Social media is a cause, not a correlate, of mental illness in teen girls
jonathanhaidt.substack.com
jonathanhaidt.substack.com
"Suppose that... a 12-year-old girl decided to quit all social media platforms. Would her mental health improve? Not necessarily. If all of her friends continued to spend 5 hours a day on the various platforms then she’d find it difficult to stay in touch with them. She’d be out of the loop and socially isolated."
You have to play defense. These apps are deleterious to your daughters self worth. I’ve seen too many hospitalizations and suicides to believe otherwise. But you also have to play offense. They will need guidance on how to be social in a world coopted by manipulation and deceit. Parenting these days is challenging but it’s possible to raise girls who thrive without phones.
I have no idea how well it was adhered to or enforced, but it surprised me that the parents of the school and the dean were trying to collectively organize action around this issue to prevent the problems described above. I had never heard of that before.
For context we severely restrict access to social media in our house, but of course they find ways around this as expected (I don't pi-hole because I want them to learn to be hackers)
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*Why I think it’s reasonable for me to have social media :)*
After reading the article, I still believe that I should be allowed to have social media for several reasons.
First of all, the article stated that people using social media moderately (half an hour to one and a half hours a day) had little to no decline in their mental health, compared to a large mental health decline in those using it a lot (3-5+ hours a day), and with the limit on my phone, I would be using it minimally, especially because I use a lot of my phone time daily to listen to music (like 5 [REDACTED], which I am listening to right now) and to text my friends, so I would only use it for 20 or so minutes a day, which is very low.
Another thing that the article mentioned is that people these days who do not have social media may feel excluded or left out, and may even miss things because they don’t have social media, which can lead to a decline in their mental health as well. It was also mentioned that not every social media user’s mental health is impacted, especially those who use it in moderation. Yet another point was that people will compare themselves to other people on there.
In case you hadn’t already noticed, I don’t really do that. I do find people pretty, but I don’t usually compare myself to them. Plus, most of them are significantly older than me, so I don’t expect myself to look like them anyway.
I believe that using social media could actually have greater benefits for me, such as being able to record Tiktok dances with my friends, or messaging people on Snapchat. I could also follow my friends and then help support whatever they do (for example, one of my friends has an account for [REDACTED]). Also, studies have shown that when people don’t get to do something as a child/teenager isn’t allowed to do or have something in moderation, they are more likely to do or have it in excess as an adult.
> Social media creates a world for Lucy where A) what everyone else is doing is very out in the open, B) most people present an inflated version of their own existence, and C) the people who chime in the most about their careers are usually those whose careers (or relationships) are going the best, while struggling people tend not to broadcast their situation. This leaves Lucy feeling, incorrectly, like everyone else is doing really well, only adding to her misery:
> (image)
> So that’s why Lucy is unhappy, or at the least, feeling a bit frustrated and inadequate. In fact, she’s probably started off her career perfectly well, but to her, it feels very disappointing.
> ...
> Ignore everyone else. Other people’s grass seeming greener is no new concept, but in today’s image crafting world, other people’s grass looks like a glorious meadow. The truth is that everyone else is just as indecisive, self-doubting, and frustrated as you are, and if you just do your thing, you’ll never have any reason to envy others.
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Thus, the "set reasonable expectations" along with "realize that what is on social media is a constructed reality reflecting the masks people wear in that environment." The "what people see on Facebook" is almost as scripted as any romcom movie - just that most people realize that the movie is a constructed fabrication yet tend to expect that they can live day to day the same as what people project into the constructed reality of social media.
It’s strange to me because I’ve talked about this literature and whatnot with other parents and they just shrug and say that their kid won’t abuse it and will withstand the negative effects. Of course, many of these are posting on social media quite a bit themselves.
It’s tough for parents but I’m encouraged by more evidence on this subject and hope that there’s soon public health guidance about when to allow social media.
As a kid, I was bullied, outcast, left out. Oddly enough, I don't think I was depressed. Sure, I was sad sometimes. But given that my options didn't include doing things with kids from school, I did things on my own. Fortunately for me, I also had access to a (relatively) safe outdoors to explore. Or if the weather wasn't cooperating, I would play with toys inside.
But it sounds like social isolation can lead to mental illness/depression, so I don't know if enduring that is an acceptable alternative to the near certain mental illness that being part of the internet-connected social scene seems to cause.
Should we redirect our attention to figuring out how to keep kids mentally healthy despite likely social isolation that's going to happen no matter what? Is that possible?
One thing I learned from observing the teenagers of my friends is that they don't want this either. We're adults and talking and a bunch of kids sit in a row on the couch, playing with their iPads. For hours on end.
And yet they hear everything you say. They're paying attention. And when you show a genuine interest them just by asking a few question, the iPad is quickly ignored.
That's a sign of hope. They want to engage and be engaged in something more meaningful. The iPad fills a void. This artificial divide of the situation between adults and children does not help. Sending them outside does not help either because nobody else is outside.
Engage with them. They have a bunch of free time on their hands but no meaning to fill it with. You can't stop the draw to the device unless that time is filled with things that makes them forget the device. It doesn't take much. A conversation, a board game, a small game of sports in the park, whatever possible for you.
I would admit though that the situation for girls is not this simple. They will be dragged into a games of thrones style social battle of self-image/worth.
Until a major of parents remove access, this will always be the problem.
Btw, I had the same issue with games and my son. I could not let him play, but then he wouldn't have had access to the sole socialization his peer group had. Both decisions were bad, but one was worse. Letting him play video games was the least bad choice. Interestingly, we've had discussions about this, now that he's an adult and (I believe) he agrees with this analysis.
That way there is not a lot of dwell time to be depressed about missing out on stuff.
Also taking away privileges due to not passing grades, not keeping up with math tutoring, etc. is a great way to get them out of the social media loop.
It gives them a highly plausible and relatable reason to not be active on these platforms (i.e. uggh, I "wish" I could have seen that instagram post but my parents are soo strict!).
Having a big important swim meet or soccer game early Saturday morning is a great reason for not being at Friday's drinking party (i.e. I would have been too tired to go anyway).
edit: but I have literally no clue what I am going to do, I have like another 5 years or so.
I’d have that attitude — show your children this study and explain why they can’t use it in your home. “I won’t support making you mentally ill”
In reality, your kids will likely subvert you to some degree. That said if you set the clear boundaries and alternatives it might not be bad. Particularly, if you’re upfront and explain.
I personally send my kids to a school that where we signed an agreement for no tech in the classroom (or generally limit it at home). At the very least, that ensures kids can be kids at school. After that; I suggest getting them in activities and keeping them active.
In many ways connectivity is great, it’s the algorithmic enhancement and broadcasting that’s at issue. I doubt there’s mental health issues related to texting one-on-one for instance (or very limited issues).
You can’t realistically ban phones, but you can control the culture they’re exposed to by where you live and send your kids to school.
> But social media is very different because it transforms social life for everyone, even for those who don’t use social media, whereas sugar consumption just harms the consumer.
In countries with single-payer healthcare (or socialised healthcare), it's not true that it harms only the consumer. If it turns into obesity, diabetes, or other medical conditions, then it may transform social life by virtue of adding pressure to the healthcare system. This is a rephrasing of the argument against smoking, where the argument that was smoking harms nobody else, and the counter was that smokers created a healthcare burden.
Arguably this is the same case in insurance-based countries, but the payment structure keeps the onus on the individual, not the overall system.
The point being that social media has damaging externalities no matter how it's framed.
My friend reports that they laugh at their friends who are obsessed with their phones and do not have any of the anxiety problems that are rampant in their classrooms.
