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."
But your daughter missed it because "you didn't let her have an Instagram account!" It seems to me that such worries are well-founded. At best, she made the decision herself and still feels the pain of it.
It's easy to be dismissive of these ideas, but there is an extensive and rigorous literature on network topology and dynamics. A good introduction with a strong quantitative/mathematical orientation is Social and Economic Networks by Matthew Jackson. Arguing on the basis of your own developmental experience in which significantly different conditions obtained (eg the non-existence/availability of social media or the internet) is equivalent to just wishing the problem away.
It's easy to be dismissive of these ideas, but there is an
extensive and rigorous literature on network topology and
dynamics.
Arguing on the basis of your own developmental experience
in which significantly different conditions obtained (eg
the non-existence/availability of social media or the
internet) is equivalent to just wishing the problem away.
When the research is becoming clear that these dynamics and these years of a teen life cause so much harm, we can't be so fatalistic to say that giving in is mandatory.
Now combine the natural fact of cliques and fissures in small groups with the amplification/reinforcement effects that social media provides, and you can see the potential for acceleration/intensification of social stresses during formative years - like Mean Girls but potentially spread across the entire internet, or at least similar cohorts.
Of course I take teens' perspectives seriously. There really is no reason for you to personalize things in that way. You have talked about being accepting, yet you have consistently 100% dismissed the lived experiences of parents who disagree with your opinions.
(prompt:) what does it mean to parent?
To parent means to raise and nurture a child from infancy to adulthood,
providing them with love, care, guidance, and support as they grow and
develop. Parenting involves a wide range of responsibilities and
activities, including providing for a child's physical needs, such as
food, shelter, and medical care, as well as their emotional and
psychological needs, such as love, affection, and encouragement.
Effective parenting also involves setting boundaries and rules, providing
discipline when necessary, and teaching children important life skills,
such as communication, problem-solving, and decision-making. As children
grow and mature, parents often adjust their parenting style to meet their
children's changing needs and help them develop into independent and
responsible adults.no, there isn't
In many ways hanging out with kids who are banned from social media is hanging out with kids from a pretty exclusive club. This is why unless you homeschool it is REALLY worth it to put your kids into school where parents are from a similar group as you are.
I know this is anecdotal, but my experience doesn't show that pans out. I am on the older edge of the millennial cohort age-wise and had a very strict parent growing up who would not allow me access to TV, most movies, and contemporary music. Which meant I never listened to what my classmates did, wasn't familiar with their pop culture references, couldn't go with them to movies, sometimes had to sit out movies shown in class (!) and none of my classmates, all of whom picked up on it and most of whom bullied me for it, cared that it was my parents forcing the situation upon me.
Strangely, I was given unmonitered and unrestricted access to the pre-social media internet and used it to associate online mostly with adults and found it very rewarding re: my education & hobbies. Until smartphones became popular it made me a firm believer in this idea that "the internet is infinite knowledge" and "once everyone gets it we'll be infinitely smarter!" The idea of "crap, X broke let's research online how to fix it" has saved me a lifetime of hiring people for car or home repairs.
Anyway I am starting to go off topic but I am very skeptical of this idea that "my lame parent won't let me" means much when bullies latch on to "hey, little Jane/Johnny over there doesn't know what X is!"
The kids here communicate via imessage and rarely during class.
If social media is as important to these kids as it sounds then follower count or posting style may be as important as athleticism and charisma.
At one time, everyone thought smoking was important as well, to fit in. Now we know better.
There's also a spectrum of FOMO, from accidental to intentional. Some people feed off of excluding others.
Most importantly that they can identify when they need to ask for help and will ask for it. We need to normalize asking for help.
Right now kids can learn these skills in therapy but that is not the only place those skills should be taught or reinforced. Schools for example are a good place for that.
Remember that cliques in school were reinforced by the telephone and just like the game of telephone a lot gets lost in communication. Social media is an extension of that.
They literally realized 300 years ago that they should opt out of the nonsense America descended into
For anyone else who was confused by this: https://www.dictionary.com/e/slang/slap/
This makes me want to make a generational/chronological slang chart now
Guess I'd fall under the generation that would have said "rock" instead (although the Amish most definitely do not rock).
Patriarchy in all decisions. The old men make choices for families based on what they know is best, and you follow that rule, regardless of your own views. Women are not allowed a voice in formal decisions. Children are a tradable commodity. If you upset an elder, your life is over.
