Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents

I wouldn't say that social media is inherently bad because it can be addicting, because games aren't seen as inherently bad because they can be addicting.

After a while, though, it just sort of filtered the events down to those I cared more about. My good friends still reach out directly and vice versa. I think it took a while for that to start happening though.

I've lost touch with many acquaintances, but if I'm being honest it's probably better that I don't expend energy on those people. I'm certainly not isolated from society, though. I just engage on my own terms.

For example; I joined my local Masonic lodge and started doing Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. Between those two things alone I find I have regular enough interactions with a variety of different people that I naturally find out about, and am invited to events and activities that more than make up for the loss of social media.

I'm not suggesting everyone join a Masonic lodge (obviously) or take up Jiu-Jitsu. There are a great number of things everyone can do that gets them around other people in a way that is natural and fulfilling.

Also--and this, I find, is critical--all my old friends are still friends and they call or email or text me and I them. Anyone who claimed to be my friend but couldn't be bothered to get in touch with me after I dropped social media was never a very good friend to begin with.

But over time that difficulty lessened. I found the connections I made outside of Facebook were longer lasting and more meaningful, because there was actually some onus on me to try and stay engaged. And people do respond well when you demonstrate you care to engage in a deeper fashion. It feels like relationship building / maintenance in today's age is something of a lost art, because it's become so easy to superficially connect without putting in a bunch of work.

The big social platforms make you want to believe there's a monopoly on societal participation. Pushing back against that energy is such a powerful thing, even if it's somewhat isolating in the short-term.

majority of things from the news has no impact on me at all

https://lite.cnn.io

https://text.npr.org

https://efe.com

I use them thru Lynx and a framebuffer image viewer.

Everything else is bullshit.

I'm probably 90% better informed than half of the mooks being idiotized at the social media.

However, I wonder if the simplest strategy that works when you have to get along with everyone is that you have to become an noisy asshole that overreacts to real "enemies" over imagined slights.

Kind of estranged my family to do it, but as soon as I was in my new city I had a great girlfriend, and my cost of living was much lower, I was much happier.

The old journey kind of took me on a personal discovery. You shouldn't worry about other people criticizing your choices because they aren't going to really affect them, and even if they are they're adults they can sort something else out.

In this new city I would notice even though technically the population was large, the communities were very tight-knit. If you're rude to the local bartender her dad might have a word with you. Contrast it to the internet, I spoke to a girl who had to stop using dating apps because guys would just lead with calling her nasty and fat. In real life if you do that there can be immediate consequences to that behavior.

Imagine if you will you were at a bar, and the Packers are playing the raiders or something, if you start yelling at random people that raiders fans are disgusting and horrible you can expect to be removed, and banned from returning to that bar. ( Or they might agree with you and buy you a beer who knows).

On twitter, Reddit Facebook whatever that doesn't really exist. You can say ridiculously nasty mean things to everyone and nothing's going to happen to you. I had to stop using social media because I would become distraught over some of the stuff I read, almost all the bigotry I experienced was entirely online.

Everyone has a right to spend their time in their energy the way they choose, but since I don't want to be called slurs I don't use social media. I've posted here a ton but back in 2019 I went completely offline and I had amazing partners, made tons of friends, traveled. I even increased my income by no small amount, I used that time I was spending making the Zuckerbergs of the world rich into improving myself.

but if I've learned one thing in my life, it's that self-improvement is very hard, I'm the only person who can put down the second donut. it's a lot easier to go on Reddit and then complain about how societies out to get you, are to go on Twitter and just spread your own, really just self-hatred to other people hoping to dissipate it. Yet you can't, spreading hate doesn't take it out of you, if anything you're just going to get more hate back and then it builds up like a fuel.

Most angry online folks, if you took away their social media and slowly reintroduced them to community, maybe a nice bowling league or something, within a year they'd be so much happier.

Those services match you, with other who share similar views/preferences - putting you inside a bubble.

Before social media radical views\moronic opinions etc. wouldn't spread so far- because others would point out flaws in your reasoning or outright laugh at it.

Now? you have permanent access to enabling group - group who share views, and support each other - entrenching it.

Flatearthers would be ridiculed anywhere - but not they have a group that supports them.

Not to mention that there are literally no consequences of holding an objectively wrong opinion(back to flatearthers) in online discourse.

Don't get me wrong, those people with those view always existed - they just get exposed, via the worst invention of 2000s/2010s, to each other and that let them be more vocal about it.

