Gaming and social media are the symptom, not the cause.
The real issue is real life is NOT friendly to teenagers. Theres few activities they can just go off and do on their own. A lot of places ban any unsupervised minors. My son can’t go to the escape room or several movie theaters without an adult.
Add to that helicopter parents over protective of kids, and kids reach to spaces they can feel more free: social media, gaming, etc
This is tricky. Anecdotally, social media has made my cousin much stupider - seriously, he’s begging me for help with stuff as basic as calculus (admittedly, I can’t help him here since I’m not good at math, but still…)
I wish there were free online resources for adults with remedial math needs…
Since when do we need study for that??
Look around us!!
Gaming isn't and never will be an issue in our society, now, social media??? 100%
* Teens in Western countries don't wanna study because they wanna be "social media influencer" (whatever that means).
* Students at Uni and schools are using ChatGPT to do the thinking for them meaning, they are getting dumber and dumber.
* if you never watched 2006 Idiocracy movie, it was a warning about the future, not a comedy movie. Strongly recommend you to watch it. DO IT!!!!
* Social media is not affecting just teens metal health but everything, look around us, birthrate is all time low and declining.
Women no longer need men they say, marriages all falling apart because of social media, they think they deserve better because neighbors grass is greener.
Decades old marriages, gone! Dating?? Non existent and not worth anymore so guys are walking away so birthrates is going worse by the day.
* Hollywood got into some insane plastic surgery epidemic right now, social media is allowing it to spread, teenagers are using cosmetics and surgery to blend into the social media trend, something 40s and above used to do, not 15-20s.
Now with the AI, chatbots, fake accounts, fake videos, fake everything, watch our society doomed.
It already started, like I said, birthrates is gone, students cannot read, they cannot do anything without asking ChatGPT. Food is nothing but plastic, chemicals and everything in between.
The study states no conflict of interest, but found it a bit ironic that the next link on HN was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46682534 , stating that "Nearly a third of social media research has undisclosed ties to industry"
This is a bad study. What it actually measured was that heavier social media use is not correlated with mental health.
It DOES NOT say that social media use is, or isn't, correlated with mental health because it did not track teens who did not have access to social media.
Australia will be an excellent natural experiment/study on this: We'll see if things change after their recent law, you can compare the same kid before and after, and you can compare Australian kids to other kids.
> The study tracked pupils’ self-reported social media habits, gaming frequency and emotional difficulties over three school years
This study is dead in the water. Teens have zero near-term incentives to be honest about any of these events.
For a study with this scope to be effective, parents will have to opt in using existing tracking/monitoring tooling for their child's habits. And even then, you might only be able to establish correlations with events serious enough to warrant mental health medical visits.
Technical critique from someone who's done these types of statistical analyses (both the psychometric and SEM components): I'm surprised they didn't include between-person random slopes as well for cross-lagged effects.
It's hard to justify the assumption that gaming/social media has the same effect on mental health between individuals (even within genders, and controlling for their choices demographic factors). I'm not convinced that their set of covariates is enough to capture psychological risk factors.
I would be more comfortable with a model that also lets us ask whether there was significant variation between individuals on the effect on gaming/social media on mental health.
Broad brush comment but studies like this kind of seem useless for a couple reasons here
One position I don't see defended as much anymore is an elitist position, i.e. even if social media & games (sm&g) are harmful to a majority of teens, there still might be a minority of teens that thrive with the sm&g and their thriving might be argued to be "worth" the suffering of many (think: geniuses who can make the world much much better)
Another direction to go in is, independent of studies, what kind of world do we want for ourselves and our kids? Do we want them to be able to play some games and access some social media? I could see them for example playing online chess and following chess masters on social media, so these could indeed be a part of something of an ideal vision for our kids. So I guess there isn't often much discussion of trying to pursue the ideals of childhood or adulthood and about crafting that vision of what activities that involves and then connecting our lives to a kind of plan for following such a blueprint. (This requires no social study to establish as far as I can see)
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[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 59.0 ms ] threadThe real issue is real life is NOT friendly to teenagers. Theres few activities they can just go off and do on their own. A lot of places ban any unsupervised minors. My son can’t go to the escape room or several movie theaters without an adult.
Add to that helicopter parents over protective of kids, and kids reach to spaces they can feel more free: social media, gaming, etc
I bet I can write a study that proves that the aggregate of gardening, yoga and crack cocaine only have limited effect on health.
Self-reported? Even if study is accurate its list a lot of credibility through its methods.
https://jonathanhaidt.com/social-media/
He has compiled reviews over many studies which arguably should carry more weight than any single study.
I wish there were free online resources for adults with remedial math needs…
Gaming isn't and never will be an issue in our society, now, social media??? 100%
* Teens in Western countries don't wanna study because they wanna be "social media influencer" (whatever that means).
* Students at Uni and schools are using ChatGPT to do the thinking for them meaning, they are getting dumber and dumber.
* if you never watched 2006 Idiocracy movie, it was a warning about the future, not a comedy movie. Strongly recommend you to watch it. DO IT!!!!
* Social media is not affecting just teens metal health but everything, look around us, birthrate is all time low and declining. Women no longer need men they say, marriages all falling apart because of social media, they think they deserve better because neighbors grass is greener. Decades old marriages, gone! Dating?? Non existent and not worth anymore so guys are walking away so birthrates is going worse by the day.
* Hollywood got into some insane plastic surgery epidemic right now, social media is allowing it to spread, teenagers are using cosmetics and surgery to blend into the social media trend, something 40s and above used to do, not 15-20s.
Now with the AI, chatbots, fake accounts, fake videos, fake everything, watch our society doomed. It already started, like I said, birthrates is gone, students cannot read, they cannot do anything without asking ChatGPT. Food is nothing but plastic, chemicals and everything in between.
Watch 2006 Idiocracy movie, you won't regret.
It DOES NOT say that social media use is, or isn't, correlated with mental health because it did not track teens who did not have access to social media.
Australia will be an excellent natural experiment/study on this: We'll see if things change after their recent law, you can compare the same kid before and after, and you can compare Australian kids to other kids.
This study is dead in the water. Teens have zero near-term incentives to be honest about any of these events.
For a study with this scope to be effective, parents will have to opt in using existing tracking/monitoring tooling for their child's habits. And even then, you might only be able to establish correlations with events serious enough to warrant mental health medical visits.
Technical critique from someone who's done these types of statistical analyses (both the psychometric and SEM components): I'm surprised they didn't include between-person random slopes as well for cross-lagged effects.
It's hard to justify the assumption that gaming/social media has the same effect on mental health between individuals (even within genders, and controlling for their choices demographic factors). I'm not convinced that their set of covariates is enough to capture psychological risk factors.
I would be more comfortable with a model that also lets us ask whether there was significant variation between individuals on the effect on gaming/social media on mental health.
One position I don't see defended as much anymore is an elitist position, i.e. even if social media & games (sm&g) are harmful to a majority of teens, there still might be a minority of teens that thrive with the sm&g and their thriving might be argued to be "worth" the suffering of many (think: geniuses who can make the world much much better)
Another direction to go in is, independent of studies, what kind of world do we want for ourselves and our kids? Do we want them to be able to play some games and access some social media? I could see them for example playing online chess and following chess masters on social media, so these could indeed be a part of something of an ideal vision for our kids. So I guess there isn't often much discussion of trying to pursue the ideals of childhood or adulthood and about crafting that vision of what activities that involves and then connecting our lives to a kind of plan for following such a blueprint. (This requires no social study to establish as far as I can see)