You're raised speaking German first, so that you can "learn your heritage" (read: always feel the divide between yourself and the rest of the country). You get up to an 8th grade education and nothing more. Only if it doesn't interfere with your chores. If you are sent off to college for whatever reason (my neighbor was a college educated Amish; he was the legal representative for the community) they treat you like an outsider. You are not allowed a voice in community votes, if they have them. You get the scraps. If you start a business, and someone else wants to start the same thing, you give it over to them, no questions asked.
God forbid you disagree with the elders. Imagine being in your 30's, with just an 8th grade education, and your entire community, family, and support system turns their back on you and yours. You're screwed.
If the bishop believes another community could use your skills, or doesn't like your family, you have to move, possibly hundreds of miles. That's after selling everything you own, usually at a loss. But that doesn't matter, because the community itself and the church actually own everything, you are just renting your own business and/or home from the church.
Absolute rule by the male elders. Lies and buried secrets. That's the way of the Amish. But they get a pass, because their beards and hats look funny.
So we don't want to emulate them in every way, but we can take some lessons in certain areas.
If you truly want resilient kids, that lifestyle will do it. Safety is another thing though. I saw a 1 year old just fall 3 feet off a playset and it only cried a little. The parents weren't very concerned. I guess when you have 6 kids, it's like you have "spares". Not that it's the right way to look at it, but ignoring balance of other concerns they will be tough.
As a parent of 4, having multiple children does tend to put things in perspective, but really what makes the biggest difference is probably that you can't physically helicopter all of them. So you have to give up that mindset. Not that you don't still need to keep an eye on them.
Living tight as a community is probably what they are doing right, I "just" would use a different approach to power.
This at least would be a massive improvement for most people in the US who only read at a 6th grade level and have a comparable level of skill in math and science.
https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/08/02/us-literacy-rate/
https://people.com/parents/most-parents-math-and-science-kno...
I.e. the average highschool graduate probably reads at 6th grade level but the average middle school graduate probably only reads at 5th or 4th grade level is a reasonable assumption.
There's also an assumption that the Amish are more rigorousness in their teaching and that they would make sure kids learn to read at the level expected from them which may or may not actually be true.
Although a few minutes with Google didn't give me a lot of firm numbers, it did return results which suggest that the Amish may be more concerned with making sure their students are literate and that they care very much about ensuring their children are well educated as a matter of cultural identity. I didn't see anything to support the idea that they would perform worse than non-amish children at least. It also mentions that they're nearly all fluent in two languages which is a bonus.
> Yet illiteracy is virtually nonexistent in Amish settlements. Without television and computers, they read more than most Americans. They have a remarkable ability to learn new skills—even complicated ones—and value lifelong learning. Amish parents are heavily involved in their children’s education: they donate the land and building supplies for the school, visit regularly, attend school events, and take turns caring for the facilities.
> In the book Amish Society, John Hostetler wrote, “On several standardized tests, Amish children performed significantly higher in spelling, word usage, and arithmetic than a sample of pupils in rural public schools. They scored slightly above the national norm in these subjects in spite of small libraries, limited equipment, the absence of radio and television, and teachers who lacked college training.” (https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/columns-and-blo...)
> That is one thing that sets our culture apart from the Amish. The Amish grow up writing. And yes, I grew up writing too but in the Amish culture reading is one of the biggest things in their culture. And even as adults such as Eli and Anna in the article; they participate in circle letters with people that have the same background, interests, or anything else that the have in common.(https://edblogs.olemiss.edu/jmswartz/2020/09/04/literacy-and...)
I was watching this show on African-American troops during WWI and The Powers That Be were really[0] concerned that the ones from the cities were consistently performing better on the standardized tests than the rural white folks.
Think the rural schools aren’t the best at educating the youths.
[0] They were also concerned about the French treating them like real people too so, yeah…
It's an out of sight, out of mind patriarchy. The amish are so offensive partially because they genuinely are extreme, but also in part because they're self-sustaining so they can't hide and abstract away such cruelty. In any case, there's perhaps a middle path between the extremes of amish society and "Patriarchy for the poor" western society.
I'd advise that you try to find a new term to replace "western" here.
There have been plenty of experiments within a "western" context to do things differently, but few of them have spread broadly. In addition, there are plenty of long-lived patriarchies outside whatever you might consider "the west" to be.
