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 think there are deeper long term trends causing psychological problems in the west: move away from physical to cognitive labour; increasing community isolation and lack of social institutions; various failures of the state; lack of meaningful wage growth in key brackets, and failure of the "aspiration engine" to create opportunities; lack of time for parenting, moving to dual working-parent households; helicopter parenting caused by breakdown of social trust; lack of infrastructure and provision of environments where children can be known safe in public. etc. etc.
The major forces here are: move to a services economy; dual parent working households; lack of social services in state provision; state infrastructure moving away from providing for the young to paying for the old. This means much of how children grow up in the world is unphysical, disconnected, time-poor, risk adverse, overly demanding, etc.
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 activities that would promote their success. We are talking about the same symptoms as addiction manifesting in kids because they are exposed to too much social media.
Your litmus test for generational effect is also flawed. Let's assume an inverse test as a mental exercise, where we introduce social media to a young population previously unexposed. Kids who are able to reject the pull of social media will replace the ones who cannot, the numbers will shuffle. After such a test is concluded, you will tell yourself you're right because on a macro-economic scale everything looks the same, but to an individual prone to social media overuse, his or her life will be different (likely worse).
That said, the issues you bring up are more important, and no one seems willing to tackle them. Perhaps a middle ground here is that the problems you listed are masking the problem of social media overuse, but that social media overuse is still a problem. It is not an innocent messenger.
> 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.
> kids doing the bare minimum on homework in order to get back on social media faster
This was me for much of high school, but with Team Fortress 2 or Dota instead of social media.
Comic books, video games, television, skateboarding, fidget spinning - the list of things kids would rather do than homework is endless. I think a kid spending 4h+ on one activity is unhealthy either way, and it really comes back to the parents to be the arbiters. Speaking from experience, children (generally) aren't very good at predicting how best to spend their time, which is why involved parents are so important.
I was also one who spent their time playing dota in high school. In my experience one can learn more from playing dota than the average social media experience. Understanding team dynamics and emotional regulation to negative experiences outside your control. If you take the game seriously even prioritization and deliberate practice.
Of course not everyone learns from playing dota but at least it's a focused experience that doesn't steal focus away like short form videos.
The question is whether social media is closer to candy or cocaine.
You are right that kids will chose anything other than homework but how do you explain adults spending 8 hours a day on short form platforms? Don't think TV had this kind of a hold on people. Some gamers did tend to develop obsessive tendencies over gaming but now that seems much more widespread with social media
I think your second paragraph is too broad. The same could be said for kids doing the bare minimum to play video games, or even go outside to play with their friends all prior to social media. Many people long spent too much time watching tv, and still do, instead of pursuing what you think success is. Also, let people be content, we don't always need to engaging in activities for success
I'm well older than 30 and couldn't disagree with GP more. I think social media has been an absolute disaster not just for young people, but for society at large.
And, importantly, I don't think it needs to be this way, but is designed to be this way to increase engagement. I remember when I first got on Facebook in the mid 00s and I loved it, and I was able to meaningfully connect with old friends. I also remember when the enshittification began, at least for me, when there was a distinct change in the feed algorithm that made it much more like twitter, designed for right hand thumb scrolling exercises and little actual positive interactions with friends.
I think that on the whole, you're right in that these issues, where social media can provide support to young people, are not often addressed, but I also think that the larger framing that seems to pop up in these threads, where we assume social media is a negative influence that might sometimes facilitate a positive interaction, is backwards, and not really supported by evidence. Far more research, especially research that actually talks to kids about their social media use seems to indicate that, on the whole, kids experience social media as a largely neutral thing that sometimes has good or bad outcomes. Importantly, I think talking to kids reveals that they're usually aware of the harms of social media and they work to mitigate those influences in their lives.
I really blame "The Anxious Generation" for somehow successfully setting the tone of conversation around social media by feeding into the larger moral panic despite being a poorly researched pile of dreck.
While it's true there are many more forces besides social media contributing to the current mental health crisis and it's true that politicians like to blame it for everything to skip talking about broader issues, social media is certainly a major one.
It's well established that excessive (aka average Gen Z and Alpha) use is linked to increased levels of anxiety. It's well understood that it affects the self-esteem of teens and it's clear that more and more kids than ever have no real interests besides TikTok.
Maybe 'social media bad' is just the new 'video games bad' or 'watching TV bad', but the sheer scale and intrusiveness is different. 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 no matter where I was, it didn't have some hyperoptimized billion dollar algorithm meticulously designed to exploit human psychology.
And even the internet was less of a bot-infested and AI-slop echochamber back then.
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.
We gave social media 20 years to impact the world, why give it only 5 for a rollback? It feels like long term effects would take much longer to surface.
>dual parent working households; lack of social services in state provision;
These two feel interrelated :)
> 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.
