I was addicted to Twitter in high school. I spent hours on it at night, getting no sleep. I spent so much time and mental bandwidth thinking of funny things to say or memes to make to get more likes. I was addicted to the likes and keeping up with everyone I knew.
First semester of college, I stopped using Twitter. My sleep got better, I had more free time, and I was noticeably happier and freer. I no longer spent time in that dopamine cycle.
I've been weening off of Reddit and HN the past few months as well. YouTube is my next beast to conquer, and that might be the biggest one for me right now. I'm trying to adapt to longer form content again, instead of only watching videos under a minute or reading 280 character tweets. I want to have an attention span again, I really do.
Is social media an inherently evil thing? I don't think so, but I don't think I should use it. I also think that it can be toxic for teenagers in general. There are a variety of reasons, but the one that applied to me was the dopamine cycle caused by "likes".
Getting off of Facebook and Twitter was the best thing I ever did - I can't believe how much more mental space I have now that I'm no longer stuck in conversation loops with strangers.
Interestingly, it was a mushroom trip that did it. The mushroom spirit (or whatever you want to call it) lucidly explained how I was wasting my life on those websites. The next day I quit, and its been years now, though I def felt withdrawals for a few weeks being off of twitter. Now it's like I was never even there.
I feel so bad for all of the young people who can't understand, due to peer pressure, just how bad it is for them. And shame on parents for not making more of an effort to ask questions.
I’ve got great mileage out of RSS feeds from Reddit and HN. I have them run once a day for the subreddits I find interesting and cruise those in the morning. Then that’s it. No more checking multiple times per day
That way I can engage in a topic if I really want to.
HN has the same problem with upvotes. It would be healthier not to display karma scores at all, even privately. Use them for ranking etc but hide the numbers completely.
I'm starting to wonder if mass media in general is bad for our mental health, and if we'd be better off unplugging as much as we can from everything - social media, TV, radio, Hacker News, etc. and spending more time with our community. I suppose the problem is, most communities are completely addicted to this stuff, so we're left in a situation where it's hard for most people to unplug for any long period of time without isolating themselves.
Social media damages everyone's mental health it seems.
For some reason it seems to bring out the worst in so many people, and people think it's now acceptable to post online the awful thoughts that they would've kept to themselves
Thing I noticed is that teens are responding to the thinking fads with a lot of intensity. They'll overthink their issues, their sexuality, their identity. Internet amplifies the already amplifying mind ..
I was about to say the same thing. At least social media gives me quite a bit of mental heart burn.
Interestingly enough, HN and reddit have both been really useful for me. Both are much more focused AND the people there don't gain anything by attacking me personally, only by attacking my ideas. This has been really good because it's allowed me to get used to communicating ideas in a way that people will understand them and getting used to people being upset at me.
Social media where people know who I am in real life though, has been terrible. Like, the worst was a few different relatives who were getting "offending" at me because it gave them social capital with other relatives. I had nothing to do with anything, they just wanted to look good in front of someone else by trying to make me look bad. And I suppose that's a good lesson to learn, but it's not something I want to have to deal with from arbitrary many people.
Uninstalled all social media apps a couple months ago. Noticed an immediate improvement in my mental health. Haven't regretted it, don't miss it. I still log in occasionally via the web, just to see if there's anything I should know about with my friends.
It may seem that way but don't believe it's 100% accurate.
Mental pressure built up within yourself, whatever is their cause, get somewhat released after a good cry. Afterwards you feel a little bit refreshed. You feel a little bit less sad. The anger within you is not as prominent.
Lashing out on people, starting flame wars in your favorite online forum, screaming, yelling and DEMANDING to be heard, shouldn't that also release some of the tensions we all carry around with us from time to time? Wouldn't that leave us a little less motivated to go out IRL and actually hurt someone physically, a little less motivated to sit down and furiously start on the next evil manifesto?
My own brain, though, is not built for social media. I need to see the nervous twitch in your eye, your conniving smile or the loving wink of your eye in order to fully understand you and I think oftentimes when you misunderstand me it's because you didn't see my eye twitching or my mouth smiling. But I've heard other people being absolutely in love with it. It can't be all bad.
> Social media damages everyone's mental health it seems.
Does it? I've been using social media extensively for almost 30 years now (and now building social platforms for nearly a decade), and a lot of the biggest opportunities I've gotten in my life/career have come from social media. Whatever anxiety it can cause on a day-to-day basis, I feel like you more than make back in various benefits over the long term.