Is this not a thing where you are? Americans(and I am one) speak much about patriarchy but still uphold it strongly. Even countries like Indonesia and Pakistan have already elected female leaders. I see people say things like this, and yet many American women would still call it a patriarchy in every sense.
>Children are a tradable commodity.
? That's kind of a huge accusation and I'm not sure what it means. That could also be describing surrogacy which is widely accepted in our society.
>If you upset an elder, your life is over.
This is true in a lot of places-- including the US senate-- and is often the result of power concentrating in the hands of those with the most tenure. While they may lean on this more in their culture, it's still not exactly unrecognizable behavior.
>You're raised speaking German first, so that you can "learn your heritage"
There are immigrants(and most European countries) that do that. It's hard to teach a second language once a child is speaking English with their peers. If you teach the non-english language first, it's easy for them to learn English as a second language in school where they'll pick it up naturally speaking with peers.
> If you are sent off to college for whatever reason (my neighbor was a college educated Amish; he was the legal representative for the community) they treat you like an outsider.
Sounds difficult. I won't deny there I'm sure there are peculiarities about their culture worth disagreeing with.
>Imagine being in your 30's, with just an 8th grade education, and your entire community, family, and support system turns their back on you and yours.
Doesn't this happen to trans youth all the time? Minus the education thing.
>But they get a pass, because their beards and hats look funny.
That's not why they're not discussed more often. It's because they mostly stick to themselves so people don't bother looking into their communities. This can happen with highly insular communities, it's not an excuse but it is what it is.
STRONG agree on the beards.
You can't swap in a lack of evidence as "evidence of zero."
We have no reliable information on how many Amish girls want to kill themselves, so there's no way to compare the two groups in that specific aspect.
In any case, the Amish are not a serious social comparison, they are a curiosity, and nothing we can say or speculate about their failings will make ours any less. Does China have this problem? Did the US have it 20 years ago? [SPOILER: no] Is turning our children over to exploitative corporations and addictive algorithms likely to result in good outcomes? Do we have any data about this?
This isn't a fair take IMO. The Amish are not the only groups of Pennsylvania Dutch that are native German speakers, and many of these groups are not counter culture isolationists like the Amish are. The Moravians for example were banned from the colony of New York because they went there to represent the Mohicans when the New York colony tried to illegally rob them of the lands they'd been promised in treaties. Like many of the non-anabaptist (that's Amish & Mennonite sects) groups of Pennsylvania Dutch they were fully on board with participating in broader US culture as long as they could do so while speaking German and engaged in all the same businesses, government/legal/military roles that the rest of society did.
People just think of the Amish by default in these conversations because in part they're more visible, and in part because the non-isolationist groups scaled back the German speaking in the wake of the two world wars.
> Patriarchy in all decisions
In the non-anabaptist communities this is not like that anymore than it is for broader culture. Traditional medicine practitioners in the Pennsylvania Dutch- for example the pow-wowers, were socially expected to only train an apprentice/protégé who is of the opposite sex, and further socially expected to provide their services for free. To stray from either of those was (and still is) a major taboo.
From "Child Sexual Abuse in the Amish Community: A Hidden Epidemic":
> “I’ve learned that sexual abuse in their communities is an open secret, spanning generations,” she wrote in the 2019 article. “Victims told me stories of inappropriate touching, groping, fondling, exposure to genitals, digital penetration, coerced oral sex, anal sex and rape—all at the hands of their own family members, neighbors and church leaders.”
[1] https://www.aetv.com/real-crime/child-sexual-abuse-amish
opting out of "the nonsense" is fun to think about, but not when competing countries have robotic factories.
Inconceivable. If a new technology comes out, we need to adopt it in 0.1 seconds, or we'll be Stone Age caveman losers!
On top of that, far from acquiring the values their parents hoped they'd get, they ended up with the reverse. Their attitudes are largely polar reversed from their parents, and they're incredibly resentful of having had those values pushed on them for the entirety of their childhood.
Homeschooling to private middle school was rough, mainly in my social circle going from a polite mixed-age group to a crass morass of the local rich kids. 18 months of that did more for my toilet humor repertoire than four years in the military.
Private to rural public school was a bit more relaxed. Less fistfights and emotional distress, but the academics were truly lacking - the district didn't have any more course material beyond Algebra 2 so I spent 8th grade math as a study hall. Chill, but ultimately wasted time.