Do you know if there are countries where the causes you laid out are not the case? (given demographics, I'm not sure if there are too many strict counter examples)
This can be proven. Simply measure a population of typical social media users for relative measures of neuroticism. Then have an experiment population of healthy military leaders and police officers that have low social media use. The assumption is that the second population would score dramatically lower in neuroticism than the population average.
That establishes a of divergent populations baseline. The change their, such as deny, social media access or content. Measure the change to those two populations.
Assumed facts:
* social media access dramatically increases prevalence of anxiety and a state of dependency/addition. When true, removal of social media triggers addiction withdrawal that displays as emotional health illnesses.
* Populations that do not frequently make use of social media are not at risk of withdrawal.
* persons in high risk professions are typically conditioned into states of substantially lower neuroticism that population averages are not exposed to
It's hard to control for mere provision of social media access. Eg., if you're supposed to be out in the field all day, when are you mean to access social media?
Social media is, in that case, a replacement activity.
The question, which is i think unanswered, is whether and what its replacing in the lives of children. It may turn out to be: not much. That when taken away, children don't suddenly get more time, attention, socialisation, etc. instead, they just get less. Or that the kinds of tech hellholes theyre dumped in have purely passive interaction, eg., ipad kids.
Actually, there is historical precedent for that: Gen X.
The defining feature of Generation X is the latch-key kid population. Children arriving home to empty houses for hours after school without any kind of social interaction whether in person or online. This would be before the internet, so there was no online social activity. This behavior may have applied to as many as 30-35 million US households where for the first time in US history both parents were expected to work full time outside the house. These children had to learn to entertain themselves, do their own chores, and possibly prepare their own meals. Imagine an entire massive population learning to become largely fully self-sufficient, from an emotional development perspective, as children. They had no substitute solution or alternative activity.
> 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 correlation with Instagram use.
For this article, however, all the participants are aged 18-30. Using it as a jumping off point to paint all concern over social media as a "moral panic" is reductive and unhelpful.
Granting to you for the moment that the issue is with technology -- if instagram is removed, what is it replaced with? Presumably youtube? Or more passive kinds of tech?
Is the issue social media, or mass media? Who knows.
If we don't grant that, then the rise of instagram correlates heavily with everything i've mentioned. I'd suppose if you look at the physical places of social interaction for teenagers, where they'd have to move around and meet people -- these have all disappeared, and extremely, with the rise of instagram.
Removing the gramme hardly brings them back. Maybe, maybe not.
Here's my take: the bigger picture is one of "lessening humanity" - and it's death by a million paper cuts. Social media is one of the bigger cuts, but it's an awful lot of other things as well.
Being on screens all the time - especially when out and about (and whether it's social media or maps, it doesn't really matter) - means less casual conversation, less "hello, how you doing", less banter, less touch points with real people. It means toddlers look up out of their prams and can't meet their parents' eyes, it means you don't smile at strangers, or exchange a common glance about something trivial. It means kids don't get to sit in pubs with their parents and have to "do adult conversation". It means if you're in a situation as a teen and you're uncomfortable, you just reach for your phone instead of reaching out to the next awkward teen, who might just end up being your lifetime friend.
And then beyond that there are infinitely many takes-away-the-humanity cuts. Even something like this: once upon in our country you could buy a parking ticket for a space in a car park, then what typically happened when you got back to your car with time to spare is you then pulled up next to someone and offered them your ticket for free. This shit doesn't happen now - spaces are tied to number plates (because: profit), and so another little touchpoint with other humans is eroded.
Getting hold of many of the companies you use is becoming harder, through profit motives / AI chat / whatever - high street banks disappear, and immediately there's a whole source of contact that disappears.
We got a deal on our post-wedding train journey 25 years ago because we did it face to face with a guy in the station, and when we got chatting about the occasion and he discovered it was our wedding, he upped our ticket to 1st class. No such luck now, when you order all your tickets online, and the customer support is outsourced to somewhere a thousand miles away.
Real people are for the most part lovely people, and their motives are 95% aligned with each other - love your family, help people, be generous, be kind - but the more time we spend slipping behind digital facades, being taken away from human contact through these many papercuts, the worse things are likely to get. IMO.
That social networks became social media indicates a clear shift in incentives toward social atomization and shallow substitutes for human connection/affection/bonding/sexual satisfaction/etc.
It is likely possible to disambiguate these concepts and build prosocial networks, if we want such a thing or believe it can work.
There is a contradiction here which commonly underlies 'problems in modern parenting' discussions and creates a "dammed if you do, damned if you don't" situation. It is always possible to criticize any parent for being uninvolved or too involved.
I've often wondered why 'soccer mom' became a negative term as though 'supporting your child in healthy outdoor recreational activities' was considered a bad thing. I know it implied a log of other behaviors, but still was anchored in the idea that there is a microscopic line between an involved parent and an over-involved parent.