As a father of a young girl, this gives me hope for her future. I think parents need to step up here. The excuse of "everyone else does it so I'm not going to introduce any discipline" is an irresponsible decision on the parent's behalf. I little more thought, effort and discipline could go a long way.
Our job is to prepare our kids for the real world and maximise their opportunities (which anxiety and depression destroys). We are not here to be their friends.
You can't pick your kids friends but you can do your best to curate the pool they are picking from.
Eventually that progressed to also on a Saturday afteroon-ish I'd update my status to "See You Noon Tuesday"* and then not do FB til noon Tue, in addition to FL Fridays.
It was odd at first. But then it's liberating in the sense you realize how much junkfood for the mind and soul it is. Mind you I'm not a 12 y/o but perhaps if it was a group / family effort you can pull back enough to develop healthier perspectives not based on SM and only SM?
* Yes, it's any intentional play on see you next Tuesday ;)
Only educational sites and videos should be available to anyone under 10.
I KNOW this is a horrendously hard problem to solve - but kids should EARN sceen time by 'playing outside time' or something.
Kids born to cities are fucked. kids born to dense 'no-nature'access' environs are fucked.
But growing up in the forrests of california and being a latch-key kid in the 80s was a godsend to my imagination and thus my IQ.
The interesting thing to me was her reaction, which actually may mirror yours based on your writing. She said she had no interest in Facebook, because she sees how much time mom wastes on it and doesn't like how she acts.
That was before our come to jesus moment as husband and wife... which I also highly recommend. But you'll have to be the bad guy again.
As a father of two girls who also runs a social network, this article is bullshit. They’re only considering social media that fundamentally looks and feels like Facebook. That’s like saying all outdoor activities are extremely dangerous, when only looking at wingsuit base jumpers.
I don’t have any daughters, but I’ve worked at some big social media companies, and this was required reading at one of them. The boss there did have daughters, but it wasn’t only so we would understand. It was so we wouldn’t build Trust and Safety headaches in the first place.
"We found that controlling for [psychological variables such as negative attitudes about school and closeness with parents] heavily suppressed the relationship between social media use and poor mental health."
Although it's almost a throwaway comment, my reading of it is that parents are not helpless. The effect is 'heavily suppressed', meaning that these variations have a significant impact. It is not a huge jump to conclude that there are steps that we as parents can do to mitigate the negative impact of social media, especially by being involved, engaged, emotionally available and supportive (and whatever else might be hiding behind this other 'psychological variables' mentionedsorr).
It's also important to consider that we don't know why the mental health outcomes are so negative (as others have highlighted).
However, there are some obvious likely causes of mental health issues caused by social media:
- 'Andrew Tate'-like personalities, who intentionally use controversy and creating feelings of inadequacy to drive engagement
- 'Dream body' type posters, who are not necessarily intentionally creating feelings of inadequacy, but nevertheless, they do by deliberately showing off parts of themselves or their lives that others cannot reasonably or easily attain (designer clothes/bags/shoes, expensive holidays, etc.)
- 'The Joneses' type posters (which actually I think most people end up being themselves), whose posts are innocent in motivation, but create feelings of inadequacy by only showing one facet of their lives. For example, photos of the family laughing together, dogs playing in fields, beers in a pub garden in the sunshine.
- Small groups of 2-5 people are fine.
- For larger groups, create limited 'societies'. Class groups, church groups, scout groups, etc. Only allow my kids to be part of groups that they *really* belong to, and which are moderated to ensure that only people who really belong to those groups are able to join.
- No 'reposts' or content which is not original. Only share photos which you've taken yourself (or which have been taken by someone within the group). Links to external services like YouTube, Spotify, etc. should be possible but limited to those where parental controls can be implemented.
- Community moderators. Either parents or trusted community members should in place as moderators to manage harmful discussions.
Might trigger some narcissism issues, but that might be an acceptable trade-off. In the end, it's a game like private schools and universities. You're not the ones making the rules, but if you want your children to succeed, playing by the idiotic rules might be your safest bet.
I'm a little confused about Haidt's pearl-clutching in this instance, when he has elsewhere argued against "coddling" and bugaboos like "intersectionality" and "identity politics". While there is certainly much to criticize in these areas, you would think one solution to this issue would be to advance a society in which women are valued equally to men. Reading between the lines of his body of work, it appears Haidt wants to return to a type of mid-century traditionalism, where children and young people are both protected and challenged by traditional adult authority figures (who are conveniently mostly people like him and his collaborators). I'm not so sure that's the direction we should be going in, but heavy-handedly cutting off the exploration at "social media as cause" certainly precludes any further analysis of an underlying dynamic.
Men not graduating as much as women, must be mens fault for not studying enough. Women not earning the same as men, must be mens fault. Boys being isolated and depressed, must their video gameing and porn habits. Girls getting mental illness from social media, must be social expectations we stack on girls and women. Men getting worse outcomes in hospitals? Must be their behavior. Women getting worse outcomes in hospitals? Must be bias by doctors against women. Why are there more men in prisons? Must be testosterone. Why more women at home taking care of children? Must be cultural.
Any observable difference between men and women, can be describe as either being caused by external factors like social expectations or internal factors like behavior and hormones. Whenever I see researchers doing a comprehensive and deep study to explain why something is observed more in one gender than the other the usual answer is a tiny bit of biology and a huge (dominating) dose of culture. Such answer generally does not change base on gender, so if we are asking why social media is causing mental illness more in girls and boys, the answer is likely a tiny bit of biology and a huge dose of culture.
By contrast, if a man spends too much time playing video games, he’s seen as lacking discipline (something within his control), not as a victim of society or corporations (something outside of his control).
The obvious reading is that GP simply meant any cultural pressure for women to (over)value appearance (or conversely the lack of cultural immunity to such pressures), regardless of whether it comes from men or women, because it has always come from both (historically, and today).
So I fail to see how they are taking away agency from women and attributing it to men.
(2) If you live in the English-speaking parts of the West, our cultural awareness absolutely has an equivalent of this for men and boys. It’s sometimes called “toxic masculinity” (we can debate whether it’s the appropriate choice of words, but the awareness exists).
If a boy or a man man spends too much time playing video games, because he is repressing his emotions, some would certainly ask whether it’s because society has never taught him to process emotions and display vulnerability. (I had a roommate like this.)
And conversely, if a girl or woman spends too much time on social media (but stripped away from context), you’d bet “poor self-discipline” is on the list of hypotheses too in people’s minds, rightly or wrongly.
I think this is trying too hard to conjure bias _ex nihilio_, or at least lumping GP’s reasoning with what you’ve seen elsewhere.
(3) Part of what people do is influenced, or inspired, or sometimes constrained by culture. Admitting this does not take away agency from people.
flipping both axes, there’s also the perception that women today “choose to” have fewer kids, and focus instead on self-directed fulfillment. that’s the internal framing you speak of, ignoring that the ability to have this choice meaningfully sits atop a bunch of external societal change over the last century.
so… i’m not really sure how these framings get selected for that perception you and i have in the end. is it just a tendency to “glass half-empty” it? maybe coupled with the incentives of outlets which most prominently discuss these things? i can’t say i’ve spoken much about these topics with a co-ed crowd IRL.
And yes there is a "glass half-empty" aspect to it, but the aspect I want to highlight is that problem and solutions are generally framed internal when men as a demographic is described. The suggested solution is not that society should do anything to help men, but rather than men must change themselves.
