Yes, social media is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness • Hacker News Board

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

#621

Post by BadHumans » Wed, Apr 10, 2024, 1:46 PM UTC

hatenberg wrote: post #593

Funes- wrote: post #590

Social media has ruined society, indeed, but only because the exploitability was always there to begin with. Just look at everyone in this thread opting for letting their kids cave in to peer pressure and dodging responsibility for their upbringing because "past a certain point" you can't do shit about it, and God forbid they try to develop themselves into a worthwhile adult without using any of those time-sinking, m…

Guns kill people but that’s only because the vulnerability of the flesh has always been a problem. Like guns, we have a hard time coming to the right conclusions

What's the right conclusion?

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

#622

Post by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF » Wed, Apr 10, 2024, 1:47 PM UTC

hackerlight wrote: post #307

01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would not feel safe painting a target on my back if I was required to attach my legal name to my comments, especially the ones advocating for queer rights.

Have a government agency do the age verification, then it tells FB your age but no other information. Maybe the agency gives you a unique token that it also gives to FB, and you can use it to make a unique account.

That would be great if voters and politicians already cared for privacy, and if it was auditable.

Anyway good thing I'm not on Facebook. If I can hang out in a community of about 100 without anyone calling it "media", and we just keep out kids by not bringing any in, I'll live I guess

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

#623

Post by BadHumans » Wed, Apr 10, 2024, 1:47 PM UTC

runamuck wrote: post #620

randomdata wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> She doesn't share her actual thoughts That's where social media has been most damaging. You can't share your thoughts anymore. The 'Redditization' of the world means that sharing thoughts is met with hostility. No longer can you just throw something out there, no matter how stupid. These days you have carry an entire encyclopedia with you in order to back up every last thing you say and if you utter anything that i…

I have a good rule. I NEVER reply to someone who comments on my comment w/ hostile intent. For example: I made an innocent comment on a YouTube video, and someone completely misread the comment and posted a hostile reply. I wanted to explain to him that he misread my comment but I just let it go. You never need to defend yourself. If you want to post a comment, post it. If someone misunderstands or mocks you, let the…

> If someone misunderstands or mocks you, let them.

Very easy to say when you aren't going viral and 100,000+ people aren't trying to get you fired or hurling insults at you ranging from calling you an idiot to telling you to die. I'm not saying you're wrong but it's much easier said than done.

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

#624

Post by maerF0x0 » Wed, Apr 10, 2024, 1:49 PM UTC

lupusreal wrote: post #609

Funes- wrote: post #590

Social media has ruined society, indeed, but only because the exploitability was always there to begin with. Just look at everyone in this thread opting for letting their kids cave in to peer pressure and dodging responsibility for their upbringing because "past a certain point" you can't do shit about it, and God forbid they try to develop themselves into a worthwhile adult without using any of those time-sinking, m…

Even if parents tried to be fully responsible for keeping their kids off social media, it wouldn't actually be possible for them. What you are proposing is akin to a world in which it is wholly the responsibility of parents to stop their kids from smoking cigarettes and drinking liquor, but whenever the parents weren't around kids could walk into a store and buy them legally. Do you expect 24/7 unceasing parental sur…

> keeping their kids off social media, it wouldn't actually be possible for them.

This is false binary thinking. I would argue that effortful attempts by parents would meaningfully reduce their kids social media usage. Social medias negative effects is a spectrum/sliding scale of effect based on amount of exposure.

Even if they cannot entirely keep their kids off social media, they can dampen the usage. Think about alcohol, as a society we focus on keeping kids off alcohol and in the main it works (until we give them free and full access and they experimentally binge, but most regain selfcontrol in short order).

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

#625

Post by quest88 » Wed, Apr 10, 2024, 1:51 PM UTC

VA0 wrote: post #531

worldsayshi wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is touching on something very important but I feel there's a lot more to it. There's a lot of mystery around this for me. Like why is social media inspiring us to such hostile nit picking on behaviour and ideals?

Social media is designed to make money, whether that be from selling data or conglomerating it and advertising to you. They want the user to be purely a consumer. They are designed to make people reactive and have a short attention span, they are easier to sell to.the users mental reward system is essentially brainwashed to be an easier target to sell to.

I think that's part of it but not all of it. Even here on HN, with no ads, you can find hostility in the comments.