Then we still assured that two working parents brings neglect - despite the pride many Gen Xers take in being a 'latch key kid' and being sent out until the street lights went dark.
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.
2. The better a platform is at delivering ads, the worse it is for your mental well-being.
Point (2) is not just because of the ads themselves, but also all the incentives created by ad-monetized platforms. So much slop, misinformation, clickbait, and ragebait is caused by people fighting for attention to get that sweet, sweet ad revenue.
There's a reason "peak TV" happened after TV shows were freed from the need to bend their structure around several ad breaks. This stuff is not just a "monetization strategy", it infects the surrounding (non-ad) media and fundamentally changes it for the worse.
Edit: One last point - ad delivery requires taking control away from the viewer/user. A platform that's good at delivering ads is necessarily one that makes it hard to block/skip/remove the ads because most users would if they could. This same mentality of control then informs the rest of the design. So you have endless A/B tests you can't opt out of and "I'll enable it later" dialog boxes instead of allowing the user to control their experience.
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.
Why does this "study" feel like those "studies" from the 50s about the benefits of smoking, which were later discovered to have been (surprise!) financed by the nicotin industry ?
The intersection of dark patterns, addiction, and support networks really creates probably more variability than this study is accounting for.
Youtube, Reddit, and a few other networks I could name off the top of my head were pro-support networks, pro-identity building at once time. It seems impossible to keep the profit motive from transitioning to an addictive/neuroticism-feeding paradigm.
You end up with the weird reality that some types of websites just need to be user-supported/run because any other motive ultimately breaks them and seems to make them toxic. I'd also add the reality that neurotic/polemic content seems to spike any sort of algorithm based on engagement.
Basically our closest metric for monetization is inherently toxic.
It does I am sure in small instances, but isn't it established that it causes more anxiety in general ? I read a linkedin post about this guy on Linkedin asking a lady to "fix her hair" as a comment to something he probably found offending and to that another guy was asking the lady to shut up and that she was wrong to call out this man in the first place. I wanted to add my comment to this other guy and I could instantly feel all adverse emotions and eventually had to calm myself down and stay out. So when someone supported her , she definetly found her support and courage but many still find the anxiety in all kinds of social network, even with a verified person.
> Anxiety is the second leading cause of disability and mortality worldwide.
I think this comes from WHO, but isn't consistent with other information from WHO, so it's pretty debatable.
I believe the source is this[0], which says "Mental health conditions such as anxiety and depression are highly prevalent in all countries and communities, affecting people of all ages and income levels. They represent the second biggest reason for long-term disability, contributing to loss of healthy life."
However, elsewhere on their site[1], WHO lists the top 3 global causes of death and disability in 2021 as heart disease, COVID-19, and stroke.
No, its very reliable after consideration for how anxiety works from a physiological perspective and what does to a person's health and how modifies their decisions and behaviors. When all these factors are taken into account anxiety alone may account for most other more directly measured mortality conditions.
The other side of that coin is that anxiety is also most prominently the result of social conditioning as opposed to diagnosed illness. This results in anti-anxiety medications that are vastly over-prescribed for individuals that receive less than ideal benefits.
When a single correlation of social media use and a positive outcome is found, it immediately becomes headlines. While hundreds of other evidence are discarded because they are 'boring'. Well, even this correlation is of little benefit. Anxious people cover their stress while engaging online and postpone their improvement while they are distracted from building real, healthy interpersonal relationships that will help them.
Smoking is correlated with lower risk of Parkinson's disease but it's not suggested in any setting.
I think of social media as the fast food of the information landscape. It’s okay to have it a time or two a week but if it’s your entire information and entertainment “diet”, you’re going to feel sick.
Our brains aren’t designed to be lit up with dopamine every 5 seconds for hours on end nor are they designed for foods that are high in sugars, fats, and salts every day.
Haven’t read the article (wouldn’t load for me) but what type of content you watch makes a difference too. I watch funny cats and dogs videos with my daughter all the time and they 100% make us feel better. But finding those said videos on social media is a “process” - it’s like going through a pile of rotting fruits to find something to feed your kid.
I can give an hour long monologue on YouTube’s continued exploitation of children. Their half assed attempts to fix this (by some well intentioned Googler’s, who I’m sure must have had a lot of pushback) aren’t enough. Just try unblocking a channel for your kid’s account (you can’t - the only option is to unblock EVERYTHING).
Social media use can be fine for people who are well-grounded grass-touchers in their everyday life, but this grounding comes with maturity and typically isn’t found in younger people, for whom abstract online spaces can be powerfully dissociating and are very unlikely to be healthy.
We are starting to understand the impact of ultra-processed food. When will we clue up to ultra-mediated social interaction?