Naturally we can flip this. We can creatively frame it as an historically injustice that men was forced to work exclusive to provide for women who did not support themselves, and now men are free to choose to spend time on other things like say video games. A hostile society however looks down on this and thus physiologically harming those men who choose to do something else than perusing a carer as a breadwinner for a wife and family. The problem is with society and it is society where the change should occur.
The above is obviously an extreme way to frame it and exist only illustrate how the framing impacts the discussion. I generally do not see such explicit framing when reading scientific studies, through they often align to a degree with the cultural framing that the author inhabits. Meta studies in social science often highlight when multiple studies on the same subject have conflicting results because the framing is made in conflicting cultures.
> you would think one solution to this issue would be to advance a society in which women are valued equally to men.
There's no reason to believe such a society can exist any more than believing it's possible for a thing to be both dry and wet at the same time. It's dubious whether such a society is even desirable, and even if it is, it's been debated since time immemorial and isn't a practical way to address real world issues. You might as well ask why the world can't be more like Star Trek.
You are wrong. Feminism as a broad social movement, and as an academic discipline, explicitly sought to question and attack the social structures and behaviors that were often insisted to be "innate" about female psychology and well being. Basically no one would find that offensive today. It's profoundly mainstream.
Many more people would find it offensive to imply that social media addiction, or that an increasing trend of suicidal ideation as a result of social media use, is somehow a result of femaleness tout-court. That's downright archaic.
Social media companies take advantage of the ways women are socialized into an incredible and unnecessary focus on their bodies by pouring rocket fuel on it.
For instance, a greater tendency among girls to express aggression through social violence rather than physical violence is universal across all cultures. Few would say this is not an inmate difference, and it has obvious roots in sexual dimorphism. This is significant with respect to social media because you can't punch someone through a screen, but it amplifies the ability to carry out social violence. Group chats, and threads denouncing rivals are a very effective tool of social violence.
Failure to recognize this innate difference in how boys and girls express aggression could lead to platforms failing to recognize the importance of curtailing this behavior, leading to greater harm.
> You are wrong
But also:
> Many more people would find it offensive ... Is somehow a result of femaleness tout-court
But the person you're replying to seems to be saying that if there is some ingrained female-related cause, it couldn't be discussed today.
How does the second thing I quoted from you not directly agree with the comment you replied to?
On the other hand, the entire posted article goes at length to study the social impact of social media for young people and young girls in particular and routinely references the heightened effect of the hyper focus on bodies for young girls.
Their comment is just a naked assertion. Would people find it offensive? Well, if the entire basis for your point is a strawman, then yes. But as far as I can tell, there is no causal evidence between femaleness and social media addiction or suicidal ideation. The need to leap to biological causation is unwarranted and unsupported.
Acting like they're already agrieved is a rhetorical slight of hand without substance.
And yet the charts look wildly different.
That said, much of those studies where later found to be mostly wrong, and testosterone tend to be a bad predictor and a very weak influence on behavior. It seems more that hormones have a stronger influence on shaping culture than it has on shaping behavior.
It’s hardly fair to call that a “leap”, especially given the comparatively limited body of evidence in support of your preferred hypothesis.
Please, present reputable published evidence for "innate" biological causation for the female sex in relation to the mental health effects of social media use and its impact on suicidal ideation. The absence of evidence is the not the proof of some grand conspiracy.
The world can be more like Star Trek, and might move in that direction a bit more quickly if there weren't so many people premature playing a victim before they try to undermine the effort.
If a society equally values the contributions of men and women in all contexts, then, by definition, it must be using an inequitable metric to ascribe value to their contributions.
No two people are identical, and the range of difference between the two most extreme men almost certainly exceeds the range of difference between the most woman-like men and the most man-like women. Given the obvious differences between humans, nobody expects that every single person will contribute identical value, or should be valued identically.
However, there is a very, very, very long history of the inverse. In nearly every area of life, the activities and contributions most commonly fulfilled by women are under-valued, while the activities and contributions most commonly fulfilled by men are over-valued. This can be seen historically, as the primary occupants of careers shifted from one sex to the other. The early computer programmers (women) were treated as doing secretarial work, while modern computer programmers (mostly men) are compensated like rock stars. Conversely, early school teachers were highly respected and well-compensated when they were mostly men, and respect and compensation both dropped relative to other careers as teachers became more likely to be women.
These are systemic biases so ingrained that we don't think about them. People are lining up to respond to this comment to helpfully explain to me that those earlier programmers weren't the same, or that modern teachers are every bit as respected and well-compensated as they should be, or whatever.
The Venn diagram of all men and all women is not a circle, because of course there are differences. But there is much overlap between the two circles, and women are mostly not valued equally where the circles overlap, and the non-overlapping areas of each circle are valued completely differently as well.
When you see it, it's clear as day. When you don't or won't, it sounds silly. Feel free to dig in to the truth of it, or dismiss it as folklore.
I could easily do the same and claim that men are undervalued. They are sacrificed in wars, make up the main portion of the homeless and they do the hardest and dirtiest work to provide the modern infrastructure of the world.
They have no support structure, can't fail and are constantly pissed on in culture and media.
Neither of us is telling the whole story.
One can still compute a mean afterward and potentially find that it differs, but that is no judgment of inherent value / not a causative factor for the value judgment being made.
And even then, there might sometimes be benefit to treating people more equally than they are on some metrics. Maximizing efficiency often means sacrificing resiliency, after all.
In my opinion, the only thing we should do with that information is accept that (1) men and women are different, (2) disparity of outcome may be the result of those differences, as opposed to systemic bias, and (3) insisting on equality of outcome will, invariably, produce grossly inequitable results in some contexts.
I agree that's an interesting question. I think it's that girls are (conditioned to be?) more sociable than boys. After a divorce, many more men find themselves friendless than women, because the mens' social networks were really their wives.
The stereotype that women gossip isn't wrong; women chatting about nonsense is simply maintaining social networks. Men maintain social connnections through team sports and work. I don't happen to believe it's "conditioned" - I think women are different from men, and behave differently. On the whole. (And for "women", read "girls and women")
So if women communicate verbally more than men, it's not surprising that women make greater use of social media.
The body-image thing obviously isn't about verbal communication, and I think it's a distinct phenomenon. I see a lot of young women in the street, with lots of exposed skin despite the wintery conditions; and with orange make-up applied with a trowel (they're always staring down at their fondle-slab). I don't know why young women want to look tacky, like a porn actress.
If the media was to be believed, video games were inevitably going to raise a generation of men ready to shoot up schools at the slightest provocation. Lots of research later, we started finding the men who grew up playing multiplayer video games were more strategic and often made better leaders. The fact that overwatch has guns doesn’t actually matter much in practice. However, the experience of getting a bunch of random people to cooperate is a lifelong skill that carries over into lots of other areas of life.
Most of what I learned about working in teams, I learned from playing world of Warcraft in my early 20s. If you can run a successful raid every week with 40 strangers, working with a team in an office is easy.
Here in Australia we play all the same video games as American kids do, and we don’t have school shootings. The problem isn’t the video games.
I hang out with fewer gun owners than many but I am from Tennessee. It is kind of like getting people to recognize the need to do something about climate change. Most everyone recognizes it as a problem now, but solutions are someone else's business. "The ability to affect the problem is upstream, what am I going to do about it? What am I supposed to do about schools, sell my gun and be without it when something crazy happens?" That is even before addressing that they can be fun, like a collectible or a sport.
The ideas tossed around are often regulations at the consumer level, and the societal momentum is thoroughly against those in general.
