Obviously it's difficult to pin a 20-year trend on a single cause. But most parents have the sense their teens spend too much time on their phones; and with social media use as common as it is, almost every kid who commits suicide will have recently used social media. But it's not possible to prove causality in a way that will silence all objections.
I suspect it's particularly easy to convince politicians that social media is bad for mental health because of their lived experience. Consider the experience of being a professional politician on Twitter.
[1] https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/publications... [2] https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/child-adolescent-and-yo...
Yeah, I wonder what caused that?
The most freedom they actually get is on the Internet, that's why they all hang out there.
The claim I'm making is that they are underprotected online.
I think you are concerned about the pendulum swinging too far in the other direction but I don't think I said anything that suggests that should happen. Unless perhaps you think the current amount of protection is already the maximal amount that is useful?
Yes, and not only is it wrong (they are protected sufficiently), but giving an inch to the same moral impulses and people that resulted in them being overprotected in the real world will naturally result in them taking a mile.
The ideal number of human beings that do stupid shit and pay for it is not zero, nor can it be in any functioning society.
The onus is on the parents though, they need to monitor (to some degree) what their children are doing online. This seems trivial to me using modern Family controls on iOS or Android + maybe DNS filtering at the router level.
Yeah. No surprise. The generation of my parents used to run free in the woods. My generation was limited to whatever bicycles offered. And when I have children, I'll probably have to be happy if they can walk to a friend's without some busybody calling the cops on them.
And drinking? Don't get me started on that one - same here. My parents' generation distilled their own spirits (that's banned in Germany these days). My generation had beer. My children? Assuming drinking is still a thing when they're at that age, I'll have to fear getting the cops called on me if they ever drink enough to end up in a hospital (which is a routine thing these days).
Generally: Third spaces (e.g. libraries, "youth centers") are closing down, others (malls, parks) try everything possible to eliminate youth loitering or, god forbid, making noise. And that's if they can actually afford something. It's ridiculous how expensive basic stuff such as fast food or ice cream has gotten.
In contrast to that, phones are free-ish (well, parents buy them for their kids anyway, and mobile data plans aren't a big deal either).
> and with social media use as common as it is, almost every kid who commits suicide will have recently used social media.
Bullying always used to be a thing, yes. But that's a legitimate complaint, the mechanics of social media and cameras being ever present have made bullying much more severe in scale. Hell if I were young today, I'd have probably ended up arrested multiple times if there was some video camera rolling around all time.
Nobody, of any age, should drink that much.
We'll lose some, but the surviving ones will be fitter.
It feels absurd to even ask.
I ask because if social media has a positive affect on mental health overall then it cant have a negative affect overall. And I ask because I think everyone intuitively thinks that idea is ridiculous. But you can't disprove the net negative affect by looking at some subset.
I think you are saying it can be used such that it has a positive effect. I agree with that but I think it's missing the point.
I've been pondering recently how much time parents are spending on phones, that, 20 years ago they might have otherwise spent engaging with their kids.
There’s some “well we have no idea how much is quality time” argument, but just looking across my own families over time the reality is more like modern parents being way more present than their parents.
The issue lies elsewhere. It’s almost a zeitgeist, the direction and evolution of ideas, and less any actual cause. At least that’s how it seems to me.
Is that true? In more "traditional" times, the husband went out to work while the wife stayed home and managed the household and raised the children.
Today more and more families need dual incomes in order to make ends meet.
Either way, I don't think "the 1900s" is a good comparison. Perhaps 1970-2000 or so is reasonable.
Anyway, to counter your anecdote with another: when I was growing up, my mom was a stay-at-home mom, and she spent a ton of time (very much of it quality) with me. I saw my dad less, of course, but he was reasonably present when he wasn't at work, and I have lots of fond memories of quality time with him.
Nearly all of my friends today who have kids are dual-income. They send their kids to daycare as soon as they're old enough, and then pre-school. The kids do get a lot of socialization with other kids (maybe more than I did in my first few years), but I'm certain they get less time (and probably less quality time) with their parents than I did.
Maybe kids would be better off if we stopped regulating every facet of their lives under the pretence of safety and make them feel if they make one mistake they will ruin their life because now they can't get into a good college or something.
I think this has been pretty conclusively proven.
Sound reasoning lol some really hysterical folk on here.
if you actually believed it were that dangerous you wouldn't be literally on social media posting about this would you?
Some people are scared of paedos talking to the kids, other people are scared the kids will watch bad videos, or read bad things. They are two distinct issues lumped in under the "social media" banner, and it can be hard to guess which issue a hysterical parent is referring too.
Hn is social media and even has a doomacrollint algorithm but because it's not classically considered to be akin to twitter, tiktok or Facebook it gets away with it
They're saying, that social media use before suicide is like drinking water
Two of those three are probably better outcomes.
For example in the country I live in psychiatric help has been systematically de-funded during that period as well as support for sports, education and more.
