Posted by giuliomagnifico 5 hours ago
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.
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.
If Larry Ellison owned the TV, I would not have a TV.
> 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.
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.
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
Tvs in the bedroom, living rooms, kitchens, they're centerpieces of rooms. Sports on all day on weekends. They got put into cars. I get together with older family and they'll put the TV on and we sit around it.
They only thing with TV is it wasn't convenient enough to be in our pockets all day.
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.
I got my career (programming) from social media and online social interaction in general. Sure, I did the bare minimum on homework for efficiency, because I disliked the extra steps and writing that teachers wanted of me (I probably have dysgraphia and can't write well), and preferred just to get the answer. It was never explained that they weren't scoring or teaching the answer, and that they were instead measuring the method. (That was a failure of the school system. Big problem in general. I digress.)
Social media allowed me to meet others like me I otherwise never would've met. Allowed me to learn things from others like me I otherwise may never have learned. Allowed me to find the people that I could get along with rather than trying to make do only with the people physically close to me.
Sure, TikTok and whatever didn't exist back then. They're terrible, even if they manage to deliver some goods. I don't have a TikTok account, don't have a Facebook account, etc.
I do have a Discord account. I did have a Cohost account, before they shut down. I have Reddit and Hacker News. Those are where I feel I spend most of my non-work, non-hobby time. I use Discord almost entirely for private communications. I used Cohost almost entirely for making connections on Discord. I use Reddit to offer advice to and receive advice from others. I use Hacker News for some sample of current events and to offer my thoughts and discussion on them.
I do have some bad habits. I scroll Twitter every once in a while, though I do find many memes and other posts to share with friends and relate over.
And social media has done some bad for me. I won't elaborate on this but I had a few very major traumas through social media when I was 12-14, and some lesser ones more recently.
But it's been a major driver of good in my life for a long time; fulfillment and connection I never could have had otherwise; and of course hard lessons I would've eventually needed anyway.
There's an argument to be made that I just wasn't the type of young person that social media is particularly harmful to, but it's done me some major harms, some exactly the type of harm that's used to protest against it, and yet none of the harm was social media's fault. All of it was interpersonal interaction. All social media did was reduce the friction to that interpersonal interaction.
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 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.
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.
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.
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)
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I couldn't carry my gaming PC with me as a Team Fortress 2 addicted kid, my Gameboy was too basic to keep me compulsively glued to its screen for 8 hours, it couldn't constantly send me notifications, it didn't have some hyperoptimized billion dollar algorithm meticulously designed to exploit human psychology.
There were friction and physical boundaries, now there aren't. That's a problem.
Just ask most primary school teachers how their students are doing.
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.
It is likely possible to disambiguate these concepts and build prosocial networks, if we want such a thing or believe it can work.
> 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.
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.
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 warranted to be skeptical of the research.
I mean it’s the same with most ads, creating an anxiety that can only be assuaged by buying the actual product.
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...
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.
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.
Smoking is correlated with lower risk of Parkinson's disease but it's not suggested in any setting.