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.
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!!!
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.
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.
Maybe 'social media bad' is just the new 'video games bad' or 'watching TV bad', but the sheer scale and intrusiveness is completely different imo.
I couldn't carry my gaming PC with me as a Team Fortress 2 addicted kid, my Gameboy was too basic to keep me compulsively glued to its screen for 8 hours, it couldn't constantly send me notifications, it didn't have some hyperoptimized billion dollar algorithm meticulously designed to exploit human psychology.
There were friction and physical boundaries, now there aren't. That's a problem.
Just ask most primary school teachers how their students are doing.
Nothing is black and white and therefore you may be somewhat correct. Society and the world is a complex beast with many drivers and gears, however it would be silly to think it isn't also a big driver and is just boiled down to moral panic, especially for our younger cohort.
Even by my own personal account social media is addictive especially short form video content.
Just the addictive components alone and the type of content that is constantly served to young adults is a concern, not withstanding other issues with social media.
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).
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:
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
When a single correlation of social media use with a positive outcome is found, it immediately becomes headline, 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.
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.
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 ?
Breaking news: MMORPGs are less fun when doctors keep calling mom to ask how the MMORPG is because it kicks you off of the dial up. News at 9: is my iPhone actually an iPod with a cellular dial up modem glued inside. Late night: Stick around to watch an old man yelling at clouds.
36 comments
[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 58.6 ms ] threadUh, what? That's a patently ridiculous assertion to lead with (and not support).
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!!!
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.
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 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.
Even by my own personal account social media is addictive especially short form video content.
Just the addictive components alone and the type of content that is constantly served to young adults is a concern, not withstanding other issues with social media.
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).
[1] Beboploop.com if you want to try it out, invite codes below:
LJC37CPD89
SP8CMRQJQA
VUEOSASRHR
2FSCBYX4NE
FBBIQMYRCX
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...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46682534
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.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.
We are starting to understand the impact of ultra-processed food. When will we clue up to ultra-mediated social interaction?
Smoking is correlated with lower risk of Parkinson's disease but it's not suggested in any setting.
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.