Back when I was a kid, if we had internet access at all, we mostly used it for the community aspect. A fan of some book? Search for it on Altavista and you likely found some kind of fan site which had a little bulletin board community organized around it. Or maybe a usenet group. A few minutes down the road you were talking to strangers on the other side of the planet about something you were all actively interested in. Hell, even radio stations had their own chat rooms and forums. Many free software tools had dedicated IRC channels. Mailing lists and usenet groups abound.
These communities were all interest based, and there were sooooo many of them. Because they were interest based, they mostly attracted people who at least had something in common with you, which made it easy to relate to them. And because people are not onedimensional, they were often part of many different communities. Which, aside from being fun, was also a great way to learn how to interact with people all over the world.
Sure, flame wars were a thing, and I'm sure people were bullied and whatnot. Community moderation worked pretty well, though (as someone who administered a 10k+ members forum) it could be a lot of work. But no one ever damaged their mental health by frequenting a knitting forum.
Facebook pretty much destroyed all of these (or at least decimated them). Perhaps these groups are still around, but it's now actively hard to find them. FB does not foster a sense of community. It's not a platform where you will learn anything about any topic. It's not an environment that's conducive to improving personal interactions. It attempted to centralize those things, and it failed. Instead of paying attention to things that interest us, we now have FB and its ilk begging us to please pay attention to their garbage. I miss actual communities, warts and all, and I think that young people's mental health would be better off if they made a return.
Final note: yes, there are exceptions, I know it's not all quite as bad as I'm dramatizing here.
People should really read the research [1] and not this article as the article doesn't actually capture the scope and real impact of the research.
The executive summary highlights:
* Personal wellbeing drops, on average, as children move from primary into secondary school, and continues to drop as children move through secondary school.
* We find a graded relationship between family income and all three outcomes through adolescence: young people’s mental and emotional health scores are worse the lower down their family is on the income scale
*Engaging in physical activity was found to be more important for boys’ mental and emotional health in early adolescence than girls’, with a graded relationship between frequency of exercise and scores on all three outcomes for 14-year-old boys; at age 17, we find a graded relationship with frequency of exercise in both girls and boys. Heavy social media use is associated with worse scores on all outcomes in girls age 14 and 17, but only worse well being for boys at age 14.
Social media as it exists currently is like being surrounded 24/7 by nattering, gossiping, scatterbrains playing an eternal game of brinksmanship and striving at one-upping each other.
It's all correlational (observing that people with higher social media use are worse off in various ways). This approach is not capable of detecting reverse causation (people use social media more because they are unhappy) or third causes (something else causes people to both use more social media and also be unhappy)
> One in three girls was unhappy with their personal appearance by the age of 14, compared with one in seven at the end of primary school.
That comparison doesn't support the hypothesis. It should have been compared to teenagers from 10 years ago. Otherwise, you can't rule out the effect of growing up on the mental health if these girls.
And even if it was causal, you'd still need to investigate what it is on social media that causes misery, e.g. ideologies/misinformation, social comparison/envy, cyber-bullying, addiction, bad news/sensationalism or echo chambers.
I also wonder how they controlled for content vs. medium.
The news of the world has been pretty bad all around, getting worse and worse over the past decade. I can't help but wonder if being online plugs someone more deeply into that news, and the actual cause of the damage to one's mental health is more exposure to multi-sourced narratives unfiltered by the editorial voice often employed by traditional news media.
What if these young people are showing signs of mental trauma because mental trauma is a predictable reaction to being informed about the state of the world, and being more online leaves one more informed?
They do acknowledge in the article itself that it is correlation and that it could be reverse causation:
> “Those who feel worse may turn to social media for solace or community,” Dr Amy Orben, research fellow at Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge, said of the research.
“It’s not a vacuum, it works both ways."
But the actual article headline is the typical clickbait interpretation of a scientific study.
> A new study in Nature Human Behaviour, which looked at data from more than 350,000 adolescents, also found that digital tech use mattered little to kids’ well-being. The authors, Amy Orben and Przybylski, argue that prior research, which examined the impact of social media on teens and tweens, was based on weak correlations and insufficiently comprehensive methods, and therefore drew false conclusions.
