Comment by twayt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by twayt | Hacker News Reader

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Is it really social media itself that's the major contributing factor? Or is it really that people are using social media as a distribution channel to propagate negative, defeatist beliefs en mass in response to the natural challenges teens face when growing up?

I think it is the latter. One has but to open TikTok to quickly come across a video instilling negative beliefs about the opposite sex with tons of commenters asserting the validity of those beliefs. Confirmation bias at scale.

You can scarcely have a nuanced conversation online without some idiot misinterpreting what you said and rousing a mob to hound you for your narrative violation. Combined with the viral nature of negativity, this is an iron cage that is difficult for an inexperienced, impressionable teen mind to escape.

Parents need to be more proactive and should keep up with the firehose of negative beliefs teens are being fed through these distribution channels and attempt to have a conversation with them. At the very least, this should teach teens the valuable skill of challenging ideas and being critical of what others are putting out there.

The ones who view the medium as the devil are misguided at best. Their temporary efforts to stop it is a bandaid over the real problem of who teens are being influenced by.

I have a somewhat similar question. Don't get me wrong, I don't think moving more of teen social life onto the internet and less in the physical world is going to lead to happiness, so I agree on principle. But this obsession with social media in particular as the cause of all ills seems overblown.

I am a huge fan of Jonathan Haidt, and think he's done a great job in explaining some of the cultural shifts going on, and the changing of morality/psychology in our society.

But I feel like he is overselling social media's impact. He even mentions in his testimony, that the correlation between social media use and mental illness may be around r=0.10 . That is a fairly weak correlation. I also have not seen a study (note that this doesn't mean one doesn't exist) that has done a good job of controlling for the selection effects involved with the data, to attempt to understand if there is any causality involved and what direction it would go. My hypothesis is that those with mental illness would be more likely to use social media more in the first place.

Social media feels like a bit of a bogeyman in our society. There are 100% issues with it, and I don't necessarily think it's net-positive for humanity, but it's only one part of the ever-changing environment we as humans are now finding ourselves in. Blaming social media won't solve our issues, I feel like they run much deeper. Some of the deeper issues are around meaning, identity, belonging, status, decreasing tolerance for discomfort/inconvenience, increasing detachment from physical reality, etc. Our amorphous culture is guiding us down this path and it's really hard for us to grasp...

I think there are powerful second order or related effects here. There is both what screens and social media replace, and what they enable.

This is the most risk adverse, most monitored, and most policed generation of Americans.

I think this results in less freedom to experiment, explore, grow, and find happiness.

In about 25 years we have gone from teens behavior being largely untraceable, to them being reachable by cellphones, to the majority of their behavior and communication being recorded and available for later scrutiny.

These are all great points. And my take on seeing these debates about the effects of social media is that too many people tend to fall on one or the other side of a false dichotomy: social media is the root of all evil, or social media is being used as a scapegoat and the effects are grossly over-exaggerated. My opinion is that social media is a contributing factor to much larger problems in our current tech driven society. It shouldn't be blamed for everything, nor casually dismissed in these important discussions.

Totally agree.

My other related hobby horse is parenting. I have seen so many people who literally mentality handicapped their children by giving them tablets instead of raising them so that they can watch TV or surf the web themselves.

American parents watch an average of 4 hours of TV per day.

Alternatively, I have friends who don't have tvs or tablets in their house and the developmental differences are night and day.

I completely agree with you.

Not to mention the other obvious contributors to poor mental health (war, isolation, health, economic, etc.) that surround us that are being: 1. Ignored due to increased ability to distract one's self 2. Being constantly amplified via social media

In differing conditions, social media may not pose as much harm as it does today. I sure hope they factor this into account when legislating anything.

I think you're completely right, and I think social media is still the contributing factor. Not the concept of social media in itself. But the way current implementations work, they are incentivised to be addictive, to increase the amount of ads viewed, and to provide more data to be sold for a profit(see Campbell's Law for the relevant sociology work here. If all you're maximizing is "engagement", you'll have lots of it, at the cost of everything else). Therefore, the things you describe are emergent effects of a platform whose custodians have incentives fundamentally misaligned with the well-being of the platform's users.

> I think it is the latter. One has but to open TikTok to quickly come across a video instilling negative beliefs about the opposite sex with tons of commenters asserting the validity of those beliefs. Confirmation bias at scale.

I don’t have a study for this but I don’t believe this. More likely than now you have to be consuming such content to get such content. If you go to TikTok for positive vibes and actively search it out , that’s what you will get.

I can buy this, but it might practically be a distinction without a difference. If social media is an amplifier, we have to be careful what we're amplifying. Most people have no regular practice for the cultivation of wholesome solace. The result seems unsurprising.

The way to control what is being amplified is to control what people are producing. You can try to do this by modulating what is allowed to be produced or you can modulate this on the demand side. The latter is more robust but harder to legislate. It can be done via greater public awareness though. We have multiple case studies for this sort of thing.

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