Switched to a public charter for high school, and did a combination of home study and local community college courses. By that point I knew what I was "missing" from regular institutional education and was fine with the trade-off.
Admittedly, I was somewhat socially awkward until I met my wife, but it’s not clear that the social pressures of public school would have improved this. My interest in computers made me an outlier everywhere I went.
Homeschooling doesn’t have to mean social isolation. My own grade school children are confident speaking to senior citizens, adults, teens and other children alike, because they regularly socialize across their age groups. Being surrounded by people roughly your own age in school is an artificial construct that mostly doesn’t repeat thereafter.
But yeah, the interest dies away a bit by 13 and we're not fully sure it worked. But we can see that her peers that didn't have earlier hobbies/skills had even lower self esteem. Shrug
Our kids have a mix of private schooling, tutoring, and homeschooling. They spend a lot of time outdoors and have very limited access to screens and no social media. We chose this path because the typical classroom has 25-30 barbarians and 1 civilized person, if you're lucky.
Most social media appears completely overrun by highly tribal barbarians.
If you ingrain this kind of superiority complex into your kid then they will have major problems when they enter the real world where they have to cooperate in a world of “barbarians”.
It's a growing trend.
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?
I've shared that advice with younger people, but not my own kids yet. I don't know if it helped, or if you can really teach that.
> 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.
---
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.
Yes, it's easy to get unrealistic expectations from social media. But that's not the point of the article, for anyone tempted to click and read.
Setting aside the expectations of "you are special and can be anything you want to be" from parents there is also the "the world around you is crafted to a degree that previous generations didn't deal with."
Recognizing that part of it is also important. If you compare yourself to influencers and expect to be able to live a life like them, you will likely be unhappy. Correspondingly, if you compare yourself to the crafted image of your peers all the time, you may feel that you're not doing as well as they are.
That part isn't a millennial issue but rather a "everyone who uses social media to compare or boast about their current social situations."
I thought the Wait but Why article made a point of calling that out. It didn't come across as blaming Lucy for her delusions, saying "she has _been told_ all her life that 'she's special'".
"Been told" seems to put the blame for that squarely on those doing the telling.
While this may be true for some people, it's not all roses in tech. I know this may not be your intended thesis, but I think it's worth pointing out some things that many people in high paying careers find out (not just tech, lawyers, business pros, ect.)... just to add to your point:
1. You're not going to have ANY time to relax, if you're trying to really get ahead, and take care of chores, let alone hobbies (which can even feel like chores if you like relax time)
2. Even if you don't care about advancing your career, or making money, there's a good chance you will feel like there's no other option... it's up or out
3. You may not find a partner, or at least a good supportive one, which makes some of these things easier (helping around the house, providing an anchor for an uncertain career)
4. Even if you find a good partner, things can change. It can make things even worse, due to heartbreak, or the pressures of living with someone you don't get along with; or you can lose your kids and/or be stuck with a big bill for your hardship.
5. There's a good chance you will grow apart from your friends. There's a lot of reasons for this, work, family, etc. It can be hard to find time in the best of cases
6. There's a pretty good chance you spend all of your money, or else you won't have the lifestyle you're expecting.
7. Health problems. They can start pretty early in adulthood, make it hard to feel comfortable, and end relationships / careers.
Just to add to your point: Even with "the career" things can wind up being pretty bleak. I have a lot going for me, but I don't live that crazy a lifestyle, own a house, etc. I suffer from some of these problems in varying degrees.
While some of the above is unavoidable, and has always been (eg. health). Other things seem fairly new. Like people with high paying jobs not owning houses, or having to choose between that, travel, etc.
Social networks are at an all time low point. Not for everyone, but it's been a growing trend.
I don't think that owning a house, occasionally traveling, with a supportive partner, while spending time with your friends, and having a few hobbies is "unreasonably high" for someone in a high paying career.
I'm not saying these things are unattainable, and it is asking quite a lot. However even if you play your cards well in life, you can easily end up falling very, very short.
I'm skeptical about this. I suspect that it's more likely that such people are presenting an image of their lives that is much better than the reality.
In my experience, people who are living great lives rarely feel the need to tell everyone how great their lives are. Even when they're teenagers.
>the people who chime in the most about their careers are those whose careers (and relationships) are going the best
As it should be. Only a very small minority of people have careers or relationships worth emulating, and they should be setting examples for everyone else to aspire to.