I skimmed the important parts of the paper. This is akin to finding that cigarettes reduce stress. Any smoker/former smoker will tell you this is true (in the immediate sense).
Does that give any weight to the stance that smoking is good for you and society at large? No.
You and me both. No dating sites either, if I'm not crossing paths with someone in the wild through the course of my everyday activity, we are probably not a fit. I have found social media tremendously helpful at connecting people to real-life local activities, but I also had to move to a place that actually had enough of those for it to matter. There are plenty of places that never had much going on, and what social fabric did exist has been worn thin by social media, which offers a poor replacement.
The journal Psychiatry International, it is part of the MDPI publisher, which sometimes faces scrutiny regarding rapid, high-volume, and sometimes inconsistent peer-review processes. Be skeptical of its contents.
Yep, when I see those 12 ads in 5 minutes of browsing it sure lowers my anxiety!
When I comment on something disturbing that I don't think I want to see again they think I love it and give me more. This is great for my emitional well being too!!!
1. (Big one) For virtually EVERY study, and especially human science studies like psychology, sociology, health; The Headline of the Press Release will imply things that the study does not claim, and especially that the study does not provide evidence for.
This headline seems to imply quite a lot for a relatively small study based on survey responses.
2. For the mass market social media platforms, it's pretty easy to get emotional support inside your bubble, at the cost of ... everything else.
I feel like the huge and obvious problems with social media hide a small and subtle, but insidious problem: How do I show that I care about you?
I feel like there is a range that might be described:
I don't care very much about you one way or another. (Small/no signal on social media, very unlikely to be boosted)
I care enough to fight for you. (Big Signal on social media, likely to be boosted)
I care enough to calmly discuss the problem. (Small signal on social media, unlikely to be boosted, likely to be trolled, unsatisfying in the face of active fighting words)
To be explicit: because fights are boosted, fights are expected. People are prepared to fight about things offline.
If you take anxiety to include everything from stress to a bunch of disorders, I'd believe it. Our bodies were not made to handle the permanent stress we see in modern life. The first place I imagine goes to cardiovascular issues?
It either is the "second leading cause of disability and mortality" or it isn't, there's nothing to believe. I very much agree with GP that the claim is completely unsupported.
I found the study that the article bases this on[1]. It doesn't make this claim and instead associates a higher mortality rate to sufferers of all mental disorders, 67% of which are deaths by natural causes. That these natural causes are directly associated with the mental disorder isn't even something the study says. Anxiety is just one of the many disorders analyzed.
This is similar to attributing a lower life expectancy to all people with endocrine diseases (e.g. diabetes) and later saying hyperthyroidism (another endocrine disease) is the sole cause of death in that group.
There is space to suspend your belief/disbelief before you look it up and entertain an idea as plausible to consider what it might say about the discussion at hand. This doesn't mean blindly believing make believe, rather it means deferring coming to a conclusion, to quote the site guidelines, to converse curiously. Of course you can look it up and resolve it after the fact, but that doesn't mean the rest of the surrounding context can't be interesting without the resolution.
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"
How fantastic. That means from age 18 we can allow men on social media!
Nobody denies all the effects of social media are negative. After all, if they were, nobody would use them. So there are benefits to it.
It also isn't news, really. The Dutch 'MIND Hulplijn' [1] in their former carnation 'Stichting Korrelatie' had a pilot with an online forum where people with mental issues could connect with each other. It eventually decided to close the forum because of users talking each other down in regard to the subject of suicide (edit: and automutilation). However, the effect of a support group was also clearly there which was also a reason why they were reluctant to close it down.
What I'd like to know is how the effect would be compared to a forum or real-life support group. Because comparing social media with 'no help' or 'loneliness' obviously isn't fair.
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 out, invite codes below:
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.
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 think there are deeper long term trends causing psychological problems in the west: move away from physical to cognitive labour; increasing community isolation and lack of social institutions; various failures of the state; lack of meaningful wage growth in key brackets, and failure of the "aspiration engine" to create opportunities; lack of time for parenting, moving to dual working-parent households; helicopter parenting caused by breakdown of social trust; lack of infrastructure and provision of environments where children can be known safe in public. etc. etc.
The major forces here are: move to a services economy; dual parent working households; lack of social services in state provision; state infrastructure moving away from providing for the young to paying for the old. This means much of how children grow up in the world is unphysical, disconnected, time-poor, risk adverse, overly demanding, etc.
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 activities that would promote their success. We are talking about the same symptoms as addiction manifesting in kids because they are exposed to too much social media.
Your litmus test for generational effect is also flawed. Let's assume an inverse test as a mental exercise, where we introduce social media to a young population previously unexposed. Kids who are able to reject the pull of social media will replace the ones who cannot, the numbers will shuffle. After such a test is concluded, you will tell yourself you're right because on a macro-economic scale everything looks the same, but to an individual prone to social media overuse, his or her life will be different (likely worse).
