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Comment by jstummbillig | Hacker News Reader

> They're battery acid poured on the human psyche.

At least as far as kids are concerned, current evidence does not readily support this common believe.

Sabine Hossenfelder writes: "The idea that social media causes children mental health distress is plausible, but unfortunately it isn’t true. Trouble is, if you read what the press has written about it, you wouldn’t know. Scientists have described it as a “moral panic” that isn’t backed by data, which has been promoted most prominently by one man: Jonathan Haidt."

Video for more insight, if you are interested: https://youtu.be/V95Vg2pVlo0

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Sabine Hossenfelder is a physicist, she's not an expert on mental health. She might be right, she might be wrong, but she isn't a source of truth.

The chart with the number of suicides for children going up is not a moral panic, but a grim reality.

Right, but correlation does not equal causation. Kids are also increasingly aware that they live in a neoliberal hellworld, and their chances of maintaining the lifestyles their parents and grandparents had are slim to none.

I’m losing family members to conspiracy theory YouTube channels.

The crackpots had a greater barrier to transmit back in the day. They had to get an FCC license or know someone with a radio station. Even then reach was limited unless you could reach a deal to transmit nationwide.

I personally believe our brains are primed on some level to buy into this stuff. It’s very hard to overcome.

I agree completely, social media is essentially a dopamine addiction. Steve Jobs had an apt quote regarding what you said "our brains are primed on some level to buy into this stuff."

> When you’re young, you look at television and think, There’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It’s the truth.

The moral panic is social media being the reason for the suicides going up, not the fact that suicides are going up in itself.

Suicides were higher in the 1980s than now. I’m pretty sure we didn’t have any apps back then.

The cause might be different, 1980s were 45 years ago. Half a century ago.

The causes for suicide might've changed in the last 50 years.

Also, the number of children suicides was in a downtrend before it went up again:

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/wr/mm6630a6.htm

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2023/05/03/suicide-...

> she's not an expert on mental health. She might be right, she might be wrong, but she isn't a source of truth.

It's FB but for the purpose of studying effects of social media on mental health it should suffice:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-knows-instagram-is-tox...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/sep/14/facebook-...

https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-internal-report-sho...

https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/how-social-medias-toxic-conten...

And correlation is not causation. If you disagree with her interpretation (it's mostly just presentation, really) of the data, feel free to be specific. Attacking the person is, as always, bad form and lame.

I haven't attacked Sabine, it was OP who used her as some some sort of authority in children mental health.

So Hossenfelder is now a psychiatrist and a sociologist?

bah, I really dislike "scientist influencers". She isn't versed in the subject, she's no better than Haidt.

No, but she doesn't have to be in this context. She's a very capable critical thinker who knows how to do very thorough research, which is all someone has to be to determine that there is, in fact, no data to support the claims.

She’s not a capable critical thinker, quite the opposite, in fact. Completely unimpressive.

From that point of view, the press and journalism should not exist.

“Sociologist” is more of an anti-qualification. In any case let’s not rely on appeals to authority. I think we are intelligent enough to judge the evidence ourselves.

They might not be causing literally mental health issues, but they're certainly radicalizing a lot of young folks into some really toxic behaviors and beliefs.

I don't really want to watch a video, but do you have a write up somewhere? The last rebuttal I've read (I think from the books that kill podcast) basically dismissed Haidts claims by saying that the increase in anxiety related disorders was due to increased self reporting. And the podcast seems to have ignored the graph on the next page in Haidts book, which showed a correlated increase in emergency room admissions due to anxiety related disorders.

> Sabine Hossenfelder

Why would a physicist's opinion on mental health carry any weight?

What is causing the record level of mental health disorders in children?

Other children.

Actually getting kids tested for them.

You can argue for more increased self-reporting, but suicide rates are going up too.

To support this: https://www.charliehealth.com/research/the-us-teen-suicide-r...

According to the CDC, teen suicide rate is up over 33% from 1999.

(Obviously, social media doesn't have to be the only cause. But something is producing a material difference and it's hard to say social media isn't a leading one.)

Do you have evidence to back up that claim?

Are children actually experiencing mental health disorders at a higher rate, or are we just classifying pre-existing variations in personality as behavior as mental health disorders at a higher rate?

I agree with your skepticism on this, but youth suicide rates have been steadily climbing. Unless we were misclassifying suicide, it seems like there is a rising mental health crisis.

Suicide rates were higher in the 80s

And it got lower before going back up.

You could use the exact same argument with the Earth temperature: it was higher 50 millions year ago.

What skepticism did I express? There are two possible explanations for the value of a metric changing: either the thing being measured has changed, or the methodology of conducting the measurement has changed. I honestly do not know which is the case here.

Teen suicide rates have been falling in Europe and most of the world. North America has edged back up to 1990 levels, and it's largely alone in that trend.

Europe and the rest of the world has social media as well. And of course 1990 didn't have social media.

There are a lot of reasons teens can feel hopeless, and I think the hyper-partisan political atmosphere / circus, coupled with the existential crisis and very real career crisis caused by AI, at least in the common understanding, the rapid heating of the Earth, etc. I would attribute all of those as dramatically more likely to lead a child to seek an out more than social media, even if the latter is much easier to blame.

The DSM used to break mental health disorders down into what it called the multi-axial system. Axis 1 being the least impacting diseases, and axis 5 the most severe. At some point we had so many disorders that more than 50% of the population was seen to have Axis 1 or higher mental health disorders. This meant that more of the population was regarded as mentally ill than were considered "healthy."

Rather than accept that >50% of the population being classified as mentally ill might be a sign we were thinking about things in a backwards way they just got rid of the multi-axial system in DSM 5.

Problem solved.

The parents.

In 1990 there were zero identified exoplants. Now there are 4000+. It isn't that there is the creation of lots of new planets, but that we started looking for them in earnest, and had the means to identify them.

Being diagnosed is the likely reason there is an explosion in mental health disorders. We go to lengths to apply a diagnostic label on every child. The massive variation in humans means that a huge portion are going to fall to the sides of the curve on all sorts of gradients. Older HNers will remember having a wide variety of kids among their cohorts, with "nerds", depressives, the hyperactive, the super driven and focused, and the manic depressives, etc, but likely zero were actually diagnosed in any way. Now you could apply a diagnoses on literally all of them.

This isn't judgmental, and it's good to know what people are dealing with, and to offer treatment or medication where possible.

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