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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

#901

Post by hot_gril »

spxneo wrote: post #97
mrob wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's mobile devices, not electronics in general. Social networking was around before widespread mobile computing, e.g. MySpace, but it was a supplement to offline social interaction, not a replacement. Back then, you had to make a conscious decision to use the computer and log in. Having the device in your pocket at all times drastically changes how it's used.

100% and the people who created Facebook, Instagram all know exactly what they were doing. This is why many people hate Mark Zuckerberg and the Instagram founders and they need to be protected at all times by armed guards.

People used these platforms willingly. I stick by my 7th grade complaints about iPhones and Facebook, but most people didn't agree and still don't.

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

#902

Post by kypro »

life-and-quiet wrote: post #68
kypro wrote: post #54

I'm sceptical of the claim that social media is causing teen mental illness. I've thought about this quite a bit, but never wrote my thoughts anywhere so I guess here and now is as a good time as any. I think Haidt's assertion that social media is to blame for the rise in teen mental illness is likely indirectly true, but from what I've observed personally even kids that don't frequently use social networking apps st…

I agree with a lot of what you're saying, but I have to wonder if, at certain frequencies, normal emotions become harmful. Like it's normal to experience sadness, and our brains are built to process it. But I'm not sure our brains are able to cope with reading about (and seeing video of) industrial warfare, genocide, and serial killings all in the same afternoon. It's similar to how our physiological stress response…

> but I have to wonder if, at certain frequencies, normal emotions become harmful

I think if I had one criticism of social media it wouldn't be that it emotionally harms people, but that it intellectually harms them by distorting how common or representative certain things are.

I've spent about 20 years of my life in debate communities online, and by far the way I'm most likely to be wrong about something is by not realising I have a biased perspective. Social media is absolutely awful for this. I've seen myself and most people I know go down some rabbit hole online where they start to subconsciously believe something is far more of a problem than it actually is because they're following and interacting with other people who share that bias. So on HN you might expect that people's thoughts on technology to not be representative of society in general, but would you expect the articles shared here about economics to be unrepresentative and biased? It's these highly correlated, yet much less obvious biases that people seem to unconsciously absorb.

I think the only thing I disagree about what you're saying is that exposure to stuff like warfare and genocide is harmful. The world is a pretty brutal place if you venture out of North America or Western Europe. For example, about a month ago my girlfriend went to Egypt with some female friends. Prior to her leaving I spent several weeks warning her that as a young blonde English women that she was going to be harassed and that she needed to be careful because Egypt is a dangerous place for women – especially people as naive to the world as her. But she didn't understand and thought I was just being racist and exaggerating what men were like there. But to be fair to her, why would she understand? Every muslim and every person from the Middle-East she's ever interacted with in the UK has been fine. And the travel videos she watched all painted a rosey picture biased by various factors.

Anyway, I won't go into details, but she returned from that holiday terrified and has now said she won't go to any muslim majority country again after getting into multiple dangerous situations with men. I actually think she is now over reacting, but this highlights the problem of having unrepresentative experiences.

I see this bias constantly from people in the West because we live in unusually safe conditions and promote the most unrepresentative examples of people from different cultures in our media.

Anyway, I guess what I'm saying is that I think most people probably would benefit from seeing how unsafe and horrid the world is, but social media doesn't do that unless you explicitly seek it. It focuses far more on things like police shootings and serial killers which are statistically extremely unlikely events and unrepresentative events.

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

#903

Post by B56c »

kypro wrote: post #54

I'm sceptical of the claim that social media is causing teen mental illness. I've thought about this quite a bit, but never wrote my thoughts anywhere so I guess here and now is as a good time as any. I think Haidt's assertion that social media is to blame for the rise in teen mental illness is likely indirectly true, but from what I've observed personally even kids that don't frequently use social networking apps st…

I would be very surprised if SSRI prescriptions could account for the international effect or the drastic sex-difference in suicide rate increases.

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

#904

Post by swed420 »

worldsayshi wrote: post #576
kombookcha wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's two major drivers here - scarcity of attention (1) and social distance (2). 1) Your attention on social media is monetized by others, which means there is always something tugging on it like so many street peddlers, in addition to all the 'organic' content made by other users. When there's a shortness of attention, you're always going to be more snippy and inclined to the short pithy retort, instead o…

I think you're on to very good points. One kind of obvious suggestion on how to fix it: We have to grow a culture of more deliberate attention. Just like how we chose to consume healthy food and avoid consuming too much alcohol we must be more deliberate in our choice of media. But this is not an easy solution. Every social media space is saturated with good content as well as bad. It might become easier if we grow s…

> One kind of obvious suggestion on how to fix it: We have to grow a culture of more deliberate attention.

What if we removed the profit driven attention seeking behavior by not charging for any digital content, and not consuming profit driven content?

Everything would be free under some kind of UBI scenario, similar to FLOSS but with other things too, like all media.