Lucy is upset because she knows that she can do better. She sees people who are no smarter and no better than her getting much more out of life, and she is rightfully disgusted with her mediocrity.
Personal anecdote- at one time I made 30k a year, and I actually thought that was good. I thought it was good because I made more than my friends.
Then I started hanging out on Blind and /r/cscareerquestions. I got a CS degree and a job paying $70k a year, but felt like a failure because everyone on Blind seems to make more. As soon as I could I hopped to a higher paying role, but still felt poor.
But I'm not complaining now. Peer pressure from social media pushed me to build a great career, even if it made me feel miserable and inadequate for a time.
Is it better to be happy and complacent? I don't think so.
> Only a very small minority of people have careers or relationships worth emulating, and they should be setting examples for everyone else to aspire to.
Of those that have relationships worth emulating I doubt they are parasocially broadcasting it for the world to see. To the contrary, most of these images that you see on social media are heavily curated and manicured and don't really reflect reality.
This is an unconscious reflex, you cannot control how anyone perceives your social worth, including yourself.
The problem is that it tends to be a vicious circle: once you start behaving in a weak way due to illusions, people will perceive you negatively and it will become harder to bounce back for real.
Knowing what teens are like I’d say that experiment would last a week. Social media is addictive probably even more so for teens and fomo is real
edit: but I have literally no clue what I am going to do, I have like another 5 years or so.
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.
Middleschoolers are suddenly blasted with hormones, and are basically accelerating at breakneck speed. Everyone's body is changing wildly, you're thinking and feeling new things every day, and it's all a total mindfuck.
By highschool, the hypernovelty has worn off. Yes, they're still developing and figuring things out, but it's not quite as much of the surreal existential body-horror that middleschool is.
This is why I think that taking steps to keep kids off social media is delaying the inevitable. Just as there’s no safe age to start smoking, there’s no truly safe age to start using social media as it currently exists. So either we accept the negative aspects of these platforms’ existence, or we remediate them.
Exactly. Just because you have a bunch of kids smoking doesn't mean the anti smoking advice and practices don't work on most of them.
Seriously false dichotomy. You understand that you can access FB/IG from a computer, right? You don't need a smartphone to do that. Could be a desktop, with shared accounts for multiple userd. And if you do have a smartphone, you can turn it off at night, or put it on the table.
And you can use social media without taking and posting selfies. Or at least, doing so excessively.
> Look at all the Baby Boomers and older Gen X’ers that got on the Internet in the past ten years and instantly had their brains rotted despite decades of life experience. Should there be some kind of emotional intelligence ...
But that's only the highly visibly subset of them who don't resist social-validation, confirmation bias, mindlessly forwarding viral crap, slurs and gossip. The other X% that behave reasonably and refrain from 24/7 ideological foodfights, we don't notice. Certainly, the big social media with quantified vote-counts, followers, shares, and in the absence of fact-checking, are incentivizing the death of civil discourse based on, uhh, facts.
It's pretty obvious one of the main necessary habits is skepticism: inquiring for the precise source and attribution of claims, checking facts, scrutinizing your own susceptibility to want to believe a specific claim (or source) without objective proof. And by extension, picking the group of people you associate with online to be like that.
Haidt also documents how socialization and playing among children [in the US] has stopped being face-to-face and moved online within that decade. This is something that can be reversed at ages 8, 12, 14 etc. Coordinated action by schools, classes and parent groups would be great.
> there’s no truly safe age to start using social media as it currently exists.
*Only as it currently exists post-2016, not as it used to be pre-2012*, which is the exact point Haidt repeatedly hammers home. People didn't complain about MySpace, Friendster, et al: why? The culprits Haidt mentions in passing: making counts of likes, upvotes, followers visible (let alone prominently showing them like as if they're the defining thing), and the (artificial) pressure to constantly post (selfie image) content that juices them, and to compare to other people's. Also, (for adults) retweeting other people arguing. We (= US Congress) can easily mandate switching FB/IG back to a 2012 interface. (Of course, they'd lose lots of advertisers and users, boo-hoo. Push the financial incentive to them to suggest solutions.)