If an uncharacteristic law was introduced along the lines of, "no more new guns" then some in my area would begin manufacturing themselves. I already see cardboard signs advertising squirrel rifles.
And even if they were comparing themselves to others, the context of it would be in the video game, rather than what their real world circumstances are.
On one end you have lads playing video games who turn out to be good managers/workers in tech. On the other end, you have socially stunted lads who gradually find themselves falling down the "incel" rabbit hole.
Before absconding boys from harm, maybe we should check twice on their health. They are often forgotten or their difficulties brushed off in studies. How are addictions progressing? Obesity maybe? Why are they all on 9Gag? Let’s check their level of racism and misogyny, it might be a proxy for self-esteem. Have right-wing groups gotten more expressive recently? Are we taking proper care of the boys?
Can we ensure, if we measure something where girls are particularly exposed, that we also measure an area where boys are particularly exposed, before assuming boys are exempt from harm.
Seems to me misandry would be a better proxy for self-esteem. I do know men who are very much misandrist. I'm not just talking about them "going woke" I'm talking about kids whose fathers abandoned them or whatever and they feel a lot of resentment when they look around and see this is a common story. As men collectively become more productive, more empathetic, less toxic, and all this stuff I only hear more and more people pleading that we ratchet up scrutiny of men to the point Gilette think's it's a good idea to run an ad directed by women about how men need to do better and do this and that wrong and just need to get their shit together [1].
Similarly, I would say that self-hating racism is a better proxy for self-esteem than racism in general. In fact this shit is out of control in Incel communities to the point they have terms like "currycels", "ricecels", etc. You know why they feel this way? Is it because they themselves are racist towards towards others? No it's generally because they look at dating site stats and see how women are racist towards them (in a highly specific context) and internalise the racism of others and hate themselves. Oddly I don't think I've EVER heard somebody suggest that women should be less racist towards men to improve men's self-esteem, even though I've seen such racism CRUSH men's self-esteem over and over.
I don't know I see the idea that the key towards self-esteem is holding people other than yourself in high esteem and think they're totally absurd on its face. If an Indian Man or Black Man or White Man or Asian Man doesn't like people like themselves, if they don't look up to proud Malcolm X like role models, their self-esteem is always going to be shit. Men are generally portrayed as either oppressor or oppressed, either way they have cause to feel bad about themselves.
I think it’s pretty awful having one gender succeed at the expense of another, whichever way around that goes. For society to be healthy we need everyone to thrive.
> “Today in America, women expect more from men,” Levant said, “and unfortunately, so many men don’t have more to give.”
Powerful stuff.
> Women are tiring of their stereotypical role as full-time therapist for emotionally distant men. They want a partner who is emotionally open and empathetic, the opposite of the age-old masculine ideal.
> “Today in America, women expect more from men,” Levant said, “and unfortunately, so many men don’t have more to give.”
I think it’s pretty clear that the harm isn’t caused by equity, but that the equity exposes the harm caused by other things.
> Women are tiring of their stereotypical role as full-time therapist for emotionally distant men
> “Today in America, women expect more from men,” Levant said, “and unfortunately, so many men don’t have more to give.”
> The same emotional deficits that hurt men in the dating pool also hamper them in forming meaningful friendships.
At first glance the article is even-handed, but reading closely you notice that not a single trait of women is described using negative terms, but men are described as needing women to be their therapists, as "not having more to give" women, and as having "emotional deficits."
This is basically an inversion of the ancient trope that women are defective men, and just as harmful.
Imagine that in this particular article we'd say to teen girls: your mental health issues are imagined, just be sane and normal. Do better.
Wildly unacceptable, but perfectly normal to talk about men that way.
The inversion would be if the claim was that a trait of men is causing this maladjustment, but the claim is instead that men are misprioritizing an equal relationship with a woman in favor of career and unequal relationships that they're now struggling to find.
Also I dunno if you missed this quote, but it's firmly discussing actions women are taking that impact these single men:
> Heterosexual women are getting more choosy. Women “don’t want to marry down,” to form a long-term relationship to a man with less education and earnings than herself, said Ronald Levant, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Akron and author of several books on masculinity.
The article also ended on a hopeful note, giving an example of a group of men who do prioritize relationships, with their Man of the Year trophy, saying literally:
> “We treat friendship as a luxury, especially men,” Ritter said. “It’s a necessity.”
It's always been a selfish behavior void of love, but I suppose that one can find rationalization in needing stability and protection if one is to start a family.
Now, however, as women match earnings or even out-earn the typical guy, they still won't marry down. Which creates selection criteria of an "impossible man". Acceptably attractive, stable high earner, emotionally advanced (yeah, right).
Meanwhile, men do marry down. And none have an ever increasing list of demands. Just noticing the asymmetry here.
Anyway, men won't emotionally "improve" because that is a strictly female value assessment. We're not broken, we're just different. My girlfriend gives me a daily update of all the ups and downs and gossips in her dealing with colleagues at work. I do not give a shit about any of it, but will pretend to care.
Neither of us are broken, we're different. And that is fine.
No one is asking women to stop having careers, or stop going to college. Rather, my point is that the article treats the women's perspective unquestioningly as reality — men aren't emotionally available enough, and aren't successful enough, and those are facts, not merely biased perspectives of a single gender.
I don't know how to fix this problem. Undoing a century of feminism is a non-starter. But you can't fix this by telling men to be better. They need the same kind of societal consideration and institutional support that women get.
> it's firmly discussing actions women are taking that impact these single men
Sure, it's stating that these are things women do. But the phrasing is neutral at worst. There's no implication that women wanting to "marry up" in a world where most men are now "lower" than them is an unreasonable desire.
> Of course it's on the men to adjust
Why? How? Even if men can somehow just become more emotionally available (assuming that the problem is on the mens' side and not womens' for expecting men to act like women), how do you suggest men fix issues like not being more academically successful as women, or not earning more than them?
Boiling all this down to a single question (I'm curious how you would answer): How can you possibly reconcile a world where men and women are equal, but women still only want to marry men that are older and more successful than them?
Given the stats on enrollment in colleges, on who is preferred for tenure track in academia, and so on and so forth, well ... that's just not gonna work out.
Right now, single women are earning more than single men (and have greater home ownership). Yet most women would prefer than men earn more than they do. Put those two things together and you create this untenable situation where women desire only a fairly small fraction of men. And that's just from an economic perspective and what people will admit to right now, nevermind anything else.
https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/i/101249738/increases-in-...
The fact that 85% of killed reporters were men...ah, well.
Men are not doing alright. And our response to it is nothing at all or...do better.
There is a large external pressure for studies to show that there are no differences between men and women while there is also demand for studies that show negative outcomes of women in comparison to men. The same problem happens again and again with these studies in that nothing explains the negative outcomes of women. Except one explanation that is instantly discarded for being socially untenable.
The intersectionalist looks at the studies and declares, "It must be something - let's keep looking!" while the sexist takes a look and nods.
Nobody is going to risk their careers or their funding when they can continue being paid to investigate other avenues of explanation. The suffering of people will continue until a more acceptable explanation is found.
And because I don't wish to speak between the lines: There are psychological and emotional differences between men and women. And, from all the humans I've known at least, women tend to give more of a shit about the opinions of other people than men give a shit about the opinions of other people. While the toxic negativity of social media impacts both genders I would honestly be shocked if it didn't impact women more if for no reason other than because they care more.
It's lonely.
It's overly inclusive to insist on talking about everything all the time, lest we leave someone out... We'll talk about the men, lots of people are talking about the men, but let's take a second to talk about how women are feeling, okay?