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

#905

Post by ianmcgowan »

Lacerda69 wrote: post #776
mindcrime wrote: post #688

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "br…

I no longer say things online except some rare occasions. Mass social media online discourse will slowly vanish in the next 15 yrs

Hard agree with this - sometimes find myself typing out a well-intentioned response, but then cancelling because of the potential downside years in the future for some anodyne opinion held today. Not to mention Roko's Basilisk (all hail the benevolent AI! :)

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

#906

Post by anthonypasq »

bart_spoon wrote: post #151
miki123211 wrote: post #95

This author is seriously suggesting that governments ban children's use of social media, and that can't really be done without completely destroying internet anonymity. Any policy that actually achieved this, without being trivial to circumvent, would basically need to replicate the great firewall of China. Doing this in a half-assed way is even worse than not doing anything at all. If you just require ID checks for…

We spend enormous amounts of time and energy trying to pick up the pieces of the destruction being left in the wake by social media giants as they get absurdly rich. How about we instead simply make the giants liable for what gets posted on their platforms? Let the “move fast and break things” crowd that is so certain of their own genius spend their billions on figuring it out instead of on how to get you to click on…

the fact they are exceedingly rich seems to indicate they are providing things people like.

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

#907

Post by kypro »

slily wrote: post #122
kypro wrote: post #54

I'm sceptical of the claim that social media is causing teen mental illness. I've thought about this quite a bit, but never wrote my thoughts anywhere so I guess here and now is as a good time as any. I think Haidt's assertion that social media is to blame for the rise in teen mental illness is likely indirectly true, but from what I've observed personally even kids that don't frequently use social networking apps st…

I'm inclined to disagree based on my personal experience. I was never subjected to the kind of pressure you're talking about with regards to mental health and medication, but I spent too much time on social media and not enough in real life since I was a teenager and I am almost certain that it negatively impacted my mental health. The only thing is that I wasn't really aware of it and so I didn't dwell on it too muc…

> I spent too much time on social media and not enough in real life since I was a teenager and I am almost certain that it negatively impacted my mental health

But was social media the issue here or was it that you didn't spend enough time interacting with the real world?

If your point is that social media makes it easier for us to not spend enough time interacting with people in the real world then I'd agree, but I think it's wrong to suggest social media is the primary problem here. The real issue is that kids are spending too much time on their own in doors.

A kid sat in their room watching TV all day and night is probably just as likely to feel depressed and is also likely to struggle socially.

I don't have kids and if I did I wouldn't give them smart phones, but I'd much rather them have smart phones and social media access so long as they had "normal" social lives and were taking part in after school activities where they were playing and interacting with other kids in the real world.

Just taking a kid's phone and replacing their addiction to Tiktok with Netflix probably isn't going to help them become socially well adjusted individuals. Where I agree strongly with Haidt is that kids today need to interact more with other children in the real world, and importantly they also need to learn how to deal with difficult social situations on their own.

For years now there's been an increasing number of children / teens that sit at home doing nothing but scrolling social media and playing video games. In the past it was the geeky guys that we mocked for never leaving their "mum's basement" who were dealing with these mental health issues, but now that we have smart phones and popular social apps a similar kind of thing seems to be impacting teen girls.

I don't think we really disagree though to be honest. I think you're just incorrectly attributing the blame primarily to social media, when I'd argue it's the lack of real world interaction which could be related to social media use, but we've seen other iterations of similar things in recent years such as dudes spending too much time in their mums basement or "Hikikomori" syndrome in Japan. What's always true is that kids need to get out the house and spend more time interacting with real people / children.

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

#908

Post by khazhoux »

gosub100 wrote: post #874
khazhoux wrote: post #821

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The 'Redditization' of the world means that sharing thoughts is met with hostility I think the actual biggest problem with "Redditization" is not hostility, but instead the fact that there is really no dialogue. There's no back and forth discussion, at least not with the same actual individual. You post a comment and ( maybe but usually not ) get a reply, then if you reply to that reply, the next reply in thread wi…

Reddit is not hostile as long as you only parrot back ideas that the hive mind agrees on. And the reward system is mis-aligned. I'd call it a Twitterification, because the karma points are awarded to succinct, snarky/funny conversation-ending quips. Nobody has time or attention span to debate an issue, and even if you did you risk being shut out of the group for wrongthink.

That's right, there's no debate, except on the rarest of occasions. It's actually an odd feeling whenever some discussion with divergent opinions ends amicably.

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

#909

Post by throwawayq3423 »

spxneo wrote: post #82

When we was teenagers we had unrestricted broadband access to the internet but what was missing was the constant comparison hellhole like Instagram that is causing mental illness. WaReZ, KaZaA, Ogrish, CD-Keys, drugs, weapon making tutorials, Mail-order-drugs. This was the wild west days of the internet. You could literally put up anything you could sell anything and everything. Classmates were downloading roms, porn…

> I turned out just fi

whoops

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

#910

Post by brailsafe »

OkayPhysicist wrote: post #842
brailsafe wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your points here are worth more emphasis. As a chronically unemployed software dev who's burnt out and crashed at least 3 times, I've spent a hell of a lot of time reflecting, and try my best to communicate these ideas to people who have the opposite problem; lots of work, but no new friends since highschool, and desperately single. People tend to rely far too heavily on the easiest way to convince themselves they're…

In my experience, most people are adequate at making setting-specific friendships, like "gym friends", "work friends", etc. What they struggle at is progressing those relationships to not being setting specific. Which involves inviting people places, and eventually progresses to full-blown planning, both of which are skills only learned with practice.

Agreed, I probably should have emphasized branching off of that too. Another component that slipped my mind, is taking those setting specific friendships outside their context. If you can't do that, it's probably worth spending more time on one's you can; not actively distancing yourself from them, but if you can't talk to them outside that one building, it might be difficult to build something more meaningful, or it may be a sign they're just not into you.
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