Consider also how widely US COPPA law [0] is flouted in allowing under-18s or under-13s to register a profile and self-certify a fake age over 13 or 18: imagine if that had to proven in person with ID, just like buying alcohol or tobacco, or driving, or buying a gun. But can anyone remember a criminal prosecution of either a parent, or a social network which knew or had reasonable knowledge that one of its users was under-13? Where is basic enforcement? COPPA doesn't appear to have criminal penalties. Why shouldn't COPPA have criminal penalties, on both the parent and the social-media company (gasp)? (in conjunction with mandating changes to remove the pressure for likes, upvotes, followers). Or, less drastically, social-media can monitor its individual users' use patterns and suggest them when that becomes unhealthy or excessive ("You've been looking at influencers for the last 4 hours. Time to disconnect and do something else?").
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_Online_Privacy_Pr...
It's frustrating, because every time this comes up we have these long, expansive threads about what social media is or isn't 100% responsible for (as if the standard is 100%), or if we can't exactly identify the precise mechanism by which this or that algorithm is predatory, we just throw our hands up and say "well shucks, it's a tough question!" It's really not. Social Media in this current form is a net detriment to human civilization. I'm open to a steel-manned argument that earlier iterations - without the algos, without the doom scrolling, without the tracking - are okay, or even a good thing.
Really? I have never felt that way about social media (esp. Fb), it's only the studies demonstrating the harmful effects that have convinced me that, at least in their current incarnations, at a population level the cons of social media outweigh the pros. That there's still no good alternative to FB for taking advantage of its "pros" is my biggest concern.
I still need to be convinced that there actually exist some "pros".
You can leave children to discover it on their own or you can talk them through what it is, what it can do, etc.
I had a close friend who came to drinking later than peers, but then hit it hard. He became absolutely unbearable with almost any amount of alcohol. Might've been a personality thing or predisposition to it, but felt like the circumstance of him starting drinking harshly like he was making up for lost time was a catalyst.
Alcohol is considered a vice and we not only have laws which prohibit children from its consumption, at least in the US, it's culturally accepted that it's generally not appropriate for children to be drinking. In the US, I do think that straight prohibition-style banning of all alcohol from children is also not a good idea largely due to the example you've given where once children become adults and have free access to alcohol, their lack of experience with the substance can cause issues.
I'm personally planning on letting my children consume small amounts of alcohol while they are under our supervision to give them experience. That way, once they do have free access, the novelty is not so great and hopefully they'll be able to behave more responsibly. Treating social media as a vice doesn't have to mean full ban until they're adults. It just means we need to acknowledge that it is and think about how we want to deal with it.
I really don't envy my parents for having to deal with that version of me, and I did so much stuff I regret.
My self-esteem back then was hair-thin; I use to obsess about EVERYTHING, from what I say, to how I talk, to how I smell, to how I walk, to the music I listen to, etc
Just do all you can to get ahead of the idea that they are in a concrete hierarchy, because make no mistake, they are in a hierarchy. Maybe even talk a bit about guanxi, and how people that freak them out now, will change a lot.
The smokers in my class (thankfully I never smoked), use to use even more Axe to cover the smell of cigarettes after they smoke, but the funny thing is that we could still smell the cigarettes on them, but now it's mixed in with headache inducing levels of body spray
Public or private?
I've got a lot of insight into local school districts in my area and a little into local private schools (good ones—not poor-quality evangelical schools for parents who don't want their kids taught about evolution, or something like that) and the public schools have all completely given up on policing phones and wouldn't dare suggest that parents ought not be giving their 3rd graders smartphones, while the private schools both police them more heavily and seem to serve way fewer families inclined to give preteens a smartphone to begin with.
Feels like the beginning of an even-greater class divide in education, to me.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/04/us/california-math-curric...
Not sure about other public schools in our area, but I suspect this type of enforcement is only possible if the majority of families are on board.
My kid doesn't have a phone. But we get inundated with these emails and new plans on what to do and so on.
I wish they'd just confiscate them and only return them to the parents, or have some sort of phone not allowed without good reason (and revoke it if someone breaks the rules), but they seem averse to that kind of thing. The new rule is that they have to be powered off during school hours. I'm sure that will be complied well by the same students who already don't care.
A lot of parents will throw a fit if schools try to take them away or ban them, and, contrary to public perception in some circles, public schools really hate upsetting parents. It's part of why private schools tend to have a lot more success enforcing phone-related rules or restrictions, since they can just tell a family to pound sand if they don't like it (they all have waiting lists anyway, if you're not some huge donor they don't need to give a shit what you think if it's not in-line with their approach and mission)
The pressure to use social media and etc will come from those around them. Being the one student not on social media would have it's own pressures I imagine.