They're not trying to win boys' approval, instead girls' approval.
Social ranking amidst young girls is natural behavior, what changed is that the limits of the physical world that kept it in check were removed, and now we see the fly-wheel effect.
At what point did "society" ask for duck lips? Where exactly did specifically men ask for it and actively select for it? If anything, they widely reject it. The expectation for duck lips does not exist, it was spontaneously fabricated by female influencers and that puts the idea and "expectation" in young girls' heads.
In other words, for as a long as we richly reward female influencers setting exactly the wrong example and being awful role models, this carries on.
I'll take a stab at it:
1. During most of homo sapiens evolution as hunter gatherers, women were more likely to congregate in centralized groups while men hunted in small groups. It is documented that gossip is an integral activity among the women of a tribe moreso than their male counterparts. Without the inhibitions produced by in-person interaction, women gossiping on social media are more likely to produce negative interactions than their male counterparts who have a much lessened propensity to gossip.
2. From an evolutionary standpoint, a woman's reproductive fertility is closely associated with their appearance. Men are hardwired to pay close attention to a woman's looks whereas women are hardwired to care more about a man's ability to "protect and provide". Since social media promotes visibility of the most attractive women, this has the effect of reducing feelings of self-worth for the female users moreso than the male users.
This is an extremely reductive take.
The depressing part about social media isn't just about beauty, it's about success in general. Social media made it very easy to show the image of success without actually being successful.
If you're basing your understanding of reality on social media, you will think that life is extremely unfair to you. Apparently all your friends are always eating at expensive restaurants, driving luxury cars, going on fancy vacations, and getting flowers every day.
This leads to a weird state where pretty much everyone is faking their success, but thinks everybody else's success is real. Which, if you think about, can be quite depressing.
If we assume that there's really zero genetic involvement, and it's all just environment: If you treat girls like boys (have to achieve something to be valued, no inherent value), you'll get tougher girls and fewer issues with social media. But you'll also get more girls killing themselves and being violent towards others when they fail to achieve things that get them recognition.
Not sure if that's a huge improvement.
> What does it say about our society that we are not equipping girls and women in the same way?
The issue is with girls using social media, not with society somehow favoring boys and giving them all the great tools and what not. Boys are insulting each other in a shooter games or trolling people while girls are on social media. If one group hikes through a forest and another swims through a river and some of the latter drown, it's not the better equipment the hikers were given that kept them from drowning.
Women are valued moreso than men. Men are 10x more likely to die at work, have little to no access to domestic violence shelters, and if war comes, the only people who will be conscripted to potentially die will be men.
Couldn't the why be due to (at least in part) these innate gender differences?
You raise a lot of worthwhile questions. It's certainly possible this piece isn't written in good faith, or that Haidt has become fixated on a particular theory and gone into some confirmation bias spiral. This might be part of a broader push to rein in 'big tech'. I know little to nothing about him as an individual, and have doubts about his theory here, but submitted it because it seems to have the position and traction required to become a political football with longer-term ramifications.
Even platforms like 4chan or reddit are less toxic in a way because they are more impersonal. That is a huge difference compared to social media where you need to present yourself and people compare themselves to each other, a main source of social pressure. One kind of platform is centered around topics, the other kind is centered around people. Twitter is perhaps a mix in between.
Do you believe the common users on a platform primarily consisting of boys do value other users more? In a way that might even be true, but it certainly isn't about the appreciation of those you communicate with.
Granted, some equations change for public figures. There is a reason there are PR agencies for that and that was even before social media.
Girls tend to impose expectations on each other. There isn't some "traditional authority" who does so. Who would that be exactly? The parents? For teenage girls?
Sounds like one of those truisms that people love to repeat. Like all other instances, this one likely isn't grounded in anything concrete
I think both ideas can be pretty toxic to their respective genders. The problems just show up differently. Social media, online bullying and body shaming hurt girls more than boys. And video game addiction, desperation due to purposelessness and suicide seem to hurt men more than women.
Every human deserves to have a life in which they flourish. We should, as much as we can, work to tackle all of these problems.
Idk. I feel like this is just culture trying to make up stories for each gender to define what deviance is supposed to look like
It reminds me of how some people gravitate towards mbti types or enneagram even though they're obviously pseudoscience
Are gender norms different though? Yes. But I don't think they should be. And the first step to overcoming them is disregarding the stupid stories that sound true
Regardless of how much the differences are cultural or innate, gender specific outcomes certainly show up in the data. Eg, this chart from the linked article:
https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/8...
> the first step to overcoming them is disregarding the stupid stories that sound true
Yeah; it would help immensely if we could teach everybody that they're essentially healthy and worthy of love. Good, consistent parenting acts as an inoculation against these problems. When we're talking about the kids with the worst mental health outcomes, they're probably disproportionally poor, and more often than not come from single parent households. I suspect more support for struggling families would make more of a difference to the mental health outcomes of kids than somehow overcoming gender norms. It seems like a much more tractable solution, too.
Convincing regular people to not buy into the expectations of their own gender sounds like a borderline impossible task.
Second no, just because Haidt is not advocating in his bodies of work for feminism doesn't mean he is against a more equal society.
I suggest that TikTok may not be bad at all. My feed is cats and farm animals.
But girls are higher on 'neuroticism' than boys, and I suggest that's a strong correlating aspect. Whey they are higher on that I have no idea but they are.
I was so confident in her ability to withstand the impact of social media, due to her education, but ultimately I was just shocked at how fast the change was.
I now no longer believe the human brain is capable of withstanding its effects.
I guess it's a brave new world.
All of this is to say that most people outgrow this stage eventually. High school doesn't last forever.
You mention who is dating whom and what the cool kids are up to. Imagine what the global reach and competition do to this particular interest.
Now it's perfectly normal for flirtation to happen city-wide via social media. That means the competition for top choices is now city wide. To be top in a 100k teenager city you;d have to be 1:100000, being 1:1000 could simply mean you're viewed as "average" because highlight reel nature of social media means the average people are essentially invisible.
They'll all fall in the bell curve so of course they'll be alright, but they'll be alright in a way different world than the one in which we were alright.
Your post seemed quite helpless.
100% agree. I don’t think any brain born after the social media age can resist getting hooked on it. For those of us born before the dawn of the internet maybe some of us don’t get the appeal.
I restrict my kids social media very tightly, and make sure they have lots of real world activities and real world influences.
> Why did a measure of loneliness at school go up around the world only after 2012, as the global economy got better and better?
The economy didn't get better for everyone, in fact inequality rose starkly; this might be a correlating factor.
> It’s not because of the 9/11 attacks, wars in the middle east, or school shootings. As Emile Durkheim showed long ago, people in Western societies don’t kill themselves because of wars or collective threats
OK, so let's dismiss societal violence because a 120-y.o. study says so. How about climate anxiety/eco-anxiety? Car-dependant suburban life? Ever-growing parental control?
All these factors have been too easily dismissed.
What is your source for this "fact"? There were no drastic changes in Gini coefficient in the USA.
Also, I'm pretty sure suicide rate was also increasing in wealthy households.
> How about climate anxiety/eco-anxiety?
Do you really believe teenage girls have "climate anxiety"? Is there anything that indicates people suddenly became more aware of climate change in 2012? (the only spike Google Trends has is around 2007).
The dozens of French white teens who joined the war in Syria in 2015.
The thousands of English teens who freely enrolled against Franco, the dictator who took over Spain in 1936, while they absolutely didn’t have to, as it was not part of the conscription? And if, once there, they deserted, they were legible for the death penalty.