A family friend explained it in a way that stuck with me, paraphrasing:
"When you were in school, you only compared yourself to peers at your school and maybe one school over. Now me and my friends compare our looks, accomplishments, and follower counts to everyone within 10 years of us on Instagram"
Social media (and the attention economy) are worse for young brains than drugs.
If you came up with a substance that caused young people by the millions to become totally addicted, cost them multiple hours per day, pushed them into depression and suicide, and contributed to inactivity, obesity, loss of attention span, and overall ennui, it would be banned almost immediately.
Heck, if you proposed a tracking system that kept track of kids' whereabouts, social connections, and required them to post identifying information and photos, as well as gather their interests and political leanings, it'd be illegal.
The fact that we allowed companies to do these two things together while making money off it is absolutely astounding to me.
Amusingly, you could analyze anything this way if you ignore the benefits and only look at the costs.
"Planes are an outrage! Imagine if you proposed a system that required hours of everyone's time, cost them hundreds of dollars, forced them to sit in cramped positions, and subjected them to invasive scans and searches of their personal materials."
"How are schools allowed! They literally imprison our kids for upwards of 7 hours a day, feed them substandard food, and subject them to Orwellian surveillance, exorbitant record-keeping, cruel social hierarchies, and a stress-inducing grading system akin to a dystopian social credit system."
I'm not saying the downsides aren't in fact downsides. They are. But you can't accurately assess the whole picture without taking the upsides into account, too.
> Social media (and the attention economy) are worse for young brains than drugs.
I don't think you need young in that sentence. I see social media's negative effects on all age groups.
I see it in my own life (I'm 30): somehow, I feel compelled to keep track of politics, and I watch political shows way too much. I don't learn anything from it 98% of the time. After I watch/read about that topic, I can't concentrate on anything for long, I want to know more. The moment I wake up, I reach to the mobile to read the news. Then, I visit some meme sites, then I go to Hacker News. When I don't want to wake up yet, I repeat.
As a defense mechanism, I deactivated Facebook, I only post programming content on Twitter and I aggressively mute anyone who brings political tweets in my feed. I disabled notifications from most apps. I set up content blocker extensions so I don't accidentally wander to sites I don't want to visit. When I visit YouTube, I intentionally focus on the task at hand and try to not let the algorithm distract me (which is hard, because their recommendations almost always resonate with me). It works "okay", but I still didn't break the habit and I need strong self-control.
I see it also with my mother and sister, they are approx 60 and 35. They never get bored of scrolling through their feeds, they can't focus on anything else. They also often feel bad because their lives don't match what they see on the web. They make up a persona online that don't match their reality (which I see).
I'm not advocating for banning these things for adults, but I'd raise this issue to the people who read my comment: most adults behave very similarly to children, so observe your behavior and adapt.
Indeed. I always find it strange when people are shocked by bullying in schools or teenagers being jerks to each other. Didn't everyone witness that? Every single person at my high school could tell you who was bullied.
The toxic communities that exist have a mixture of no-clue 11 year olds with minimal parental supervision (or parental supervision that's failing) through to young adults who found a community that can reflect their feelings back.
Eg: the proana/edtwt communities are clearly children just working things out to young adults getting followings and interaction with a community. It sickens me to see a post from a 23 yr old spouting how to hide ED from your parents by doing the following... Or using subliminals to change the shape of your nose.
Imagine you are the chairman of Phillip Morris in 1995. You control one of the biggest companies in the world, absolutely full of cash. You also know that your product is just bad all around for everybody whether they use it or not. One of your corporate lawyers tells you that you need to immediately break yourself up, sell off all the components to foreign buyers, cease all operations in the United States, and cash out the company to the shareholders. You pass; this will be no big deal. The next three years are living hell, morning to night sitting in a courthouse listening to your customers detail how you destroyed their lives. At the end you get a $200B settlement against you, your company is dead, everybody hates you, and you are no longer welcome in any of your social circles. Was it worth it? If a company is required to do the best thing for the shareholders, then shouldn’t it require them to cash out at the zenith of their value? Otherwise if they are going to ride all the way down, how is the stock ever worth anything?
Phillip Morris didn't operate a sophisticated propaganda machine capable of steering national opinion in its own favor and indeed directing the course of democracy (if we are to believe that foreign actors can side-channel attack Twitter's algos to influence elections, then it naturally follows that Twitter can influence elections with direct control over its algorithms). I don't mean this in a contrarian sense (I agree with you), moreso just venting my pessimism that things will change.