That said, the issues you bring up are more important, and no one seems willing to tackle them. Perhaps a middle ground here is that the problems you listed are masking the problem of social media overuse, but that social media overuse is still a problem. It is not an innocent messenger.
> 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
> kids doing the bare minimum on homework in order to get back on social media faster
This was me for much of high school, but with Team Fortress 2 or Dota instead of social media.
Comic books, video games, television, skateboarding, fidget spinning - the list of things kids would rather do than homework is endless. I think a kid spending 4h+ on one activity is unhealthy either way, and it really comes back to the parents to be the arbiters. Speaking from experience, children (generally) aren't very good at predicting how best to spend their time, which is why involved parents are so important.
I was also one who spent their time playing dota in high school. In my experience one can learn more from playing dota than the average social media experience. Understanding team dynamics and emotional regulation to negative experiences outside your control. If you take the game seriously even prioritization and deliberate practice.
Of course not everyone learns from playing dota but at least it's a focused experience that doesn't steal focus away like short form videos.
The question is whether social media is closer to candy or cocaine.
You are right that kids will chose anything other than homework but how do you explain adults spending 8 hours a day on short form platforms? Don't think TV had this kind of a hold on people. Some gamers did tend to develop obsessive tendencies over gaming but now that seems much more widespread with social media
Which items on the list have engineers dedicated to rapid A/B testing running 24-7 to amp up the engagement numbers?
I think your second paragraph is too broad. The same could be said for kids doing the bare minimum to play video games, or even go outside to play with their friends all prior to social media. Many people long spent too much time watching tv, and still do, instead of pursuing what you think success is. Also, let people be content, we don't always need to engaging in activities for success
I'm well older than 30 and couldn't disagree with GP more. I think social media has been an absolute disaster not just for young people, but for society at large.
And, importantly, I don't think it needs to be this way, but is designed to be this way to increase engagement. I remember when I first got on Facebook in the mid 00s and I loved it, and I was able to meaningfully connect with old friends. I also remember when the enshittification began, at least for me, when there was a distinct change in the feed algorithm that made it much more like twitter, designed for right hand thumb scrolling exercises and little actual positive interactions with friends.
I think that on the whole, you're right in that these issues, where social media can provide support to young people, are not often addressed, but I also think that the larger framing that seems to pop up in these threads, where we assume social media is a negative influence that might sometimes facilitate a positive interaction, is backwards, and not really supported by evidence. Far more research, especially research that actually talks to kids about their social media use seems to indicate that, on the whole, kids experience social media as a largely neutral thing that sometimes has good or bad outcomes. Importantly, I think talking to kids reveals that they're usually aware of the harms of social media and they work to mitigate those influences in their lives.
I really blame "The Anxious Generation" for somehow successfully setting the tone of conversation around social media by feeding into the larger moral panic despite being a poorly researched pile of dreck.
> lack of time for parenting
The average father in present day spends more time with their kids weekly than the average mother did in 1960.
> helicopter parenting caused by breakdown of social trust
This one is more likely I think. Kids aren't able to just run around anymore.
> lack of infrastructure and provision of environments where children can be known safe in public
Kids can not safely ride their bikes a few miles across town. Fewer sidewalks, bigger cars. Distracted drivers. Its a death sentence.
While it's true there are many more forces besides social media contributing to the current mental health crisis and it's true that politicians like to blame it for everything to skip talking about broader issues, social media is certainly a major one.
It's well established that excessive (aka average Gen Z and Alpha) use is linked to increased levels of anxiety. It's well understood that it affects the self-esteem of teens and it's clear that more and more kids than ever have no real interests besides TikTok.
Maybe 'social media bad' is just the new 'video games bad' or 'watching TV bad', but the sheer scale and intrusiveness is different. 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 no matter where I was, it didn't have some hyperoptimized billion dollar algorithm meticulously designed to exploit human psychology.
And even the internet was less of a bot-infested and AI-slop echochamber back then.
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.
> if after 5yr+ of it being banned or limited
We gave social media 20 years to impact the world, why give it only 5 for a rollback? It feels like long term effects would take much longer to surface.
>dual parent working households; lack of social services in state provision;
These two feel interrelated :)
> 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.
Do you know if there are countries where the causes you laid out are not the case? (given demographics, I'm not sure if there are too many strict counter examples)
This can be proven. Simply measure a population of typical social media users for relative measures of neuroticism. Then have an experiment population of healthy military leaders and police officers that have low social media use. The assumption is that the second population would score dramatically lower in neuroticism than the population average.
That establishes a of divergent populations baseline. The change their, such as deny, social media access or content. Measure the change to those two populations.