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.
...and this is by the companies themselves, if they are found out to be "marketing to children", they get hit with a whole another set of legal issues. Epic just got hit with this because of Fortnite and has to pay over $200M fines.
The only issue is that there is zero oversight on the age limit, there is no way to report underage users on social media sites - and even if there is, nothing happens until someone goes through the courts.
You can only report YOUR OWN CHILD: https://faq.whatsapp.com/695318248185629
Other Meta properties are better at this though.
Given that the instructions are to prove ownership over the phone number as well as trying to at least somewhat link that to an underage child how exactly could this reasonably be accomplished by someone other than the parent? If you know enough to be confident that a given account is linked to a minor then there's basically zero chance that you won't also know of a way to contact their parents about it. Given the e2e nature of WhatsApp any other implementation would be akin to the "But think about the children!!!" reactionary calls to ban e2e encryption.
Then you're just added to a group with complete randos who can immediately see your phone number and they can start posting whatever.
I've had cases where my kid has been added to a group along with older kids and their posts have not been exactly SFW. I've got zero recourse in those cases, I don't know who any in the group are. I taught my kid to remove themselves from any suspicious groups immediately and that has curbed it for now.
I expect that at some point law firms will invest enough to do a class action suit to show these tech firms knowingly allowed and even marketed to under13 kids.
That and it seems like as fraud as advertisers are paying to show ads to 13+ and they are being shown to kids.
This seems like a large amount of tort given tens of millions of kids.
Or maybe once more damages studies come out, state attorneys general will sue like they did for tobacco and opioids.
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.
I don't think you could enforce this anyway, but it's also a terrible idea. I can't imagine what my life would have been like if my local library or bookseller felt like you do about the internet and I was trapped reading fiction way below by level.
The solution to the problem isn't censorship and holding inquisitive children back, it's parenting and guiding children safely while they explore their interests and the world they live in.
Social media, and the internet as we know it, have only been a part of children’s lives for about 15 years, less than a single generation. The idea that it is now an indispensable part of their development, and that depriving them of it is going to harm them us utterly ridiculous. As if every generation before now consists of drooling ape-men that could have been what this current generation of apparent Uber-children will become if only they too had access to TikTok and YouTube.
I have no doubt that the children growing up with access to the internet (including youtube and twitter) had greater opportunity to be better educated, more exposed to art and culture, and to be better prepared for their life as an adult in the world than the children who grew up without the internet. Those things were made much easier by having access to the internet. I say that as someone who grew up without internet access for many years. I know not having access to the internet we have today as a young child placed limitations on what I could have reasonably attained. That doesn't mean we should set every child lose on the internet without any thought to what they're seeing.
Also, the internet is very much like books, but I'd remind you that libraries and even bookstores offer many other forms of media as well.
The thing that these devices take away from us is time to think, or 'boredom'; we're meant to walk everywhere. The only solution is to restore that, what better environment to do so than a forest?
Nobody likes this but the consequences of not taking action are huge.
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).
Play for the sake of playing toxic social media social games?
It seems like everyone wins in that scenario, it's healthy but playful and low stress while accommodating parents' need for scheduling.
Is such a thing common? I don't hear about it much.
Middle school sports and junior varsity high school sports coupled with math tutoring is probably enough to keep them busy enough and out of trouble/off social media.
I guess you're talking about a little bit more organisation - today, muck around with racquets and shuttlecocks, tomorrow muck around with calligraphy brushes and ink.
I always remember once in unstructured art time (1980s, substitute teacher...) around the age of 11-12, we were all nailing together strips of masonite, making cross-shaped projectiles about 500mm across, and then flinging them around the oval. They would've been absolutely deadly if that wasn't shut down!
For the rest of us - particularly for dual income parents with teenagers who no longer really "play" - there are organized after school activities.
Its really about odds. You won't get outlier results like Bill Gates or <insert other famous person> but on the flip side you won't get a teenager you have to bail out of jail or a teenager pranking people for Tiktok views. You'll get a decent young adult that can earn a decent living and live independently and confidently.
Often we want to protect our family through rigid rules, but all that does is make them want to pull away more.