Loneliness damages peoples' mental health, too. Is there some chance that, for mental health, the ordering goes "in-person interaction > social media interaction > no interaction at all"?
Then of course if you compare social media interaction with in-person interaction you may conclude that social media = bad, but the causality may (in part) be the other way around, as the article says:
> “Those who feel worse may turn to social media for solace or community,” Dr Amy Orben, research fellow at Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge, said of the research.
The article mentions a myriad of factors that correlate with mental health issues going into adolescence. It’s interesting that the headline targets social media, as the body of the article doesn’t seem to highlight it as an especially strong correlation.
As a side note, the differing trends of boys and girls after adolescence is really interesting.
> However, it recognised that girls' self-esteem and wellbeing stabilises as they move into their late teens, whereas it continues to drop for boys
Will have to read the source material to see if they propose any causes for that
The article also quotes the researcher explicitly denying the BBC’s headline suggesting causation.
I downvoted all the popular comments here which were ready to agree with the causation despite the research making no comment on that at all: the complete lack of critical thinking is why this gets to be the chosen headline. Pure clickbait.
One child (reserved/shy) - has had probably more negative impact than anything else in her life. From the very first access to tech has continually found opportunity to find toxic, negative communities (hentai, r/teenagers, edtwt, sh, bdsm). Any attempt to reduce results in hiding and lying. The speed that a kid can change window or swipe away is ridiculous. Literally can't find a way that tech has benefitted her.
Another child (shy too), enamored with anything that teaches her more (tik tok, youtube, etc).
The big difference is that the second child isn't looking for community. The first child is looking for community but can only find community in echo chambers that reflect back teenage angst, and those echo chambers run deep.
I can only hope that the first child grows into an well adjusted adult, and while not social media, toxic and negative online communities are just simply too easier to slide into.
It is heartsickening that this is the result of current social media implementation. As others have mentioned, it is largely caused by this attention economy (as I've heard Tristan Harris of https://www.humanetech.com/ call it) - where the apps most used today are made to be addictive and consume our attention as much as possible.
I have been working on a more intimate, less addictive, social media and messaging application that I hope can be part of a trend of new apps that help solve this problem. I believe one of the features in current apps that makes them so addictive, for teens especially, is the endless stream of content they have access to - they can view hours and hours of videos from celebrities they don't personally know, content creators they have never met, brands, etc. If we can scale back the endless stream of content (which leads to doom-scrolling), that might be one approach to helping limit screen time without sacrificing the meaningful connection to friends and family that social media enables.
He's not on social media, but does play games online with others.
I'm working really hard to enforce a sort of "If it isn't positive, you don't feel good about it... time to not do it for a while / find another game / people to play with."
I'm trying to teach him to evaluate and shape his own experiences online and make choices based on that.
It is interesting to me the way these research results are spun. A previous study[1] that paid users to quit Facebook found that they were happier, and were less up to date about news and politics. The headlines were all some variation of "quitting facebook will make you happier", as opposed to "keeping up to date on news / politics makes you unhappy".
Similarly, the headline here says "Social media damages teenagers' mental health, report says" while the body of the article notes:
“Those who feel worse may turn to social media for solace or community,” Dr Amy Orben, research fellow at Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge, said of the research.
[+] [-] jjice|5 years ago|reply
First semester of college, I stopped using Twitter. My sleep got better, I had more free time, and I was noticeably happier and freer. I no longer spent time in that dopamine cycle.
I've been weening off of Reddit and HN the past few months as well. YouTube is my next beast to conquer, and that might be the biggest one for me right now. I'm trying to adapt to longer form content again, instead of only watching videos under a minute or reading 280 character tweets. I want to have an attention span again, I really do.
Is social media an inherently evil thing? I don't think so, but I don't think I should use it. I also think that it can be toxic for teenagers in general. There are a variety of reasons, but the one that applied to me was the dopamine cycle caused by "likes".
[+] [-] sibeliuss|5 years ago|reply
Interestingly, it was a mushroom trip that did it. The mushroom spirit (or whatever you want to call it) lucidly explained how I was wasting my life on those websites. The next day I quit, and its been years now, though I def felt withdrawals for a few weeks being off of twitter. Now it's like I was never even there.
I feel so bad for all of the young people who can't understand, due to peer pressure, just how bad it is for them. And shame on parents for not making more of an effort to ask questions.