Assumed facts:
* social media access dramatically increases prevalence of anxiety and a state of dependency/addition. When true, removal of social media triggers addiction withdrawal that displays as emotional health illnesses.
* Populations that do not frequently make use of social media are not at risk of withdrawal.
* persons in high risk professions are typically conditioned into states of substantially lower neuroticism that population averages are not exposed to
It's hard to control for mere provision of social media access. Eg., if you're supposed to be out in the field all day, when are you mean to access social media?
Social media is, in that case, a replacement activity.
The question, which is i think unanswered, is whether and what its replacing in the lives of children. It may turn out to be: not much. That when taken away, children don't suddenly get more time, attention, socialisation, etc. instead, they just get less. Or that the kinds of tech hellholes theyre dumped in have purely passive interaction, eg., ipad kids.
Actually, there is historical precedent for that: Gen X.
The defining feature of Generation X is the latch-key kid population. Children arriving home to empty houses for hours after school without any kind of social interaction whether in person or online. This would be before the internet, so there was no online social activity. This behavior may have applied to as many as 30-35 million US households where for the first time in US history both parents were expected to work full time outside the house. These children had to learn to entertain themselves, do their own chores, and possibly prepare their own meals. Imagine an entire massive population learning to become largely fully self-sufficient, from an emotional development perspective, as children. They had no substitute solution or alternative activity.
> 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 correlation with Instagram use.
For this article, however, all the participants are aged 18-30. Using it as a jumping off point to paint all concern over social media as a "moral panic" is reductive and unhelpful.
Granting to you for the moment that the issue is with technology -- if instagram is removed, what is it replaced with? Presumably youtube? Or more passive kinds of tech?
Is the issue social media, or mass media? Who knows.
If we don't grant that, then the rise of instagram correlates heavily with everything i've mentioned. I'd suppose if you look at the physical places of social interaction for teenagers, where they'd have to move around and meet people -- these have all disappeared, and extremely, with the rise of instagram.
Removing the gramme hardly brings them back. Maybe, maybe not.
Teens and social media rethoric in my country right now is very close to the "video games cause violence" type of argument.
They always fixate on external things instead of strictly looking at it as internal economic and social shortcomings.
There was a short time, between 2012/2013-2020 when the "kids were alright", though a bit worse in school than previous generations.
Here's my take: the bigger picture is one of "lessening humanity" - and it's death by a million paper cuts. Social media is one of the bigger cuts, but it's an awful lot of other things as well.
Being on screens all the time - especially when out and about (and whether it's social media or maps, it doesn't really matter) - means less casual conversation, less "hello, how you doing", less banter, less touch points with real people. It means toddlers look up out of their prams and can't meet their parents' eyes, it means you don't smile at strangers, or exchange a common glance about something trivial. It means kids don't get to sit in pubs with their parents and have to "do adult conversation". It means if you're in a situation as a teen and you're uncomfortable, you just reach for your phone instead of reaching out to the next awkward teen, who might just end up being your lifetime friend.
And then beyond that there are infinitely many takes-away-the-humanity cuts. Even something like this: once upon in our country you could buy a parking ticket for a space in a car park, then what typically happened when you got back to your car with time to spare is you then pulled up next to someone and offered them your ticket for free. This shit doesn't happen now - spaces are tied to number plates (because: profit), and so another little touchpoint with other humans is eroded.
Getting hold of many of the companies you use is becoming harder, through profit motives / AI chat / whatever - high street banks disappear, and immediately there's a whole source of contact that disappears.
We got a deal on our post-wedding train journey 25 years ago because we did it face to face with a guy in the station, and when we got chatting about the occasion and he discovered it was our wedding, he upped our ticket to 1st class. No such luck now, when you order all your tickets online, and the customer support is outsourced to somewhere a thousand miles away.
Real people are for the most part lovely people, and their motives are 95% aligned with each other - love your family, help people, be generous, be kind - but the more time we spend slipping behind digital facades, being taken away from human contact through these many papercuts, the worse things are likely to get. IMO.
That social networks became social media indicates a clear shift in incentives toward social atomization and shallow substitutes for human connection/affection/bonding/sexual satisfaction/etc.
It is likely possible to disambiguate these concepts and build prosocial networks, if we want such a thing or believe it can work.
> lack of time for parenting
> helicopter parenting
There is a contradiction here which commonly underlies 'problems in modern parenting' discussions and creates a "dammed if you do, damned if you don't" situation. It is always possible to criticize any parent for being uninvolved or too involved.
I've often wondered why 'soccer mom' became a negative term as though 'supporting your child in healthy outdoor recreational activities' was considered a bad thing. I know it implied a log of other behaviors, but still was anchored in the idea that there is a microscopic line between an involved parent and an over-involved parent.
