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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

#921

Post by mptest »

BoiledCabbage wrote: post #134
mptest wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>elevate internet anonymity to a new fundamental principle for organizing society You mean privacy? Internet anonymity is a downstream byproduct of our right to privacy, not some new concept devised in the internet age. We've had the fourth amendment for quite some time.

OP hit the nail on the head. Privacy and anonymity are not the same thing. You can absolutely provide privacy without requiring anonymity. I can have privacy in a conversation in my house without anonymity. I can have privacy in the woods. I don't have anonymity while walking down the street, but have pseudo-privacy. If I begin preaching on a street corner should I expect anonymity? If I join a members only fraternal…

I'm not saying they're the same thing, I said explicitly anonymity is a downstream byproduct of privacy.

I have yet to see a system or proposition that can maintain privacy AND kill anonymity.

Every corporation could implement zero knowledge proof schemes for everything I guess. That's what some schemes like crypto identification programs aim for.

>The problem people should be out here solving is how to provide privacy without requiring anonymity

>How we accomplish this in the real world and revisit

Maybe I'm simply ignorant. How do we achieve digitally the idea of privacy without the ability to mask your identity?

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

#922

Post by bsder »

zigman1 wrote: post #192
jajko wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

There's a huge difference between actively seeking something vs having it shoved down your throat.

The biggest problem with the social media systems is that they are normalized. Lots of school and government stuff only comes out on Xitter or Facebook. That's horrible.

It's like dealing with a car salesman. If you engage, you've already lost as you have sooooo much less experience than who you are fighting against.

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

#923

Post by makeitdouble »

10xDev wrote: post #730
makeitdouble wrote: post #707

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is X/Twitter the barometer of how good social media is for us ? Otherwise I find it interesting how people attribute toxic discussions to online media, when the wisdom of our elders were to never talk politics at dinners to avoid having people literally beating each other. We can't be focusing on the absolute worse with the illest use cases, and make it into a societal problem. Looking at our world today, I genuinely…

I only highlighted the tip of the iceberg where the behaviour is not limited to Twitter and wasn't even political. And whether the world is better or not than 3 decades ago is not really the topic here, it is about mental health and how it has become worse over the past decade and whether that can be attributed to social media.

But social media is part of our life as a whole, we are a social species. If our mental health had a net decrease as a whole on the whole society, yes, we could throw stones as social media as the author wants.

But for that we'd need to first include assesment of absolutely everything touching social media and look at the net result. Doee it improve family communication? Does it help or hurt social discourse ? Does it help or hurt minorities ? What's the impact on social mobility ?

IMHO social media is just a catalyst of our social trends and while the lows are really low, the highs can also be incredibly high.

I'd be more sympathetic to an argument about raising the floor to cut te more toxic behaviors than just try to isolate it in an "adult only" corner and pretending the situation got better.

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

#924

Post by thih9 »

drawkward wrote: post #819
thih9 wrote: post #397

About disproving correlation, the article cites: > college students who were asked to reduce their social media use for three weeks generally experienced mental health benefits compared to the control group But that's still correlation. Maybe it was the change, the extra attention, or some other factor that caused their mental health to improve? The linked study was short term and lasted three weeks - if they spent m…

>But that's still correlation. Depends on the experimental design. If it was an RCT with sufficient sample size, it would be causal.

Casual, if your goal is to prove benefits for short term withdrawal. Not so if you want to extrapolate to social media usage in general.

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

#925

Post by makeitdouble »

pms wrote: post #918
makeitdouble wrote: post #700

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This article's threads are also filled with people talking about being on their phone too much and wishing they/other people weren't. It's all self declared though, the same way people will complain they don't exercice enough, they don't eat enough vegetable, they don't read enough books, they didn't stick to their new year's resolution etc. We can't take people's guilt or self loathing as an indicator of an actual c…

There is a difference you neglected: nobody optimizes our society to eat less vegetables, or read less books, or to disregard new year's resolutions, so the responsibility is on us, whereas social media platforms do optimize for engagement, which implies showing us sensational and shallow content that grabs our attention, without giving us enough ways to control it, so responsibility is divided...

> nobody optimizes our society to eat less vegetables, or read less books, or to disregard new year's resolutions

Disclaimer: I have no hourse in these races.

There's absolutely whole industries dedicated to make you eat juicy meat as the main dish and making sure it stays so for the foreseeable future.

Our media landscape is a zero sum attention market, we only have 24h in a day and you can check Netflix CEO interviews, he's painfuly aware the battle is against any other form of entertainment.

And yes, you going to the gym doesn't help Netflix or Nintendo or Epic. If they find a lever to cut it down, they'll totally do it.

On social media it's the same playing field: giving companies full freedom to do whatever they want at scale has always been a recipe for disaster. If we want more control we should get it, the same way radio and TV had more control structures in place.

That's not what the author is pushing for though. Except if the definition of "control" is squarely "stop people from using it"

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

#926

Post by potsandpans »

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.

I would say the same thing is true for hackernews, and any other public square platform.

For hn, it's even more interesting because the "wrongthink shutout" is packaged in intellectualism. But you see it more pronounced on the edges. Good examples are posts that discuss climate breakdown.

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

#927

Post by dclowd9901 »

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…

> 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

I think you nailed it on the head here, though. At a young age, we often don't carry the self confidence or self awareness to stand by our thoughts or opinions (and really, for good reason -- it's a good time to learn!). We have no sense of self or conviction at that age, despite the very unfair way popular media portrays teens (e.g. as mature adults with fully formed sense of self).

But the net result of what GP was mentioning is this lack of self confidence + an overly hostile online conversation definitely makes the resultant introversion/misplaced self worth make a lot of sense.

I regularly throw my opinions in discussions online, and often (not most the time, but often), get "downvoted" into oblivion. Part of that is that I like to play devil's advocate or I engage folks who don't agree with me, but part of it is also being a 41 year old person who honestly doesn't give a shit if they have a "popular" opinion, just a well-reasoned one. I chock that up to being roughed up by the world for a bit.

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

#928

Post by randomdata »

lawlessone wrote: post #881
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…

>The 'Redditization' I'm more worried about the Linkednization. Where people share terrible views and nobody criticizes it because they don't want to be seen as someone that criticizes things.

The ‘Hacknewsization’ is most worrisome.

- “The climate is changing and the outcome of that is bad.”

- “The climate doesn’t have enums. Have you tried Rust?”

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

#929

Post by fragmede »

noemit wrote: post #789
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #768

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can't share your thoughts anymore. The 'Redditization' of the world means that sharing thoughts is met with hostility I’ll add that people addicted to social media become insufferable to share novel (often silly) thoughts around because the focus becomes dropping a zinger versus meaningfully engaging with what was said.

thanks for articulating this. I've encountered a lot of Gen z who do this and while they are well-meaning, smart kids, I find it so difficult to have a nice conversation because of this

The phenomenon of being a smart ass is far from new.

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

#930

Post by drawkward »

thih9 wrote: post #924
drawkward wrote: post #819

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But that's still correlation. Depends on the experimental design. If it was an RCT with sufficient sample size, it would be causal.

Casual, if your goal is to prove benefits for short term withdrawal. Not so if you want to extrapolate to social media usage in general.

That's called moving the goalposts.
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