-Uncle Ben

So I think you're right that while it is a release, it's an anti-productive one.

One analogy I saw once likened it to having a balloon. You forgot to take out the trash this morning--the balloon got blown up a little. You got stuck in traffic--the balloon got blown up a little more. All those little things happening throughout the day and blowing up that balloon a little bit more each time and pretty soon that balloon is going to violently pop. We can choose things in our life that release that balloon periodically however, and in doing so it never gets so full that it pops.

To me, there is no difference between lashing out online or in person and is more akin to that balloon popping (or, at the very least, adding air to it) than it is releasing air from it.

Personally, the experience is a bit incredible.

> Heavy social media use is associated with worse scores on all outcomes in girls age 14 and 17, but only worse wellbeing for boys at age 14. In a model controlling for pre-existing levels of self-esteem and wellbeing, we find that low levels of physical activity remain associated with lowself-esteem and wellbeing scores in girls and boys through adolescence, while heavy social media use contributes to low self-esteem and wellbeing in girls, and wellbeing in boys at age 14.In focus groups, young people highlighted the positive and negative aspects of social media. While girls tended to focus on the negative impact on body image, boys felt that the images they saw on social media platforms could be aspirational.

And at this point even a lot of engineers I know fall into the traps of addiction and echo chambers quite readily. I find of Tristan Harris’s “pointing supercharged AI at our brains” line to be accurate.

I'm 30, so myspace and Facebook showed up only once I was in high school, but everything you describe was still available on the web before social media. Shock sites were huge (goatse, tubgirl, etc), and I remember watching a beheading with a chainsaw by a Mexican cartel. And of course porn was around too.

The difference with social media is the "keeping up with the Joneses" except now it's your entire life, not just your literal neighbor. Way more damaging long term, since you actually know these people and can relate to them. Yeah the beheading was shocking, but I'm not hanging out with cartels regularly. Just a completely different thing.

To use your example as an analogy, most porn with any production value at all will show a drastically distorted depiction of what sex is actually like. To be raised on a diet of unrealistic porn will not leave you merely ill-prepared for an actual sexual relationship, but will actively disillusion you when reality fails to match your expectations.

If you let your kids use social media, then you need to take steps to emphasize the hyperprocessed fiction that it represents.

I'm not sure how you balance those two things. My sense, though, is that the balance was better 20, 25 years ago, when the Internet had more small, individualized communities. Most of them have since been squashed by the rise of the social media oligopoly.

Later on in life, I think everyone knew "a guy" at work that had all kinds of taboo material. The Weird Eddies or Creepy Colins of the world had a black-market snatched from them when the internet got popular.

I was able to find some wonderful communities, like the iPhone jailbreaking community on IRC, which completely changed my life and put me on the path I am on now. I was also on Twitter in the early days, too, which was the primary way that the iOS development community communicated. Facebook allowed me to connect with my high school robotics community, as well.

Communities like this existed before my time with Flash games, Neopets, MySpace, etc. and continue to this day, with the Minecraft modding community, Roblox game building community, etc.

But at the same time I also agree that social media has become incredibly toxic and addictive, and we don’t give anyone any tools to navigate it. I ultimately quit social media entirely, but my younger sister spends 3.5 hours a day on social media. I think this is a relatively new beast, and not inherent to the internet itself.

The issue with the internet as is currently is more about societal pressure. Every device for the last umpteen years has come with parental controls that include filtering out NSFW-esque material. If your position is that platforms such as FB should also include these sorts of parental controls I agree, but if your position is that we should restrict kids access to the internet as a whole because they might see a boob, then I wholeheartedly disagree.

I think among people who grew up with the internet, there's less assumption that things are true just because someone said or wrote them. People can and do lie constantly on the internet and without evidence it's not necessarily worth believing.

That there's some "news" outlet just blatantly lying and making things up, even if it looks to be made "professionally" is not surprising to a younger person.

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For personal anectdata:

I'm late 20s and had virtually unsupervised internet access and my own personal computer from about age 8 or so, as my father brought home old parts from work and let me tinker/assemble something, and they didn't watch me too closely. (early DSL adoption meant I wasn't limited for long by speeds, either).

I pirated and played all the violent games, I downloaded lots of porn, and while I was never into "shock"/watching real death/gore, the nature of the internet was such that you were going to run across plenty of it if you spent enough time browsing, I certainly saw a lot.

I turned out to be a fine, reasonably well-adjusted adult, as did most of the friends I know who grew up similarly.