Then we still assured that two working parents brings neglect - despite the pride many Gen Xers take in being a 'latch key kid' and being sent out until the street lights went dark.
There's no winning, which is perhaps the point.
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.
I think it's pretty simple:
1. Ads are mind cancer.
2. The better a platform is at delivering ads, the worse it is for your mental well-being.
Point (2) is not just because of the ads themselves, but also all the incentives created by ad-monetized platforms. So much slop, misinformation, clickbait, and ragebait is caused by people fighting for attention to get that sweet, sweet ad revenue.
There's a reason "peak TV" happened after TV shows were freed from the need to bend their structure around several ad breaks. This stuff is not just a "monetization strategy", it infects the surrounding (non-ad) media and fundamentally changes it for the worse.
Edit: One last point - ad delivery requires taking control away from the viewer/user. A platform that's good at delivering ads is necessarily one that makes it hard to block/skip/remove the ads because most users would if they could. This same mentality of control then informs the rest of the design. So you have endless A/B tests you can't opt out of and "I'll enable it later" dialog boxes instead of allowing the user to control their experience.
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.
Why does this "study" feel like those "studies" from the 50s about the benefits of smoking, which were later discovered to have been (surprise!) financed by the nicotin industry ?
Giving an addict a hit also reduces anxiety.
This was literally my first thought
beautifully said :)
Bingo!!
I mean it’s the same with most ads, creating an anxiety that can only be assuaged by buying the actual product.
Social media: the solution to, and source of, all your anxiety!
The intersection of dark patterns, addiction, and support networks really creates probably more variability than this study is accounting for.
Youtube, Reddit, and a few other networks I could name off the top of my head were pro-support networks, pro-identity building at once time. It seems impossible to keep the profit motive from transitioning to an addictive/neuroticism-feeding paradigm.
You end up with the weird reality that some types of websites just need to be user-supported/run because any other motive ultimately breaks them and seems to make them toxic. I'd also add the reality that neurotic/polemic content seems to spike any sort of algorithm based on engagement.
Basically our closest metric for monetization is inherently toxic.
It does I am sure in small instances, but isn't it established that it causes more anxiety in general ? I read a linkedin post about this guy on Linkedin asking a lady to "fix her hair" as a comment to something he probably found offending and to that another guy was asking the lady to shut up and that she was wrong to call out this man in the first place. I wanted to add my comment to this other guy and I could instantly feel all adverse emotions and eventually had to calm myself down and stay out. So when someone supported her , she definetly found her support and courage but many still find the anxiety in all kinds of social network, even with a verified person.
> Anxiety is the second leading cause of disability and mortality worldwide.
I think this comes from WHO, but isn't consistent with other information from WHO, so it's pretty debatable.
I believe the source is this[0], which says "Mental health conditions such as anxiety and depression are highly prevalent in all countries and communities, affecting people of all ages and income levels. They represent the second biggest reason for long-term disability, contributing to loss of healthy life."
However, elsewhere on their site[1], WHO lists the top 3 global causes of death and disability in 2021 as heart disease, COVID-19, and stroke.
[0] https://www.who.int/news/item/02-09-2025-over-a-billion-peop...
[1] https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/themes/theme-details/GHO/m...
No, its very reliable after consideration for how anxiety works from a physiological perspective and what does to a person's health and how modifies their decisions and behaviors. When all these factors are taken into account anxiety alone may account for most other more directly measured mortality conditions.
The other side of that coin is that anxiety is also most prominently the result of social conditioning as opposed to diagnosed illness. This results in anti-anxiety medications that are vastly over-prescribed for individuals that receive less than ideal benefits.
When a single correlation of social media use and a positive outcome is found, it immediately becomes headlines. While hundreds of other evidence are discarded because they are 'boring'. Well, even this correlation is of little benefit. Anxious people cover their stress while engaging online and postpone their improvement while they are distracted from building real, healthy interpersonal relationships that will help them.
Smoking is correlated with lower risk of Parkinson's disease but it's not suggested in any setting.
A product that is both the cause and solution to your problem. An MBA's wet-dream
Maybe social media is like cigarettes, in that it cures the anxiety it causes. A powerfully addictive cycle.
I think of social media as the fast food of the information landscape. It’s okay to have it a time or two a week but if it’s your entire information and entertainment “diet”, you’re going to feel sick.
Our brains aren’t designed to be lit up with dopamine every 5 seconds for hours on end nor are they designed for foods that are high in sugars, fats, and salts every day.
Haven’t read the article (wouldn’t load for me) but what type of content you watch makes a difference too. I watch funny cats and dogs videos with my daughter all the time and they 100% make us feel better. But finding those said videos on social media is a “process” - it’s like going through a pile of rotting fruits to find something to feed your kid.
