Teen mental health is plummeting and social media is a major contributing cause [pdf]

i want to share one of the saddest things i have read online recently.

not long ago, one would think that bullying would not follow kids to their houses. once they got home, they would be safe with their family. that's no longer the case with the advent of social media.

the story is that of a teenage girl who committed suicide due to constant bullying. it never stopped, even when she got home. and her family had no idea. she was, based on the photos and her brother's post, a very pretty and high achieving young person. that alone, he wrote, was the reason they targeted his sister.

after her suicide, a memorial page was set up by her family. anyone who knew her could add a message. huge mistake! the bullies flooded the page with cruel and insensitive messages. like "good riddance" and how "the world was better without her". remember, the bullies were her schoolmates, not strangers...

the story saddened and upset me.

i couldn't imagine what the poor family were going through. and i know that these bullies didn't realize the gravity of what they were doing. i don't have a solution to offer either. i just wanna share that young person's story. i am sure when the leaders of our social media platforms get in their meeting rooms, nobody is going to mention her.

i wanna share her story so people know it happened. and that it's still happening.

> We'll fix them and, with any luck, we'll be better ancestors to our children.

I think that the anxiety might come from the view that we might not fix those problems in time, because the amount of work needed to do so is that vast.

I'm not sure if you know but Tiktok and Douyin (Chinese Tiktok) are actually separate.

it must be said, even if its not what everyone wants to hear, that the fear-mongering corporate news media, who carpet the world in content that is deliberately designed to elicit a primordial brain-stem stress response, have probably contributed to this problem. whether they turn on the tv or they are sitting in the classroom, kids of all ages have it drilled into them that their country is evil and racist, that they are guilty almost implicitly for having white skin, doomed to a life of hardship if they have black skin, and also that the world is coming to rapid apocalypse which is completely the kids and the kids familys fault. i am not making a statement about whether any of that is true; what is undeniably true is that kids are being injected with this stuff 24/7 and its not good for them.

when i was a kid, we stood for the flag and sang the pledge of allegiance. there was a notion in the air of unity, order and strength. when i look back i recognize that this was very good for my mental health. you can have your opinion about the pledge but there is no denying that our children need an environment that is good for their mental health.

>Strongly disagree, when has society ever decided less access to information is ideal?

The trick social media companies use is convincing people that all they're doing is giving people access to "information". They are not; they're just creating addiction machines. It should be self evident that wikipedia or a minimalist blog with a comment box is in an entirely different solar system from facebook's algorithm that keeps track of how long you scroll and then shows you something you're likely to interact with right before you're supposed to close the app, manipulating your emotions to keep you "engaged" longer.

>Our descendants will create better platforms that can allow users to better filter for their emotional needs and they'll likely have better tools to understand their own emotions.

We already have them. My kids won't be able to access the internet until they figure out how to navigate the command line.

In the beginning ...