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