I can give an hour long monologue on YouTube’s continued exploitation of children. Their half assed attempts to fix this (by some well intentioned Googler’s, who I’m sure must have had a lot of pushback) aren’t enough. Just try unblocking a channel for your kid’s account (you can’t - the only option is to unblock EVERYTHING).
Social media use can be fine for people who are well-grounded grass-touchers in their everyday life, but this grounding comes with maturity and typically isn’t found in younger people, for whom abstract online spaces can be powerfully dissociating and are very unlikely to be healthy.
We are starting to understand the impact of ultra-processed food. When will we clue up to ultra-mediated social interaction?
I skimmed the important parts of the paper. This is akin to finding that cigarettes reduce stress. Any smoker/former smoker will tell you this is true (in the immediate sense).
Does that give any weight to the stance that smoking is good for you and society at large? No.
We are right to panic about social media.
I am determined to find real life local connections. No doom scrolling, no “social” media no hacker news
You and me both. No dating sites either, if I'm not crossing paths with someone in the wild through the course of my everyday activity, we are probably not a fit. I have found social media tremendously helpful at connecting people to real-life local activities, but I also had to move to a place that actually had enough of those for it to matter. There are plenty of places that never had much going on, and what social fabric did exist has been worn thin by social media, which offers a poor replacement.
The journal Psychiatry International, it is part of the MDPI publisher, which sometimes faces scrutiny regarding rapid, high-volume, and sometimes inconsistent peer-review processes. Be skeptical of its contents.
This is the equivalent of saying that a cigarette reduces anxiety. The overall habit absolutely does not reduce anxiety.
Yep, when I see those 12 ads in 5 minutes of browsing it sure lowers my anxiety!
When I comment on something disturbing that I don't think I want to see again they think I love it and give me more. This is great for my emitional well being too!!!
Social media is a Dunning Krueger support network.
1. (Big one) For virtually EVERY study, and especially human science studies like psychology, sociology, health; The Headline of the Press Release will imply things that the study does not claim, and especially that the study does not provide evidence for.
This headline seems to imply quite a lot for a relatively small study based on survey responses.
2. For the mass market social media platforms, it's pretty easy to get emotional support inside your bubble, at the cost of ... everything else.
I feel like the huge and obvious problems with social media hide a small and subtle, but insidious problem: How do I show that I care about you?
I feel like there is a range that might be described:
To be explicit: because fights are boosted, fights are expected. People are prepared to fight about things offline.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).
If you take anxiety to include everything from stress to a bunch of disorders, I'd believe it. Our bodies were not made to handle the permanent stress we see in modern life. The first place I imagine goes to cardiovascular issues?
It either is the "second leading cause of disability and mortality" or it isn't, there's nothing to believe. I very much agree with GP that the claim is completely unsupported.
I found the study that the article bases this on[1]. It doesn't make this claim and instead associates a higher mortality rate to sufferers of all mental disorders, 67% of which are deaths by natural causes. That these natural causes are directly associated with the mental disorder isn't even something the study says. Anxiety is just one of the many disorders analyzed.
This is similar to attributing a lower life expectancy to all people with endocrine diseases (e.g. diabetes) and later saying hyperthyroidism (another endocrine disease) is the sole cause of death in that group.
- [1]: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/...
There is space to suspend your belief/disbelief before you look it up and entertain an idea as plausible to consider what it might say about the discussion at hand. This doesn't mean blindly believing make believe, rather it means deferring coming to a conclusion, to quote the site guidelines, to converse curiously. Of course you can look it up and resolve it after the fact, but that doesn't mean the rest of the surrounding context can't be interesting without the resolution.
may be true in some specific cases, but put like this it's just vague and impossible to verify
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"
In men? The study claims half the participants were guys age 18-30.
How fantastic. That means from age 18 we can allow men on social media!
Nobody denies all the effects of social media are negative. After all, if they were, nobody would use them. So there are benefits to it.
It also isn't news, really. The Dutch 'MIND Hulplijn' [1] in their former carnation 'Stichting Korrelatie' had a pilot with an online forum where people with mental issues could connect with each other. It eventually decided to close the forum because of users talking each other down in regard to the subject of suicide (edit: and automutilation). However, the effect of a support group was also clearly there which was also a reason why they were reluctant to close it down.
What I'd like to know is how the effect would be compared to a forum or real-life support group. Because comparing social media with 'no help' or 'loneliness' obviously isn't fair.
[1] https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIND_Hulplijn
No, in both genders. You have to click on the link to the paper [0]:
>Gender was approximately equal, with 50.8% being female.
If anything, the data is more accurate for females, since there are 1.6pp more females.
[0]: https://www.mdpi.com/3679792
Is this another part of this third?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46682534
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 out, invite codes below:
LJC37CPD89
SP8CMRQJQA
VUEOSASRHR
2FSCBYX4NE
FBBIQMYRCX
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.