While underage. Indeed, many examples of teens engaging into collective theoretical threats.
One thing that I thought about this is that while unemployment might have been low, both parents were more likely to be working.
I like this part, it is quite clear quitting social media alone is probably even worse and self-isolating than not taking part.
The solution would be to address it on a societal level, but that requires pretty strong societal/political will to put such a policy in place.
Such is the dilemma of the age, no doubt this is only one aspect, boys and even dating are affected on similar levels.
In college I chose to go to bed early and abstain from alcohol, which seems similar to this. It was definitely isolating. On the other hand, it ensured that my few friends were people who actually shared my (apparently strange) values. But I did it voluntarily. If someone's parents tried to make them go to bed early and restrict them from drinking in college, that seems like it could lead to a lot of resentment.
Supposedly, about a quarter of South Korean women have had plastic surgery (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmetic_surgery_in_South_Ko...). They'd be much better off just agreeing not to do it. Surgery always comes with risks.
There are for sure still some kids that don’t use social media. So those kids won’t be completely alone with that decision.
It's clear from my experience as a parent, and from the experience of many others, that that isn't an issue. The child may whine and throw a tantrum, but that's not a reason to let the child be the parent.
This is purely anecdotal with my group of friends, but we all can safely say that we feel mentally so much better when we're not on those apps, and yet the pull is always there when you want to expand your dating reach beyond your immediate circle and you hope that maybe this time around you'll get lucky and find the right partner. As a regular CBT practitioner I can detect many unhealthy conclusions that my mind makes any time I'm on these apps.
I know the solution is to focus on in-person dating and building genuine connections with people in the real world, but I've had no success with that either. I asked my friends if they knew anyone they could set me up with, but nobody did. My job and my hobbies are male dominated. Every activity in my area (a large US tech hub) that I've tried is male dominated except for yoga. Maybe things will change as I get older (I'm in my early twenties), but if things continue as they are now it will take a minor miracle for me to find a relationship before I die. I just feel so lost, I don't know what to do.
Maybe this is oversharing, but I just wanted to get it out there. Thanks for reading.
My advice to those starting their dating app journey would be to time box your usage; give yourself at most a few months a year on the app. Uninstall in between those periods and let the dating pool recharge while you invest in yourself.
She still gets on them occasionally, because there's no alternative now.
Guys in the post-#metoo era just won't approach a girl at a bar the way they used to.
I do think that people, particularly men, of my generation have completely lost the concept of going out to meet people and have an idea that it's apps or nothing. In many ways this gives the ones who are willing to step up IRL an advantage. I know women also hate the apps, even though they are bombarded with matches. Meeting someone face to face is always an advantage.
Women also have the advantage on these apps ('putting the pussy on a pedestal') whereas IRL its far closer to equal.
Then once you do start getting matches the more formulaic it becomes and the more disenchanting and antiromantic it is until you've surpassed some high watermark among your sample size of interaction.
It's not how we're meant to function. Of course it works for some, that's a statistical certainty. The worse the sorting (or the more egalitarian) is the worse the experience will be, which is why Tinder is more of a hookup app.
The more 'serious' dating sites encounter the same initial problems despite better sorting. You're selecting for a certain kind of people who for whatever reason have low satisfaction in their personal social lives. Race to the bottom.
I'm also not sure if it's worth discussing this on HN because this topic tends to attract commenters of one opinion, but I also think it's worth making opposition known. I fully expect this opinion to be unpopular.
EDIT: Indeed, doing a shallow dive into the referenced longitudinal study links shows that none of them establish any form of control. One of the studies linked's abstract (I don't have access to the full paper) has an intervention model but doesn't split the initial cohort in order to establish the causal effect.
N.B. I am aware that in social science it's hard to find large enough cohort sizes to establish effects and that splitting a cohort to establish causality could destroy the statistical power of the study altogether.
Why can't people succinctly describe their thesis and then have a nice outline for the fine details on the proof? Is this not something we learn at uni, or even high school?
Why can't people read the article in question? Is this not something we learn at uni, or even high school?
The structure on this article is the standard academic one, adapted to a less formal style. The authors first succinctly describe their findings so you can know if you want to read the article at all. Then they fully describe their findings, like you seem to want, and only then they talk about the evidence and how it was gathered.
> 5. Question 3A: Do Experiments Using Random Assignment Show a Causal Effect of Social Media Use on Mental Health?
> These experiments provide direct evidence that social media—particularly Instagram—is a cause, not just a correlate, of bad mental health, especially in teen girls and young women.
As for the thesis, it is succinctly described in the title:
> Social Media is a Major Cause of the Mental Illness Epidemic in Teen Girls.
I don't fully agree with his argument and have said so before (briefly, I think it overlooks other major contextual factors like increasing international violence and political polarization that are less obvious but just as deadly). Nevertheless I think his argument is worth examining because mass networking is resulting in huge social changes but many of these seem to be making most of us less happy.
You might be asking for a proof, but proving causation for historical events is nearly impossible.
Overwhelming amount of correlation is as good as it gets. For example if you can see the same trends in other regions where inflection point strongly correlates with social networks entering the market (i.e. being launched/unbanned/localized).
One the rumor mill went from days or weeks to real time, once the ability to present a.. diorama of life to a large online audience became commonplace - it in my opinion breaks a bunch of cultural and social factors in human life.
Bullshit. These numbers are self reported and show exactly the opposite of reality. Boys aged 15-24 are about four times[0] more likely than girls to die by their own hands, so clearly relying on self reported cases of mental illness is not very helpful and is likely to shift focus away from those groups who most need help.
Everyone who asks for help should receive it, but don't forget to keep an eye on those who stay silent.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/187496/death-rate-from-s...
It's quite possible that young men are less likely to be depressed but that those who are depressed are more likely to turn to suicide. If that were the case it would be a very important distinction to make.
Furthermore, while in that age group boys are more than 4 times as likely than girls to take their own lives as of now, the question is whether that proportion was the same before the advent of social media. For instance, maybe at that time boys were 10 times more likely to do it, which may support the hypothesis that social media is to blame—or maybe they were only twice likely, which would be evidence against it.
Finally, while depression and anxiety may be increasing in both boys and girls, I understand that Haidt is pointing out that these disorders are increasing faster in girls than boys.
[1] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/the-teen-mental-illness...
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/wr/mm6630a6.htm
Meanwhile, the premise of this piece is that social media has increased mental illness for teen girls. Yes, that's self-reported, but it's always been self-reported (and can only be self-reported), so that's not a factor which has changed for boys or girls. So why are girls, but not boys, reporting more mental illness and at greater rates than boys now than they have in the past. That's what this piece is trying to figure out.
But aren’t the data for both girls _and_ boys self-reported in the cited CDC study? In which case, if the data for boys is unrepresentative relative to that of girls, then there is either systematic underreporting or a gender-based methodological flaw in ascertainment. Either is possible but I’m not sure how one would glean that from what was published.
I didn’t read the methodology carefully but the ascertainment almost certainly did not involve asking (non-silent) people with distress to identify themselves; but rather to take a representative sample and assess the rates of mental distress within that population. So the point about being aware of silent suffering is entirely valid but I’m not sure that it explains the delta between observed rates of emotional distress in boys and girls.
Will also note that the views of the author and their partners are pretty damn conservative having released a book entitled "The Coddling of the American Mind". The jist of the book is that american kids are too soft and too prone to victimhood, rather than having legitimate grievances about the capitalistic/individualistic social and emotional systems that exist. To me this completely ignores almost all of the positive advancements the younger generations have done especially in terms of stopping generational cycles of emotional, physical and sexual abuse - the current generation is the least abused generation in the history of the US.
