of the bottle, and won't get back in.

Sports teams and school clubs haven't changed, and good parents take substantial advantage of them, sure. Community centers are all but dead in my town. The local youth centers I attended as a child have shut down. Churches exist; in my town, everyone who attends them is 60 and over. Libraries exist; they are near empty, or full of people quietly studying. Not a place for a kid to socialize. The local spaces that children used to hang out after school are empty, because everyone is at home playing games and using social media, and kids don't want to stop using them because the local spaces are empty. There's no winning.

These places are different than they used to be. The avenues exist, but there's no-one on them. If I told my kids to go play outside with their friends like people did in the 90s and prior, they'd be on their own. I'd need to start a societal revolution in my town with at least 50% of the other parents to get them to coordinate in sending their kids out as well. It seems like if it's not a validated group activity like sports or clubs, then people just keep their children at home.

Re: Social media can be a ‘profound risk’ to youth, surgeon general warns

#507

Post by unmole »

gsinclair wrote: post #482
srackey wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Far higher chance you’ll die on the way to school in a car accident. School shootings are to the left what terrorist attacks are to the right —- fear-mongering over an ultimately rare and insignificant problem to drive desired policy change.

Insane. School shootings are genuinely frightful, not the subject of artificial fear-mongering. This shallow and ideological analysis represents such a callous disregard for the trauma that any child would experience is they had to go through that.

> School shootings are genuinely frightful, not the subject of artificial fear-mongering.

Terrorist attacks are genuinely terrifying. That doesn't mean the probability of experiencing one isn't vanishingly small.

Re: Social media can be a ‘profound risk’ to youth, surgeon general warns

#508

Post by fuckingkike »

standardUser wrote: post #249
omginternets wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"When the wise man points to the moon, the fool looks at his finger." I trust you can find alternatives to little league. I also trust you can understand the broader point.

Feel free to actually make a point instead of cryptically alluding to one. Obviously, there are a finite number of activities in any community. Restrict the number of activities available to your child, restrict their capacity for finding and forming bonds with like-minded people. Simple as that.

[flagged]

Re: Social media can be a ‘profound risk’ to youth, surgeon general warns

#509

Post by escapedmoose »

galdosdi wrote: post #486
escapedmoose wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But in other developed countries, kids still die from car crashes and swimming pools. It’s less of a “one is too many” argument for me and more a question of “if everyone else is able to get this right, how the hell are we getting it so wrong?” Looking around the world really drives the point home that these are avoidable fatalities.

That's a great argument for policymaking, but that's not what we're talking about -- we're talking about whether the children themselves should be worried sick, literally, about it. They clearly should not. Obesity and car wrecks will kill far more of them, and dealing with those issues is far more preventable. Smash the soda vending machines in their lunchrooms, and you'll save far more lives, plus avoid traumatizin…

Ah, I see we’ve talked past each other. I was speaking to the policy-making angle. I don’t have any good ideas about how to get the policy issues fixed while avoiding scaring the kids. I doubt that’s even possible, tbh.

But yes, let’s smash the soda vending machines as well!

Re: Social media can be a ‘profound risk’ to youth, surgeon general warns

#510

Post by escapedmoose »

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS wrote: post #480
escapedmoose wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But in other developed countries, kids still die from car crashes and swimming pools. It’s less of a “one is too many” argument for me and more a question of “if everyone else is able to get this right, how the hell are we getting it so wrong?” Looking around the world really drives the point home that these are avoidable fatalities.

How many of those countries have a democratic republic style of governance like the US? Perhaps it is more dangerous to live in a freedom-loving democratic republic, but the number of people clamoring to get into the US vs the lack of people trying to leave tells us there's value in the risk. That's not to say we shouldn't strive to get those numbers down, but personally I think we should be focusing on mental health…

I understand the motivation behind this argument, but I haven’t seen compelling evidence that mental health issues are the “cause” and weapon availability is the “symptom.” There are mentally ill people all over the world, many of whom attempt to commit mass murder but are not as successful as they are in the US. Try killing four people in a row with a knife and you’ll have a much more difficult time. Contrast that to my city, where a fourth person was accidentally killed because they were in proximity of a gunfight a few years ago (in a decent part of town too. Scary.) As large as it is, the same will never happen in Tokyo.

Strictly speaking on numbers though, the evidence I’ve seen weighs heavily on the side of weapon availability being the root cause, with countries and states with fewer weapon restrictions having more weapons-related deaths per capita. All this talk of “weapons aren’t the problem, people are” therefore strikes me as disingenuous.

I thoroughly believe in keeping rifles around because hunting is vital to my community. I remain unconvinced that handguns and automatic weapons are at all important to protecting US democracy (though I’m certainly willing to be disproven).

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