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Yes, social media is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness

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Re: Yes, social media is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness

#191

Post by ZaoLahma »

jameslevy wrote: post #76

It's surprising how many parents I know who are in denial about this. It must be because they themselves are constantly using social media and don't want to accept what it is doing to their own mental health.

I, Millennial, am seeing a huge decline in social media usage among my peers. It's reached the point where I didn't even bother to install any of the apps when I got a new phone last year, other than Facebook Messenger which we still use for planning activities.

The vast majority of my friends and "friends" on social media haven't posted anything for years. I think my last contribution was back in 2017.

I thought social media in general is boomer / gen X town nowadays.

Re: Yes, social media is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness

#192

Post by zigman1 »

jajko wrote: post #182
rgbrenner wrote: post #145

The author had it right in the first paragraph. In the 90s version of this hysteria, Congress passed a law that would have prevented access to education medical information, dirty curse words, and other filth from being published on the internet to protect the children. The federal government fought a case all the way to the Supreme Court to enforce it. If they had won that case, the internet would look very differen…

You dont have kids, do you. Seeing them being pushed out of entire school community due to higher principles is heartbreaking to say at least, this is place from which teen suicides come from. Parents usually cave in the pressure. I would go and even claim I would ban all current social media platforms below 18. Ther are simply not enough protections, consistently, its place ripe for abuse and tons abuse is happening…

> I would ban all current social media platforms below 18

Just like porn? Do you think kids would find a way around it?

Re: Yes, social media is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness

#193

Post by otherme123 »

EGreg wrote: post #169
golergka wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somebody has bought or rented the computer that this AI runs on, somebody has launched it as a piece of code or an API call. This somebody is using his right to free speech, AI is just a tool.

Praxeology 2.0 I have heard similar arguments about corporations hehe Very Rothbardian, Mises and Say would be proud too https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8550560/

How a corporation can have an opinion?

I can give you that an AI trained to make a mixin of a lot of input texts and output a mashup of those texts, the output might not be the same of their creators. That said, it's known that AI creators/trainers can make their AI lean towards certain "opinions", as we saw recently with the case of Gemini and their understanding of diversity (https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/21/24079371/google-ai-gemini...).

Corporations can't do that. Corporations don't ask for everybody's in the corporation opinion and then do an aggregate with all of them to write a press release. They have some people choosing what to say in the press release that goes in the interest of the corporation.

Re: Yes, social media is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness

#194

Post by INTPenis »

We as a society need to adapt to this new wave of influence on kids.

I think it goes without saying in this forum that if we try to ban children from using social media they will simply make their own. Any ban will only drive them into using it illegally or on a sort of underground scene.

Re: Yes, social media is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness

#195

Post by newzisforsukas »

rgbrenner wrote: post #145

The author had it right in the first paragraph. In the 90s version of this hysteria, Congress passed a law that would have prevented access to education medical information, dirty curse words, and other filth from being published on the internet to protect the children. The federal government fought a case all the way to the Supreme Court to enforce it. If they had won that case, the internet would look very differen…

> Being exposed to shit on the internet teaches you there's bullshit on the internet, and not to believe everything you see

Maybe it taught you that, but there are plenty of people that grow up on the Internet who do not learn these lessons. Take a look at any conspiracy message board, group, etc.

Akin to saying something like, "let it happen, that'll teach 'em"

Unfortunately, not everything works itself out.

Re: Yes, social media is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness

#196

Post by smokel »

zigman1 wrote: post #190
smokel wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> then don't use them This assumes that humans are rational agents. I think that drug addiction, wars in Israel and Ukraine, conspiracy theorists, and free-climbers sufficiently prove that this is not the case. If only life were so easy, we would not even need to have this discussion.

It's the country's role or more specifically, the role of education to equip citizens with skills that will help them navigate virtual, deceiving and fake internet space.

No, it's not. Where does it say so?

Re: Yes, social media is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness

#197

Post by mixmastamyk »

agentgumshoe wrote: post #133
mixmastamyk wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn’t have to be a technical ban. Just make it the law and let companies, schools, parents, and kids take their punishment when found to happen. This should be enough for the risk averse to take open devices away from children and bolster parents. It’s not important to stop every possible access, simply that adults have the authority to say no and be supported by society instead of undermined.

Now, define 'social media' clearly and we're all good.

I don’t think kids should be on the internet (public WAN) alone at all, so easy for me. They could get larger whitelists over time as they approach 18—no sites where they interact with adults.

Re: Yes, social media is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness

#198

Post by xandrius »

logicchains wrote: post #163
jameslevy wrote: post #76

It's surprising how many parents I know who are in denial about this. It must be because they themselves are constantly using social media and don't want to accept what it is doing to their own mental health.

Or maybe their mental health is just fine? Who are you to believe you know their mental health better than they do; very presumptuous of you.

Hey logicchains, being a little bit aggressive today, aren't we? Is everything ok?

Re: Yes, social media is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness

#199

Post by stahorn »

I grew up in Sweden, where strong alcohol is only sold in a state owned company and the same for gambling, so this probably make me have another view of this than people from other countries. I do believe that there has to be some sort of laws around how social media, or really "endless scrolling of content" is done. It's seriously addictive, I feel it myself, and just letting people "be free and choose what to do" results in addicts in real life. If people and society is hurting because of this, it would be good to fix it.

I think that an easy start is to require every platform that has addictive endless scrolling, or endless suggestions for what to watch next, to have a soft limit. After some regular time, information is shown that "you are on an addictive platform and taking breaks from it is good for your mental health". "Algorithms are made to keep your attention, often by making you angry and upset. Remember that this is easily fixed by stepping off this platform". It is basically a version of "smoking kills", or "don't drink and drive", but for the digital age. I think it is an easy thing to legislate (as easy as those things get), still allows people to be "free", and that could actually have a positive effect on the world.

Re: Yes, social media is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness

#200

Post by qwery »

manmal wrote: post #186
qwery wrote: post #184

As many point out every time this comes up, regulating access to social media products by requiring ID checks and age gating will almost certainly not work effectively, will harm the web overall and that's if its not implemented in a half-arsed way. It's a bad idea. You want people to stop buying cigarettes? Don't let the cigarette companies advertise. Require warning labels, plain packaging, increase tariffs, etc. T…

I mean how would you bypass an ID check? Parents can’t share a FB account with their kids.

Sorry, I was trying to summarise there because the points get repeated a lot. I'm not saying that all ID checks are easy to bypass, but that:

- a lot of people do not want effective ID checks, for a lot of reasons

- effective ID checks are not necessarily easy or even feasible to implement (this may vary depending on your region/government)

- there's a fair chance (some would say high likelihood) that any implemented ID checks are not effective

- ineffective ID checks can fail to do what they were supposed to do (age gating) while still having negative impacts (reduced privacy, more data to the datalords, lower barriers to law enforcement access to your activity, connecting government ID with day-to-day identity, etc.)

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