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

#626

Post by hiatus » Wed, Apr 10, 2024, 1:51 PM UTC

qzx_pierri wrote: post #580

rchaud wrote: post #570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These days you have carry an entire encyclopedia with you in order to back up every last thing you say and if you utter anything that isn't deemed 100% perfect by those listening, the social scorn will fall upon you. I would expect this to some extent when conversing with strangers IRL too. If it was a chat between friends, a rant here or there is OK because your friends know the real you and understand where you'r…

But you can't 'downvote' someone in real life. In real life, you can say what you want, and people have to hear. However, on reddit (and many sites copying its pernicious site design), if your comment goes against the hivemind and gets hit with -5 immediately, your comment gets collapsed (and basically unseen). Imagine being out in public at a party and you say something slightly 'spicy' and someone walks up to you a…

> I should mention that I don't see it that way, but a lot of people don't know how to separate real life from the internet - Especially Gen Z. The internet is NOT real life

People have lost jobs, college admissions, and more based on their posts online. I understand the sentiment but what we do on the internet most certainly has an impact on real life.

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

#627

Post by wepple » Wed, Apr 10, 2024, 1:51 PM UTC

sourcecodeplz wrote: post #465

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…

I am into wildlife & nature in general. In my country, public institutions in charge with wildlife & nature have started for some time posting interesting videos, projects and images on facebook. They don't post them anywhere else, if you can believe it. Here, everyone has facebook, from your grandma to your little cousin. My family is spread all over the country and you can keep in touch via text, phone but seeing w…

The social side of things is very difficult to work around.

Public institutions, however, should not be restricting information dispersal to third-party private companies who force even a casual viewer to agree to extensive legal contracts.

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

#628

Post by haswell » Wed, Apr 10, 2024, 1:52 PM UTC

Buttons840 wrote: post #149

The charts in this article are deceptive and cause me to not trust the author. Look at long term teen suicide rates and you will see that suicide rates were quite high around 1990, and then rates dropped until about 2005, and are now on the rise again but have not yet reached 1990 levels (I think). So, the author of this piece wants to make it look like suicides and self harm are on the rise because of social media ,…

On the one hand, I can see how starting the graph in 2005 feels misleading. On the other, past high rates don’t necessarily invalidate theories about the current spike.

Another way to frame this is that whatever factors were leading to teen suicides in the early 90s improved.

The question now is: are the same factors in play? The fact that rates were higher is not by itself a good reason to conclude that Haidt’s theory is wrong. The world has changed drastically, and a new upward trend is still a problem even if it never reaches previous highs. At a minimum, it indicates that something is going in the wrong direction after apparently going in the right direction for awhile.

Could the current trend be caused by the same factors in 1990s? Possible, but it’s also possible that social media is the problem in the same way airplanes cause global pandemics.

Even if the reasons are the old ones, we have a new operating environment to contend with.

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

#629

Post by jononomo » Wed, Apr 10, 2024, 1:52 PM UTC

My workout buddy at the Y related the following story to me this morning:

Yesterday his 11-year-old daughter was without her phone because she was being punished for something or other. They did various activities throughout the day and my buddy noticed that his daughter was noticeably happier and more engaged than she usually was -- he mentioned looking at ferrets at the mall and playing a card game, etc.

He said that had she had her phone with her then there is no way she would have been as interested and engaged in the world as she was that day and that she would have been smiling and laughing less and just been generally less happy overall.

But, nevertheless, she continually begged for her phone back throughout the day.

He had noticed this pattern over time, my buddy said, and it was like you could just give her the phone and then watch her become withdrawn, sad, and angry, or you could take the phone away and watch her become smiling, happy, and engaged but then also beg to have her phone back so that she could be withdrawn, sad and angry.

Just for more context, she was adopted out of the foster care system about five years ago and she seems to need to create a lot of drama at school for some reason.

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

#630

Post by saulrh » Wed, Apr 10, 2024, 1:53 PM UTC

giarc wrote: post #598

genrilz wrote: post #571

This is a post in a debate between Jonathan Haidt and Candice Odgers. If you look at the meta-analysis cited by both, Haidt cites one which does seem to show a high effect size correlational link between screen time and depression. Odgers cites 4 meta analyses, one of which is actually a meta-meta analysis, which all claim that the effect size on depression and other measures of well-being are small. I'm not quite su…

"the majority of the evidence seems to point towards it not causing large well-being problems." I can't see how this is true. Anecdotally, everyone I talk to, and you most comments in this thread (and any other thread) is full of people admitting that they A. use their phone too much B. wish they didn't and C. it makes them feel bad. Again, n of 1, but I've never met someone that openly wants to use their phone more…

Probably that there's an underlying common cause that means the effect disappears when you analyze the data properly. For example, if screen time is caused by lack of parental presence and lack of parental presence is caused by poverty and poverty also causes depression, then a naive analysis would find a correlation but a proper analysis or meta-analysis would subtract out the common causes of poverty and parental absence and find no effect.