I don't know all the details of their sex lives, but I'm not aware of any winding up with unrealistic expectations from porn. Always seemed like an action movie. Exciting, but not "real".

Most of the shock stuff felt like it just made me more cautious. "That guy got one whack in the head and he died!" was a better argument against getting in a fight than the threat of parental/school punishment is. Same regarding a lot of other potential teenage risk-taking behavior, like reckless driving or getting exceptionally drunk. Watch enough people die or ruin their lives at something and you're a lot more cautious about it.

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To be clear, I'm not suggesting that it's a net positive for kids to view those things at a young age. I'm just not sure that the harm is as large or uniform as people making moral panic claims often make, either.

Also, something like a third of people lose their virginity before 16 (although it's declining) and the median age is ~17 in the US. A lot of your peers were having real-life sex when you ran across porn for the first time. Worrying about them watching porn when plenty of them are having sex.....I don't know it makes much sense at that point.

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Looking back on that time, I'm primarily concerned with how easily I was talking with random strangers in great depth than the content I was watching. While there are some internet friends from old forums and chatrooms I've kept in touch with for 15-20 years now, that I could get to know random strangers like that as a preteen obviously had potential risks. Worked out well for me and I found great communities and interests, but still.

I grew up on the internet. I first connected with I was 11. I was first online by myself soon thereafter. I practiced writing on the internet while hanging out on the internet. I made friends on the internet. I made mistakes on the internet. I lost friends on the internet. I learned about Linux and programming on the internet. I got a job on the internet. All of this happened before I was 16. There is an old joke, one that I took to heart as a child, "On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog". On the internet, nobody knew (or at least cared) that I wasn't an adult. People accepted my patches, took my advice, flamed my half-baked ideas, and overall treated me as an equal.

As a young adult I started internet companies over the internet with business partners I met on the internet. I met love interests on the internet. I found new music leading to concerts, festivals, and road trips on the internet. I learned about Magic: the Gathering strategy, met a lot of friends, and coordinated cross-continent travel over the internet with people I had only interacted with via IRC.

> Maybe I'm prude or naive but I remember vividly when I first saw a pornographic movie at like around 17. It really shook me at the time. I wasn't traumatized or anything but it made a strong impact on me.

People are different. Maybe I'm a degenerate. I grew up watching The Simpsons and Beavis and Butthead. In middle school, friends would trade porno mags. A friend had the premium cable channels with "Skin-a-max" (Cinemax) playing late nights. When I first got online (at 11 years old), I had two priorities: porn and learning how to hack like I saw in some movies (Wargames, Ferris Bueler's Day Off).

Finding porn was easy since the "filters" were mostly someone who largely didn't care configuring a default search engine or maybe a DNS blacklist. Once I knew "search engine", finding more search engines that weren't filtered was easy. A couple queries about how filtering works and I knew enough to configure a different DNS resolver. It's not like I went looking for Pokemon tips and found hardcore XXX action.

In trying to learn about hacking, I stumbled onto ESR's "Hacker Howto". I took it to heart, printed it out, and pasted sections on my bedroom wall. "The world is full of fascinating problems waiting to be solved. No problem should ever have to be solved twice. Boredom and drudgery are evil. Freedom is good. Attitude is no substitute for competence." I kept this as a mantra. I took the "Basic Hacking Skills" section as a formula. Python, C, Lisp, Perl, Java. Check. Check. Check. Check. Check. Learn to use a *nix? Done. I never was especially good at red team offensive security, but "how to hack" put into a search bar changed my life for the better.

> These days I expect that most teens experience this at like 12yo on their smartphones. Last week I was linked a reddit video of some guy dying in absolutely gruesome circumstance due to an industrial accident. And then there's the constant influx of disinformation. Did you know that Hydroxychloroquine cures HIV? I saw a Youtube video claiming just that yesterday.

At least in my day, we learned skepticism early on the internet. Everyone can be an asshole and most accounts would troll you. Getting razzed for your naivete in a chat room or message board was a rite of passage. Bullshit comes in a lot of flavors, and some people needed to taste the rainbow and while others were quicker on the pickup.

I could never deny others the chance to gain what I have gained by restricting their ability to access the internet.

I grew up with uneducated parents who are susceptible to believing bullshit peddled by cult leaders. I lived in their business, without access to other people since we lived in a business area with no other residents.

Access to the internet was the only way I was able to interact with educated adults, and I attribute it to as the main reason for my economic and social success as an adult.