The research is quite confusing. This is because the strongest version of the argument is not "your child uses social media, and that makes them depressed". The strongest version is more like "when a society mass adopts social media, this irrevocably alters the culture in ways that causes massive changes in mental health, most prominently among young girls, including those exposed to the culture who don't even use social media."
This means you get a weird effect where experimental studies of high quality - which are usually the best evidence, are expected by the strong argument to show zero effect.
Correlational studies usually show either a weak effect (stronger in young girls) or no effect (it's extremely rare to see a study showing a positive correlational effect, though).
And where you get the most juice is looking at population level introduction of social media studies like those discussed here: https://www.afterbabel.com/p/phone-based-childhood-cause-epi...
But even then it's very tricky, as those studies can't exactly be replicated, and we don't know whether changes will actually reverse the cultural artifacts
Network level effects are still falsifiable, it's just often really challenging to falsify them at scale.
which also did happen through the nineties and 2000s before social media, but how would you measure the effects of each on their own?
One clever example discussed in the blog I linked:
> We also found five studies that used a similar design applied to the rollout of high-speed internet. It’s hard to have a phone-based childhood when data speeds are very low. So what happened in Spain as fiber optic cables were laid and high-speed internet came to different regions at different times?
https://www.afterbabel.com/p/social-media-mental-illness-epi...
This procrastination is why my children have 30mins + 1h bonus, if they do their chores, of the phone limit every day. This is done via family link. There is an exemption to music on Spotify, however recently I noticed they are watching (not listening) to podcasts on Spotify too.
But still this is managed by me on our local ecosystem. It's not government thing. That's super creepy when government says (read in your mind or aloud with a sleazy guy's whisper)
"hey, your kids are unsafe, better allow me read all their and yours communication. Ah and please give me your id so I can protect your children more".... Is this trolling? Banning social media won't stop them accessing "horrible things", you'd need to disconnect the internet entirely from them, have you done that?
Why do you think social media is bad but somehow regular websites aren't horrible?
But this is the level 2 argument to enforce identity verification everywhere. You are reaching ahead.
I'd be very curious what kind of "research" NPR is talking about, and who funded it, because it flies in the face of what all of us at these companies have seen.
Maybe it's not climate chance, pseudo intellectualism, late stage capitalism, etc. Nah, it's the kids in their group chat or scrolling through tiktok, that's it, that's the reason.
Age checks are part if that. They will just feed the sureveillance capitalism machine and make the problem even worse.
Age checked social media is just like the parlor walls in Fahrenheit 451 and infuencers are Mildred Montag. Just another thing to keep people distracted and neutered.
I remember I used to hang out on IRC during my teens with all kinds of people: jewish lesbians from conservative families and other teens from Scandinavia who got drafted on somewhat right wing warez groups, middle aged goth rockers on music sharing channels. Quite an experience for someone who grew up in a post communist country to interact with so colorful and genuinely interesting people. In contrast to that social media is an entirely fake experience generated with bots, algorithms and AI, just like a techno feudal version of the communist propaganda riddled lalaland that I grew up in. Many a DPRK on steroids, except it herds people into getting enraged and engaged with brands in order to hopelessly buy useless junk instead of submitting to a dear supreme leader. Of course it gets people addicted, because it was designed with that in mind.
Now all that peer pressure is distilled online in short, monologue based, video format, unilateral edited transmissions setting beauty, purity, and behavior standards based on claims, and everyone has a permanent digital record, and mass shame campaigns targeted at random individuals are routine.
In school they still perform ok for what is required there today, but from what happens when you say "oh, wifi doesn't work today in our place" I would argue they behave like addicts... It might be a fun addiction insofar as mental problems are usually not the cause but possibly the result if this runs for years on end.
My pet theory is that these kids will graduate to online-gambling around 12-14 because that's exactly the kind of gameplay they prefer on roblox currently. Even when I was 16 there was a noticable share of classmates gambling online - and this was pre-facebook.
Probably the best way forward would be to make KYC mandatory for large, data-selling public fora like we do with banks. Noone complains there and noone is forced to use platforms.
If you don't want to do KYC (such as on hn or a model train forum) you are liable for any criminal activity you enable (such as pedophiles using your private messages or whatever...).
The NPR bit sounds like what I'd imagine I could expect from people who are very good at pushing junk food -they've got good science behind flavoring and light addiction (like you don't get withdrawals from not eating doritoes) and the same with social media. they have very good science behind getting people to spend more and more time viewing their content not matter what. So I take that bit on NPR with a grain of salt. In my experience, NPR often presents studies based on small samples for whatever reason. Maybe to go against the grain, maybe to get people to think, who knows...
But social media is already non-anonymous (twitter used to be anonymous but those days are long gone) so I don't have any problems with age checks there -- that's very different than requiring age verification to access the internet or the WWW generally.
However, there are publicists like Jonathan Haidt who have observed the link between kids mental health and use of social media. (among other things) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anxious_Generation