[+] [-] causalmodels|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] loughnane|5 years ago|reply
That way I can engage in a topic if I really want to.
[+] [-] anthk|5 years ago|reply
As if doesn't have infinite scroll, is less addicting.
[+] [-] esja|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bnralt|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChrisRR|5 years ago|reply
For some reason it seems to bring out the worst in so many people, and people think it's now acceptable to post online the awful thoughts that they would've kept to themselves
[+] [-] agumonkey|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] daenz|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Verdex|5 years ago|reply
Interestingly enough, HN and reddit have both been really useful for me. Both are much more focused AND the people there don't gain anything by attacking me personally, only by attacking my ideas. This has been really good because it's allowed me to get used to communicating ideas in a way that people will understand them and getting used to people being upset at me.
Social media where people know who I am in real life though, has been terrible. Like, the worst was a few different relatives who were getting "offending" at me because it gave them social capital with other relatives. I had nothing to do with anything, they just wanted to look good in front of someone else by trying to make me look bad. And I suppose that's a good lesson to learn, but it's not something I want to have to deal with from arbitrary many people.
[+] [-] marcus_holmes|5 years ago|reply
Still can't kick HN ;)
[+] [-] kreeben|5 years ago|reply
It may seem that way but don't believe it's 100% accurate.
Mental pressure built up within yourself, whatever is their cause, get somewhat released after a good cry. Afterwards you feel a little bit refreshed. You feel a little bit less sad. The anger within you is not as prominent.
Lashing out on people, starting flame wars in your favorite online forum, screaming, yelling and DEMANDING to be heard, shouldn't that also release some of the tensions we all carry around with us from time to time? Wouldn't that leave us a little less motivated to go out IRL and actually hurt someone physically, a little less motivated to sit down and furiously start on the next evil manifesto?
My own brain, though, is not built for social media. I need to see the nervous twitch in your eye, your conniving smile or the loving wink of your eye in order to fully understand you and I think oftentimes when you misunderstand me it's because you didn't see my eye twitching or my mouth smiling. But I've heard other people being absolutely in love with it. It can't be all bad.
[+] [-] calebm|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Alex3917|5 years ago|reply
Does it? I've been using social media extensively for almost 30 years now (and now building social platforms for nearly a decade), and a lot of the biggest opportunities I've gotten in my life/career have come from social media. Whatever anxiety it can cause on a day-to-day basis, I feel like you more than make back in various benefits over the long term.
[+] [-] opendysphoria|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elric|5 years ago|reply
Back when I was a kid, if we had internet access at all, we mostly used it for the community aspect. A fan of some book? Search for it on Altavista and you likely found some kind of fan site which had a little bulletin board community organized around it. Or maybe a usenet group. A few minutes down the road you were talking to strangers on the other side of the planet about something you were all actively interested in. Hell, even radio stations had their own chat rooms and forums. Many free software tools had dedicated IRC channels. Mailing lists and usenet groups abound.
These communities were all interest based, and there were sooooo many of them. Because they were interest based, they mostly attracted people who at least had something in common with you, which made it easy to relate to them. And because people are not onedimensional, they were often part of many different communities. Which, aside from being fun, was also a great way to learn how to interact with people all over the world.
Sure, flame wars were a thing, and I'm sure people were bullied and whatnot. Community moderation worked pretty well, though (as someone who administered a 10k+ members forum) it could be a lot of work. But no one ever damaged their mental health by frequenting a knitting forum.
Facebook pretty much destroyed all of these (or at least decimated them). Perhaps these groups are still around, but it's now actively hard to find them. FB does not foster a sense of community. It's not a platform where you will learn anything about any topic. It's not an environment that's conducive to improving personal interactions. It attempted to centralize those things, and it failed. Instead of paying attention to things that interest us, we now have FB and its ilk begging us to please pay attention to their garbage. I miss actual communities, warts and all, and I think that young people's mental health would be better off if they made a return.
Final note: yes, there are exceptions, I know it's not all quite as bad as I'm dramatizing here.
[+] [-] AndrewKemendo|5 years ago|reply
The executive summary highlights:
* Personal wellbeing drops, on average, as children move from primary into secondary school, and continues to drop as children move through secondary school.
