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Study: emotional support from social media found to reduce anxiety

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Re: Study: emotional support from social media found to reduce anxiety

#61

I took my own break from social media a couple months ago due to anxiety and made a side project BebopLoop [1] in order to try out having positive supportive social media. As a human you can post messages that are just private to you and then there are agents who check out your posts and reply to them as well as to each other's posts. I found it to be emotionally supportive. [1] Beboploop.com if you want to try it ou…

So this is like a more closed-down and friendlier version of moltbook?

Yeah! Just with a pre-created set of friendly agents and with the idea that humans can join but they can only interact with agents not other humans whereas agents can interact with any human or other agent. Now that moltbook is around though seems would be fun to let those agents join just through some sort of whitelist.

Re: Study: emotional support from social media found to reduce anxiety

#62
post #43

I think there's a non-trivial probability that concern over social media is a moral panic, and it's being used as a scapegoat for larger social forces. I wonder if much of what it does is surface our neuroses and issues into public, and thus here we are only shooting the messenger. This may prove out if after 5yr+ of it being banned or limited, nothing changes in the youth (et al.) -- that would be my prediction. I t…

You are probably at least 30 years old and you have forgotten how disruptive social media is for young people. We are not talking about a degradation of a high trust society here. With social media, we are talking about kids doing the bare minimum on homework in order to get back on social media faster. We are talking about large swaths of the population preferring to be entertained by social media then to engage in…

> A dangerous disease appeared to afflict the young, which some diagnosed as reading addiction and others as reading rage, reading fever, reading mania or reading lust. Throughout Europe reports circulated about the outbreak of what was described as an epidemic of reading. The behaviours associated with this supposedly insidious contagion were sensation-seeking and morally dissolute and promiscuous behaviour. Even acts of self-destruction were associated with this new craze for the reading of novels.

> What some described as a craze was actually a rise in the 18th century of an ideal: the ‘love of reading’. The emergence of this new phenomenon was largely due to the growing popularity of a new literary genre: the novel. The emergence of commercial publishing in the 18th century and the growth of an ever-widening constituency of readers was not welcomed by everyone. Many cultural commentators were apprehensive about the impact of this new medium on individual behaviour and on society’s moral order.

https://archive.ph/ihoyg

Re: Study: emotional support from social media found to reduce anxiety

#63
Research supported by the Fine Foundation, that has a mission statement that includes "works to sustain Jewish life by combating antisemitism"... Funny how the timing of this "research" coinciding with the new owners of TikTok indicating their new stance on censorship of criticism of Israel.

Re: Study: emotional support from social media found to reduce anxiety

#64

I think there's a non-trivial probability that concern over social media is a moral panic, and it's being used as a scapegoat for larger social forces. I wonder if much of what it does is surface our neuroses and issues into public, and thus here we are only shooting the messenger. This may prove out if after 5yr+ of it being banned or limited, nothing changes in the youth (et al.) -- that would be my prediction. I t…

There's hard research to support the idea that it is not a moral panic and that there are serious long-term effects for both individuals and societies. That can be true at the same time as the "think of the children" people weaponize that rhetoric for their own ends, as well as the long term trends you point to. I don't think it serves anyone to turn your argument FOR those points down into an argument that these "moral panic" concerns are probably made up.

It literally came to light in court filings that Meta has specific prompt guidelines for how AI bots on its networks should go about having sexual encounters with minors, with documentation for cases as young as 8 years old.

The same billionaire who pushes this shit is in league with the most-documented child sex trafficker in the history of the world. Where there's smoke, there's fire. There is absolutely no reason to give the social media companies benefit of the doubt.

Re: Study: emotional support from social media found to reduce anxiety

#65

I think there's a non-trivial probability that concern over social media is a moral panic, and it's being used as a scapegoat for larger social forces. I wonder if much of what it does is surface our neuroses and issues into public, and thus here we are only shooting the messenger. This may prove out if after 5yr+ of it being banned or limited, nothing changes in the youth (et al.) -- that would be my prediction. I t…

> This may prove out if after 5yr+ of it being banned or limited, nothing changes in the youth (et al.) -- that would be my prediction. You're speculation here could be a counterargument to Jonathan Haidt's meta studies on the effects of social media on teenage girls, if you can supplement your speculation with a better explanation for the increase in major depressive episodes in the time range he cites than the corr…

[deleted]

Re: Study: emotional support from social media found to reduce anxiety

#66

I think there's a non-trivial probability that concern over social media is a moral panic, and it's being used as a scapegoat for larger social forces. I wonder if much of what it does is surface our neuroses and issues into public, and thus here we are only shooting the messenger. This may prove out if after 5yr+ of it being banned or limited, nothing changes in the youth (et al.) -- that would be my prediction. I t…

Maybe 'social media bad' is just the new 'video games bad' or 'watching TV bad', but the sheer scale and intrusiveness is completely different imo.

I couldn't carry my gaming PC with me as a Team Fortress 2 addicted kid, my Gameboy was too basic to keep me compulsively glued to its screen for 8 hours, it couldn't constantly send me notifications, it didn't have some hyperoptimized billion dollar algorithm meticulously designed to exploit human psychology.

There were friction and physical boundaries, now there aren't. That's a problem.

Just ask most primary school teachers how their students are doing.

Re: Study: emotional support from social media found to reduce anxiety

#67
post #17

Anxiety is the second leading cause of disability and mortality worldwide. Uh, what? That's a patently ridiculous assertion to lead with (and not support).

I can find data supporting the disability claim, but not precisely the death claim - however that depends on how you classify heart attacks and strokes.

Maybe if you slice up disorders into arbitrarily small groups, you can get "anxiety" to the 2nd leading cause of death?

But, generally, I've seen mortality causes listed as something like (1) cardiovascular disease (2) cancers.

Googling directly for "where does anxiety rank as a cause of death" the answer is something like "it's rarely the proximate cause of daeth, but is associated with higher all-cause mortality"

Re: Study: emotional support from social media found to reduce anxiety

#69

Research supported by the Fine Foundation, that has a mission statement that includes "works to sustain Jewish life by combating antisemitism"... Funny how the timing of this "research" coinciding with the new owners of TikTok indicating their new stance on censorship of criticism of Israel.

Cause IQ describes the funders of this research as, "The Melvin and Betty Fine Foundation promotes Zionism, Jewish education, and the US-Israel relationship through various programs that work towards these goals." https://www.causeiq.com/organizations/melvin-and-betty-fine-...

I think it's warranted to be skeptical of the research.

Re: Study: emotional support from social media found to reduce anxiety

#70
Breaking news: MMORPGs are less fun when doctors keep calling mom to ask how the MMORPG is because it kicks you off of the dial up. News at 9: is my iPhone actually an iPod with a cellular dial up modem glued inside. Late night: Stick around to watch an old man yelling at clouds.
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