Its with that lens that I view the opinion piece and still agree on some level that social media is harmful.
That isn't an accurate picture you paint, at least in the UK: https://www.ons.gov.uk/visualisations/dvc2132/heatmap/datado...
Teen suicides first peaked in 1998 at 6.1 per 100,000. The numbers are noisy but it looks like it declines to a lower level of 3-4 in the 2005-2013 period (with an all time low of 3.1 in 2010 but still low at 3.6 at 2012), then starts to increase again to the 4-5 range, before covid gives it a giant spike to 6.5.
Teen suicides in the 90s were higher than the 21st century at between 5.0 and 6.1.
Social media and cellphones, if they are a factor, aren't dominant enough to be distinguished from the noise.
So is it really related to smart phones? What was causing the decrease?
0: https://www.childtrends.org/publications/teen-suicide-databa...
I wonder though, assuming this isn't new just because it's not something that was previously not measured: If there's been a more recent and drastic decline in mental health due to it in young girls due to social media, is it the general concept that's the problem, or the current implementation?
Most anyone who has quit social media can attest to the near-immediate benefit they get to their subjective well-being. And it persists even in spite of realizing they are missing out on some of the things social media does well. I REALLY hope we can eventually look back at this time and laugh at the incredibly high rate of addiction to what are worthless Internet Points. Everyone laughed at WoW junkies for staying up late to get epic loot, then turned around and did exactly that themselves, or worse!
Social media persists because it fills a void in our increasingly atomized lives. And some people thrive on what is essentially a real-time status market. The real fix is we stop normalizing having lives so small they can be so easily filled with such worthless garbage like social media.
Edit: really appreciate how Jon calls out how every damn journalist treats social media with such kiddie gloves because they are too scared to speak what is plainly evident: social media is toxic.
Setting overly strict rules is out of touch and old fashioned and the worst possible approach here. That's like what my parents' generation did - banning video games and DnD and rock music (I had my NiN CDs and DnD books confiscated from me and thrown in the trash in order to "save me"). It's a great way to break all trust with your kids and is lazy parenting.
We need to be realistic - denying a teenage girl a phone and/or social media is akin to making them a social pariah. They will ignore your ridiculous rules and figure out ways to do things without you ever knowing.
I feel the best approach is to aim for a strong relationship with your teenage child. Communication and trust are paramount. As a parent, you want to be in the loop on what's going on in their lives - so you can provide support and guidance, and be emotional support as they navigate this part of their lives. If your child is coming to you with their problems, then you have succeeded.
This isn't new, it's just become more important. The influence of social media in a vacuum is very strong.
To that end the last post I saw on Tiktok before deleting it basically said that social media is so insidious because it is both the sickness and the cure. You feel bad and then you feel better ad nauseum and that rang very true for me.
Go to an AA or NA meeting and you can hear the same stories.
I do wonder if there’s room in this analysis for specific social media analysis. It seems like it would be very hard to separate out effects of Facebook vs. effects of Twitter and so on, but at the same time I worry about throwing the baby out with the bath water.
A technology-intermediated social life is not inherently bad. Pen and paper letters are technology. Dumb phones are technology. We have been adapting culturally to new ways to communicate with each other for a long time; I want more about what’s driving this trend now, and I think it might be more than just feedback and cycle speed.
Or maybe it is simply the democratization of platforms; it’s bad when speech is filtered through a few trusted authorities but that doesn’t mean the opposite doesn’t have risks. (Yay, it’s the free speech debate!)
If we had an actual telos to our use of technology work like this by Haidt would be in the evening news and it'd inform decisions at every level. From parents keeping their kids away from harmful social media, to communities and institutions refusing to use these platforms for anything, to governments regulating the worst aspects of it.
We're terminally screwed if the trend of letting technology (and profit maximizing firms) control design of social media rather than the other way around.
I learned this lesson back around the early 80s. When I got off work I'd stop and grab some food and then go home and watch the "News". The station I watched started off with local Los Angeles and State news for a 1/2 hour, then a 1/2 hour of National News, then another of World News.
The station was a predecessor to "FOX News" and was purchased by FOX just a few years later. They focused almost entirely on negative news, car crashes, murders, rapes, robberies, etc. So by the end of 1.5 hours I had consumed most all the major tragedies for the entire planet, and I was depressed AF.
I finally realized that it was consuming all that "bad news" was the cause of that because days when I didn't consume it I felt fine.
That was just 1.5 hours a day, 5 days a week, of my routine back then.
Nowadays I would offer you need to put your phone down and spend more time doing something you can learn from and enjoy, like friends and family, like people did before the internets.
The price of this convenience is very high. Surely this can't be good for us.
The difference between girls and boys are interesting. From my casual experience, I have a lot of friends with teenage boys, a distinct pattern can be seen.
Almost all of them are gamers. That's their main digital channel. Many don't give a shit about social media and some don't even have any account at all. Nothing public anyway, just some basic chat account. As they game, they can at times be toxic and competitive, but that's "part of the game", they don't take it very serious at all.
Likewise, none of them seem to care much about stacking each other by looks, the typical male trait of physical strength, or wealth. Surely, some of this is always present in the background, but it's all in a lax "it is what it is" vibe. Their main issue/challenge seems to be gaming addiction and how this comes at the expense of other aspects of their lives (sleep, school performance, physical exercise, socializing with girls).
Also noteworthy: not politicized. Most don't seem to have much of an opinion on anything. Pure indifference.
The teenage girls are so radically different. They don't game, they're literally self-imaging non-stop. Constantly recording themselves, watching influencer videos, gossiping on chat, stacking and ranking each other. Unlike a gaming addiction (which is fixable), their success or failure is existential.
I would imagine that both tendencies between both and girls have always been there, it's just that they were naturally constrained by the physical world. Social media made it limitless.
The link between (early) smoking and cancer seems like it was about as difficult to measure as the link between (early) social media use and mental illness, but we have better tools for collecting and analyzing data in 2023.
There's many gradations between what we have today ("Hey! How old are you? Under 13? Try again later") and requiring new accounts to be linked to a government ID attesting a certain age, but it does feel like the norm today might hem too close to reckless abandonment.
I'm going to follow this up with cheap phones that I can lock down. I'll add a bunch of hand-picked games and maybe set up a slack account and get their friends to join. Then disable the play store. Again, this will shut them up for a while and let them have access to technology without the brain-rot. And their parents will be in slack, so they'll be able to keep tabs on them. (I don't have kids, so I have the spare time and the inclination to do this, unlike their dad)
This review is a lot less than a smoking gun though. The author goes into large detail on the quantification of associations and correlations in the first section (association review) - and limits towards communicating only qualitatively that there was an effect when getting into the longitudinal and experimental reviews (the causation-proving ones).
Reading through the actual google review doc, this is present in the review as well. Very little quantification, and when quantification is given it's the wrong type of quantification. Even in an experimental study, showing mean comparisons rather than distribution comparisons is misleading, even when statistically significant.
This is a bit of a problem, as it doesn't go into the effect size of the causation. The author is quite cleary rooting for causation to be there. This is not uncommon in science (a strong conviction into an unproven hypothesis) - but when this happens, we have to be extra vigilant in looking at the results.
EDIT: Also, for sth to be a major cause we would need to demonstrate that the effect of social media is in the top quantiles of all known effects. The most we can get out of this review (and I'd even challenge that) is that there is enough proof that social media is a causally proven contributor to mental health deterioration. Nothing presented indicates anything to say that it's a large contributor or that it's a major contributor, it just isn't discussed at all.
