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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

#681

Post by jmathai »

nojvek wrote: post #657

In 2023, I would glue my self to the phone after reading book to our kid. But then our 5 year old would want to see what I am doing on my phone. One day I was reading a reddit thread while she wanted to tell me something that happened in school. Someone told her her school lunch stinks because it is vegetarian and I brushed it aside. That moment was a wake up call. I was addicted to a stupid reddit thread ignoring a…

> get bored

We really underestimate how negatively it's impacting our quality of life that we don't let ourselves get bored anymore.

My kids liked to listen to the radio while in the car. We stopped doing that - they fight it but we have conversations we otherwise wouldn't. Oh, and less Doja Cat in our lives isn't such a bad thing either.

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

#682

Post by dfxm12 »

thegrim000 wrote: post #212
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…

It's funny .. earlier today there was a front page HN post about the federal government mandating safer circular saws. It seemed like the majority of users in the thread were in favor of the federal government mandating technology changes to prevent harm from being done to the population. Now for this issue, there's harm being done to children, and the majority of users in the thread seem to be against government int…

Regulating a physical product being sold within the country, like a circular saw, is obviously materially different from enforcing age restrictions or other regulations to a website probably owned by a multinational company.

Personally, I don't have much of an opinion around circular saws, but I don't want my government to build a framework where they can choose to hide certain parts of the Internet. I also think the issue isn't social media, per se, but algorithms that promote negative content, personal data harvesting, etc. Banning tiktok et al isn't going to solve those problems. They'll still exist because other types of sites are implementing them.

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

#683

Post by ayewo »

worldsayshi wrote: post #495
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…

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?

> Like why is social media inspiring us to such hostile nit picking on behaviour and ideals?

Social media is a highlight reel of people’s lives. It’s the best part hand-picked out of our mostly mundane lives.

Until these teenagers understand this, they’ll never feel “good enough” to share their own situation. Instead, they’ll remain on the hamster wheel trying to live up to the ideals peddled by influencers.

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

#684

Post by tootie »

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…

Since we're all applying our own anecdotes, I can tell you my kids have had unfettered and unregulated screen time pretty much their whole lives on account of I don't really believe Haidt's point of view. They have absolutely zero interest in any social media platform except YouTube which we all frequently watch together.

My son got inspired to cook by watching youtube. My daughter loves Vihart and wants to study math in college. I use Reddit and HN, but no Facebook or Tiktok. We also pretty much all have elevated levels of anxiety and it's all due to things happening in real life. Too much homework, annoying coworkers, annoying neighbors.

And I also observe that my kids and their classmates are just so incredibly good. There is nearly zero bullying. My son got picked on recently and his classmates jumped up and formed a circle around him like heroes. There is zero tolerance amongst even middle-school kids for anti-LGBTQ sentiment that was just basic banter for kids when I was in school. I hear this from a lot of parents. I think Gen Z and Alpha have anxiety because the adults in charge of the world are such worse people than they are.

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

#686

Post by Aerroon »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #315
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…

There are two kinds of freedom [0]. What we are missing in our society today is some essential negative freedoms. Most of us follow J.S. Mill's idea on restricting the influence of the state. See the many comments in this thread decrying government intervention to ban social media. That's a negative freedom, from tyranny. Mostly, we tend to emphasise positive freedoms, freedom to ; run a business, share speech, own t…

"The freedom from the scourge of drugs" is why I can't buy an asthma inhaler without paying out the nose to see a specialist that will prescribe it to me. As a result I don't have an asthma inhaler. I feel very free when breathing gets hard.

This is a snarky comment, but this is the consequence of this "negative freedom".

I do think that there's some merit to these ideas, but I think it would always leave the choice to the individual. But we also have to realize that some things you just can't opt out of, eg electromagnetic radiation from cell towers.

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

#687

Post by doublerabbit »

Teever wrote: post #468
tick_tock_tick wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit now is not even vaguely close to the site it used to be. Doomerism is popular on Reddit because the power users are Reddit are basically everyone who failed life. Can't get a job, can't find a partner, no friend, and normally for reasons their own fault. Those people used to be social shunned and live on the edge of town but now their voice gets amplified 1000x because they are willing to live online 24/7 and…

Can you really say they failed at life when they have so much power over society? Some moderators have control over an audiance of millions, something media moguls like Ted Turner dreamed of in the beginning of his career. If anything the real losers are the people like you and me who frequent the site but didn't take advantage of the opportunity that it provides.

> If anything the real losers are the people like you and me who frequent the site but didn't take advantage of the opportunity that it provides.

What am I exactly losing out on by not visiting?

What opportunities do reddit provide for me in comparison of me going swimming tonight?

What are the benefits of an hour worth of scrolling, exhausting myself mentally reading people's comments?

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

#688

Post by mindcrime »

amplex1337 wrote: post #646
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…

You certainly can just throw things out there, but if you are obsessed with making every single person satisfied with your thoughts, you are going to have a bad time. The world is full of people who disagree with you, but you need to learn more than ever to recognize and filter out what you don't care about. I don't even view replies to posts any longer, 98% of the time because I am not seeking validation sharing my…

The world is full of people who disagree with you, but you need to learn more than ever to recognize and filter out what you don't care about. I don't even view replies to posts any longer, 98% of the time because I am not seeking validation sharing my opinion.

This is something it's taken me a while to come to terms with. I used to want to fully engage with everybody and everything. It was anathema to me to just "broadcast something into the void" and ignore replies. But over time I came to realize that a. I don't scale to engaging with every single person who replies to something I say online, and b. I don't owe those people a response or any of my time/attention; especially the trolls and bots and other lamers that are so prevalent these days.

So now I'm more comfortable (albeit maybe not 100% comfortable) with treating things in more of a "fire and forget" fashion. I say what I want to say, and people can do with it what they will. I just can't be arsed to engage with the trolls and other randos. But... if somebody has a mature, reasonable, professional response then I am willing, on a selective basis, to dig in deeper and have a longer discussion.

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

#689

Post by MrYellowP »

skilled wrote: post #337

I'm no saint when it comes to addiction and being on my phone for more than I should be, but I have a sister who is in her mid 20s right now, and for the last couple of years she has slowly isolated herself from life and her family, she spends most of her time in her room on the phone and does weird things like get cosmetic surgeries, ordering cosmetics, etc. It's bizarre. She does this and all the while never leaves…

> It's her life

Clearly it's not. It's the life of those she copies and is influenced by. I strongly doubt any of the people like your sister are actually making actual decisions about their lives.

You absolutely should try getting through to her, because that's in her best long-term interest. She's literally destroying her life.

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

#690

Post by 2devnull »

randomdata wrote: post #574
watwut wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No longer can you just throw something out there, no matter how stupid. Back in real world, I could never do it. If you could, that just means you lived in a bubble of like minded people.

There have always been some dimwits who do not see that good ideas come from iteration on dumb ideas, but what is different now is that the societal norm, adopted from forums like Reddit, is an expectation for you to prove that you are a dimwit, incapable of any original thought, only able to repeat ("source", as the kids like to say) what others have said in the past. This is certainly not the only anti-intellectual…

Arguably that’s the meta force behind social media. The platforms are designed to make people think in collectivist terms, which coincidentally (or not) makes things easier for more tyrannical forms of government. Indeed Facebook and old twitter are arguably quasi-federal entities.
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