There was also lots of gore/pornography/other explicit stuff, although social media was more limited to instant messengers and photo/video content of yourself was not a thing yet. But the upside was almost limitless with the access to all the information, experts, and ability to interact with someone you can learn something from.

I survived, so maybe there are missing stories from people who didn’t. I learned lots of skills used every day for work and never did anything I’m ashamed or or criminal.

But with my own kids, I protect them more than I protected myself. I wonder about the paradox of whether I would have changed anything in my chaotic youth and whether I’m stunting my kids by sheltering them. But there’s YouTube videos of behedding that I don’t want to risk my kids’ mental health.

I feel like the paradise I envisioned after reading Heilein and Dickson and Stephenson is here now and I hate it. Now spend my time in the digital Galt’s Gulch.

Also, the gamification of many things. Even HN karma. The thrill of watching the upvotes roll in! (even now...)

Now the internet has been delivered right into their pockets and they aren't prepared for it. They see a video about ballet boxes being stuffed, and of course they believe it. Their friend Gladys shared it on facebook, of course it's real!

Yes, parenting is not in vogue, and that's the problem. People do not know how to parent. It almost seems like many people are treating them like pets.

Trust me, with trillion dollar corporations pushing their propaganda nonstop and self-important, self-appointed lords of industry convincing themselves every little tweak to their website is world-changing, the "upsides" need no signal boost from me.

Sorry to be a bit of a downer, but we absolutely should be talking about the downsides instead of listening to over-powerful CEOs tell us how great their crack is.

Also, you forgot that planes emit CO2, which is not just a subjective judgment, but is objectively bad for our planet in large quantities. ;)

The happily took credit for the upsides and for the longest time, like almost a decade, laughed out of the room anyone talking about the downsides.

Such people are still in charge of these fucking companies.

apologies but it sounds like PR from the tobacco industry before they got regulated. wonder how we'll look at this in 10-15 years time. the "let's listen to both sides" argument has no place on something this evil and damaging (not just to children) imo.

Planes and schools are by design positive things.

Social media by design is at best neutral.

Social media is designed to benefit its owners and its customers (ad sellers). At best social media is designed to entertain its users, but the big caveat is that it does it through whatever means necessary. And that's a big caveat. Because at the end of the day, it's an online casino. And we regulate casinos to hell and back.

I feel like you're dead on for air travel. I absolutely hate it, and wish it were drastically reduced.

The very fact that we consider weighing the 'upsides' of something is if we give it, or part of it, legitimacy in the first place - legitimacy that may not be deserved. I'm silent on the topic of social media, but we wouldn't even begin to consider the 'upside' of murder or rape or defamation, for instance - and that's not because people in the past have done that analysis for us, it's because collective experience has shown the analysis isn't worth doing - that the utilitarian analysis is the wrong method to apply to the question, just as there are good and bad methods in science or philosophy.

It's hard, there's no immediate downside to checking your phone or app.

I kind of think stuff like infinite scroll, gamification of social media needs some kind of regulation. I don't think we have the power to fight for our selves against these companies

What? Yes, it did, that's literally what it did do.

Someone once commented on how we can't go for a drive in the car without having some music on to distract us from thinking. I wonder if we don't want to be alone with our thoughts.

Not always the case I don't think(your over all point still stands though). An anectodtal example, I've been thrown some racial & very insensitive slurs at sports bar/convenience store late night, but seeing the person/the state the person throwing the slur is in (intoxicated) can make it way easier to just brush it off. Being thrown an insult in say, StackOverflow by someone that have provable trackrecord of excellence can be quite more demoralizing.

The absence/existence of additional information about the person throwing the slur can make the whole difference, and that can exist/not exist on both internet and real life.

Not sure if I'm the only doing that but in many, many cases I just ignore the reddit red envelope (I open it in new tab and close that tab instantly with Cmd+W), I choose to which comments of mine to answer directly (if the case) by going straight to them, so to speak, and see if there's anything in there.

Granted, I'm not strong enough to do that all the time, but it helps, nonetheless.

Really?

Teenagers are addicted to social media and adults get addicted to news media.

Both are based on fear mongering and the fear of missing out. Do you not see that underneath the problem is the same?

Addiction is a a real, serious problem with drugs that effect the brains reward system (opioids) or prediction of reward (amphetamines). It is not a real problem associated with using online forums using a computer.

I don't see why any kind of urbanization or improved communication/infrastructural technology wouldn't have this effect. The more people you can reach, the more people you have to compete with.