* We find a graded relationship between family income and all three outcomes through adolescence: young people’s mental and emotional health scores are worse the lower down their family is on the income scale
*Engaging in physical activity was found to be more important for boys’ mental and emotional health in early adolescence than girls’, with a graded relationship between frequency of exercise and scores on all three outcomes for 14-year-old boys; at age 17, we find a graded relationship with frequency of exercise in both girls and boys. Heavy social media use is associated with worse scores on all outcomes in girls age 14 and 17, but only worse well being for boys at age 14.
Etc...
[1]https://epi.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/EPI-PT_Young-p...
[+] [-] sillyquiet|5 years ago|reply
So yeah, I can intuitively believe this study.
[+] [-] jefftk|5 years ago|reply
It's all correlational (observing that people with higher social media use are worse off in various ways). This approach is not capable of detecting reverse causation (people use social media more because they are unhappy) or third causes (something else causes people to both use more social media and also be unhappy)
[+] [-] ohduran|5 years ago|reply
> One in three girls was unhappy with their personal appearance by the age of 14, compared with one in seven at the end of primary school.
That comparison doesn't support the hypothesis. It should have been compared to teenagers from 10 years ago. Otherwise, you can't rule out the effect of growing up on the mental health if these girls.
[+] [-] civilized|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] longtom|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shadowgovt|5 years ago|reply
The news of the world has been pretty bad all around, getting worse and worse over the past decade. I can't help but wonder if being online plugs someone more deeply into that news, and the actual cause of the damage to one's mental health is more exposure to multi-sourced narratives unfiltered by the editorial voice often employed by traditional news media.
What if these young people are showing signs of mental trauma because mental trauma is a predictable reaction to being informed about the state of the world, and being more online leaves one more informed?
[+] [-] NalNezumi|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dr_orpheus|5 years ago|reply
> “Those who feel worse may turn to social media for solace or community,” Dr Amy Orben, research fellow at Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge, said of the research.
“It’s not a vacuum, it works both ways."
But the actual article headline is the typical clickbait interpretation of a scientific study.
[+] [-] jameslk|5 years ago|reply
http://www.nautil.us/blog/studies-shoot-down-techs-harmful-e...
> A new study in Nature Human Behaviour, which looked at data from more than 350,000 adolescents, also found that digital tech use mattered little to kids’ well-being. The authors, Amy Orben and Przybylski, argue that prior research, which examined the impact of social media on teens and tweens, was based on weak correlations and insufficiently comprehensive methods, and therefore drew false conclusions.
[+] [-] coreyrab|5 years ago|reply
"When you were in school, you only compared yourself to peers at your school and maybe one school over. Now me and my friends compare our looks, accomplishments, and follower counts to everyone within 10 years of us on Instagram"
[+] [-] titzer|5 years ago|reply
If you came up with a substance that caused young people by the millions to become totally addicted, cost them multiple hours per day, pushed them into depression and suicide, and contributed to inactivity, obesity, loss of attention span, and overall ennui, it would be banned almost immediately.
Heck, if you proposed a tracking system that kept track of kids' whereabouts, social connections, and required them to post identifying information and photos, as well as gather their interests and political leanings, it'd be illegal.
The fact that we allowed companies to do these two things together while making money off it is absolutely astounding to me.
[+] [-] csallen|5 years ago|reply
"Planes are an outrage! Imagine if you proposed a system that required hours of everyone's time, cost them hundreds of dollars, forced them to sit in cramped positions, and subjected them to invasive scans and searches of their personal materials."
"How are schools allowed! They literally imprison our kids for upwards of 7 hours a day, feed them substandard food, and subject them to Orwellian surveillance, exorbitant record-keeping, cruel social hierarchies, and a stress-inducing grading system akin to a dystopian social credit system."
I'm not saying the downsides aren't in fact downsides. They are. But you can't accurately assess the whole picture without taking the upsides into account, too.
[+] [-] serial_dev|5 years ago|reply
I don't think you need young in that sentence. I see social media's negative effects on all age groups.
I see it in my own life (I'm 30): somehow, I feel compelled to keep track of politics, and I watch political shows way too much. I don't learn anything from it 98% of the time. After I watch/read about that topic, I can't concentrate on anything for long, I want to know more. The moment I wake up, I reach to the mobile to read the news. Then, I visit some meme sites, then I go to Hacker News. When I don't want to wake up yet, I repeat.