I want my car to have no ECU with an always on LTE backdoor
I want my streets to be free of facial recognition CCTV cameras
I want it to be normal to use physical cash for payments again
Mostly I only want tech that people use as a tool, rather than tech that uses people...
IIRC this "nature preserve" concept appeared in Brave New World.
I think there are approaches to handle each aspect, many of which are never recommended in debate about this, seemingly because people want single, absolute solution:
* I have no idea if anyone I follow on Twitter, or here too, has perfect teeth, a thigh gap, or whatever is the latest unrealistic goal; teenagers could be asked to use text-only media or one without humans presented as attractive: Reddit has a rule about selfie for instance.
* social media companies can choose to let you see more friends over people with large audiences; I remember that was a big debate at Instagram when I worked there (and a couple of brilliant people left because the decision went for a stickier audience, slowly slipping towards pros over friends). There’s definitely an appetite to revert that decision.
https://sci-hub.se/https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-02...
I haven't read all of Haidt's position yet, or the original paper, but this response is fairly convincing.
Whether we like it or not, unfortunately social media is now an integral part of how people are expected to behave in modern society. So we have to figure out how to address the consequences of it on an individual basis in our home without resorting to flat bans. This is addressed to some extent in the article as well.
They don't really take in the fact that the fitspo model in the picture is sucking in their stomach, flexing like crazy and posing in a very specific way to get the photo. And in many cases looking good is literally their job, they can spend 16 hours a day to look a specific way and have sponsors and money to do it.
Nor do they notice how that one influencer they are following just had one vacation to $fancy_location, but took thousands of photos in different clothes and keeps posting them all year round to give the impression of constant travel and luxury.
(Social) Media literacy is more important now than it ever was in the past.
I was definetly quite lucky that my dad worked in the tech industry as well and was a bit of a luddite around social media (locked down accounts and parental controls) while also maintaining a non-social media related friend group (swim team, tennis, debate, hiking, boxing). By the time I was old enough to learn how to bypass these (around 12-13) I feel I was a bit more mature and able to handle the kinds of pressures on social media.
But then again, my parents were also pretty pro-active in my life, so maybe issues caused by social media are due to lack of parental involvement leading to parents using FB/YT/IG/TikTok as a substitute for parenting.
It's like you're sending SYNs with the tweets and such, and need to be ACK'ed. As if just putting it out there for the sake of sharing was not enough. Though during Internet's early years with tons of personal sites and blogs, watching visitor counter as the owner of the site was like seeing all the ACKs. We were getting our kicks from watching that number go up. Now, social media's likes replaced that simple number with all bunch of numbers, and it is incredibly addictive. Internet is definitely connecting us people together, for better or worse, but it also amplifies some of our destructive emotions and urges. Interesting times.
I think it’s very well documented, that social media can be really bad for kids. It seems to be much worse than drinking, smoking or bad relationships.
Separate issue, I know. But it could be much lower because men/boys often refuse to report such feelings, out of a fear of being perceived as weak/having been taught that "that's not what men do".
Self-reported data can always be a little flakey, especially on sensitive topics like this.
This is the kind of thing that should be front and centre in media discussion, but Meta has too much money. It's just not.
This, and the Opioid push by Big Pharma have to be taken much more seriously.
I suggest there might be some massive lawsuits on the way.
With enough coordination we can push some collective control over most social trends, but now every parent is fighting their own David vs Goliath. I'm amazed the US is the same country that passed prohibition.
I'm at -3 right now but look at the data yourself: https://afsp.org/suicide-statistics/, scroll down to suicide rates by age range.
And yes I think suicide deaths is the best measure of mental illness since it has the most life impact and is the least prone to measurement/diagnosis error and changes,
What's the solution then? Maybe we need some sort of "device-free summer camp" where teens just have fun with other teens in nature, without any devices to distract them?
I'll bet this could be a profitable business at least...
And Rightly So.
Their entire business model is to poison the well of society to improve their quarterly profits; strip-mining goodwill and trust, leaving anger and ashes.
A long damn way from 'just trying to connect people'.
ABC story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSUrE4-zYzg
The mental relief was immediate.
Facebook (and social media in general - including linkedin) is pure evil.
But what about supporting the NCMEC National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, without biometrics due to new laws?
Can you teach your daughters to be considerate of others on the internet?
They used to tell us not to put any personal information online as kids; no real names, etc.
Perhaps social media is a mirror from which we can determine parenting approach?
Are violent video games less bad than social media for which unhealthily-competitive strata?
"Please do not bully people on the internet because:"
"Please be considerate and helpful on the internet because:"
"How to Make a Family Media Use Plan" (HealthyChildten.org (AAP)) https://www.healthychildren.org/English/family-life/Media/Pa...
Internet safety: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_safety
2. Suppose legislation limits Meta's freedom in attempt to advert mental health issues.
How difficult will it be for Meta to maneuver or adapt to survive in this environment?
3. Meta's market cap is 442 billion usd. What do you guess Meta's market cap to be in 2033 (ie, the average of your expectations)?
- Make social media illegal to underage kids, just like tobacco or alcohol
- Enforcement through ID verification of every user (would solve the bot problem as well)
- Jail terms for executives of social media companies who fail to enforce these rules and protect children from harmful content
The most convincing argument is that I don't want social media companies to have access to my ID. Remember, even websites like HN and Pornhub would need to verify your age with your ID.
How depressing.
apparently discipline society and father morality still reign supreme even in the postmodern era as long as you're a child :/
I think its clear society is on the verge of failure. We've allowed radicals and a small minority to take control of culture, and break it for the vast of amount of normal people. We need to return to the first principles we know most societies are based on.
Its a control mechanism on the population because the state deliberately doesn't teach law and parents cant be relied upon, so social media can also be a way to psychological and biologically profile people before choosing to radicalise individuals, set them up for blackmail, or have them carryout a variety of Darwinism tasks, to help population levels or boost GDP through health care.
Social Media is to the ego, as the Olympics is to the body, but parents are not sports coaches, managing the physical and mental aspects of failure.
So do parents take the China route and limit gaming time to 3 hours a week Fri, Sat, Sun and limit access to the FAANG companies?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_China#:....
Now enjoy your fortnite hot pics on youtube, some of you might find it xxx rated in all but name!
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=fortnite+hot+pi...
There is no reason why "the government" (who exactly?) needs a control mechanism in order to biologically profile and radicalise you. None of this babble passes Ockham's razor or basic reason.
Make your point without the nonsense.
What do you mean by that? And how is this currently achieved?
Bingo. The entire thing is a psyop designed to artificially limit and homogenize groups to make them more predictable and easier to control.
Would be great if we could start doing properly controlled trials with folks who _never_ use these things we're widespread experimenting across the population. A few examples that might make sense: social media, pornography usage, and perhaps any fast tracked vaccines. Might make sense to have even just a few randomized folks be controls for research purposes. As of now you likely cannot find even a single person over ~15 who hasnt used social media/porn ever in their lifetime.
Is now: "If all your child's friends jumped off a cliff, would you push them too?"
Let's assume they live in a deeply rural area in which variant sexualities and genders are frowned upon. They are the only person who feels this way that they've ever met. Their parents restrict the media they watch for whatever reason and they assume they're broken.
This is not a hypothetical. Coming out saved my life. I don't use social media because I have better ways to spend my time, but I'm wary of taking away the one light in a tunnel that this only-nominally-hypothetical person might have.
[1] https://www.kqed.org/futureofyou/441784/the-controversial-re...