As a defense mechanism, I deactivated Facebook, I only post programming content on Twitter and I aggressively mute anyone who brings political tweets in my feed. I disabled notifications from most apps. I set up content blocker extensions so I don't accidentally wander to sites I don't want to visit. When I visit YouTube, I intentionally focus on the task at hand and try to not let the algorithm distract me (which is hard, because their recommendations almost always resonate with me). It works "okay", but I still didn't break the habit and I need strong self-control.
I see it also with my mother and sister, they are approx 60 and 35. They never get bored of scrolling through their feeds, they can't focus on anything else. They also often feel bad because their lives don't match what they see on the web. They make up a persona online that don't match their reality (which I see).
I'm not advocating for banning these things for adults, but I'd raise this issue to the people who read my comment: most adults behave very similarly to children, so observe your behavior and adapt.
[+] [-] jp555|5 years ago|reply
Don't most teenagers spend most of their time socializing with other teenagers?
My pre-internet teenage "social networking" was full of traumatic times. Has that not been the case of teenagers forever?
I guess this study is reporting an measurable increase above the "normal" amount? That seems like it would be very hard to measure.
[+] [-] MattGaiser|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mtippett|5 years ago|reply
The toxic communities that exist have a mixture of no-clue 11 year olds with minimal parental supervision (or parental supervision that's failing) through to young adults who found a community that can reflect their feelings back.
Eg: the proana/edtwt communities are clearly children just working things out to young adults getting followings and interaction with a community. It sickens me to see a post from a 23 yr old spouting how to hide ED from your parents by doing the following... Or using subliminals to change the shape of your nose.
[+] [-] jl2718|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway894345|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] twiss|5 years ago|reply
Then of course if you compare social media interaction with in-person interaction you may conclude that social media = bad, but the causality may (in part) be the other way around, as the article says:
> “Those who feel worse may turn to social media for solace or community,” Dr Amy Orben, research fellow at Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge, said of the research.
[+] [-] samrmay|5 years ago|reply
As a side note, the differing trends of boys and girls after adolescence is really interesting.
> However, it recognised that girls' self-esteem and wellbeing stabilises as they move into their late teens, whereas it continues to drop for boys
Will have to read the source material to see if they propose any causes for that
[+] [-] learnstats2|5 years ago|reply
I downvoted all the popular comments here which were ready to agree with the causation despite the research making no comment on that at all: the complete lack of critical thinking is why this gets to be the chosen headline. Pure clickbait.
[+] [-] mtippett|5 years ago|reply
One child (reserved/shy) - has had probably more negative impact than anything else in her life. From the very first access to tech has continually found opportunity to find toxic, negative communities (hentai, r/teenagers, edtwt, sh, bdsm). Any attempt to reduce results in hiding and lying. The speed that a kid can change window or swipe away is ridiculous. Literally can't find a way that tech has benefitted her.
Another child (shy too), enamored with anything that teaches her more (tik tok, youtube, etc).
The big difference is that the second child isn't looking for community. The first child is looking for community but can only find community in echo chambers that reflect back teenage angst, and those echo chambers run deep.
I can only hope that the first child grows into an well adjusted adult, and while not social media, toxic and negative online communities are just simply too easier to slide into.
[+] [-] OmniiTyler|5 years ago|reply
I have been working on a more intimate, less addictive, social media and messaging application that I hope can be part of a trend of new apps that help solve this problem. I believe one of the features in current apps that makes them so addictive, for teens especially, is the endless stream of content they have access to - they can view hours and hours of videos from celebrities they don't personally know, content creators they have never met, brands, etc. If we can scale back the endless stream of content (which leads to doom-scrolling), that might be one approach to helping limit screen time without sacrificing the meaningful connection to friends and family that social media enables.
[+] [-] username90|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] duxup|5 years ago|reply
He's not on social media, but does play games online with others.
I'm working really hard to enforce a sort of "If it isn't positive, you don't feel good about it... time to not do it for a while / find another game / people to play with."
I'm trying to teach him to evaluate and shape his own experiences online and make choices based on that.
[+] [-] tqi|5 years ago|reply
Similarly, the headline here says "Social media damages teenagers' mental health, report says" while the body of the article notes:
“Those who feel worse may turn to social media for solace or community,” Dr Amy Orben, research fellow at Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge, said of the research.
“It’s not a vacuum, it works both ways."
[1] https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/quitting-facebook-research-...
[+] [-] tbugrara|5 years ago|reply