But I 100% agree you do have to explain and you do have to eat your own dog food and try not to be too much of a hypocrite. They need to see you believe it yourself. And try not to lie with tall tales. I think every time a non life threatening absolute statement is proven false by experience they will lose trust.
I read or heard once that if you always told your child to put a coat on before they have actually experienced the cold they naturally don’t understand why they need it and will resist wearing one. But if you let them experience the cold and involve them in the thought process they will want to put a coat on. “Let’s see how it feels outside? Oooo it’s cold! What should we do?” Etc etc. I’ve tried to do that with most things (within reason and when applicable) and I think it gives them more confidence and understanding. Like the whole tell/show/include thing. The more experiences like this where you proved to be right the more they trust you even when the disagree.
Speaking of different, I do remember friends as a kid that went through a phase where they believed "no, they won't hit me or else". The "or else" was the driver getting in trouble, being sued, going to prison, something.
I never thought any of that would fix me, and continued to look.
A little rebellion is inevitable, just matters what it is. By acknowledging this inevitability, you have a much better chance of giving your family the tools to make smarter choices. Exactly like you said, demonstration is a fantastic tool to utilize.
It's the difference between rebelling against your friends peer pressure obsession with posting so much on social media because you knew how it made them miserable, as opposed to rebelling against your parents for banning social media when it looks like your friends are having so much fun without you.
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.
Of course a decision to use restriction would ideally be one made together with the child so that they can truly consent.
Yes, that's the core of it. Working together on facing the issue while supporting increasing the agency of the child.
Anything forced onto them is just an external force to deal with. A decision made together, with own interest and long-term vision in consideration, with rules derived from these goals, are a very different thing.
One trains the child to submit + secretly subvert, the other nurtures trust and trains collaboration, openness, iteration etc.
This is bullshit. They are not consenting. They are succumbing to coercion due to power dynamics at best or are straight up being overridden by what you want.
Parenting is not negotiating with an adult, especially if they are preteen/early teenage years. They are humans with terrible executive functions that would be wards of the state without you.
You can certainly explain why you’re making a decision, but it’s really just your decision.
You get a lot further by engaging and explaining things with a child, and proceeding with their agreement.
"Because I said so" is not a good approach, which I think the op meant
This one, yeah?
Tangentially, I’m curious if smoking went through a phase similar to this, where all the parents were doing it but there was still some recognition that children/teens shouldn’t and some parenting struggles against the ubiquity of cigarettes.
If so, what were the factors of success or failure? Did any progress in protecting kids from smoking have to wait until underage smoking was illegal or even the public push against adults smoking?
It really does feel to me like the smart phone and social media are the cigarettes of the millennial generation.
Factors for that being successful was mostly just repeating the information about how bad it was a lot in the beginning. Once everybody agrees about that, then you slowly start making it socially unacceptable.
I could see a similar thing happening with social media of awareness of the seriousness of the damage becomes as widespread as for smoking. As in I think it's possible that one day it will be totally socially unacceptable to be glued to your phone at a social event of some sort.
I think the door can swing both ways. While consumers can take tobacco as a playbook, there was recent reporting about the stickiness of iOS with Gen Z. I can imagine there a number of people want to (indirectly) keep it that way.
Platforms will come out with some feature that mitigates the social outrage, creates FUD around the true scale of the problem, and kicks the can down the road a little further while millions more get addicted for a little while longer.
If there's something to this analogy, I feel like it'd be worth being more commonly known.
For me, as a Millennial/Xennial, I sure as hell criticised the elders close to me for their smoking and their taking up the habit in their youth. For parents now who have similar stories, it might be a helpful perspective to have on how these things tend to happen and what's required to actually address any problems.
It might also lead to some uncomfortable reflections on the world us Millennials are passing on.
Maybe the best first step for parents would be to quit social media / smartphones themselves and get more active in creating alternative ways of being (however easier said than done that is)?
Interestingly, I'm also struck at how unclear it might be as to which is the worst of these two "generational original sins".
Despite all the health effects, maybe no one lost the ability to think deeply or critically assess propaganda or fall into a cult or become obsessed with their appearance or spent thousands of dollars to throw perfectly functioning pocket computers in the bin for slightly bigger ones from smoking?
A funny image comes to mind of senile Millennials refusing to give up their social media smartphones despite their carers' best efforts, wildly declaring that they've been scrolling timelines since before the carers were born and have been fine.
Edit: should -> shouldn't
By early teens, peers are the largest influence on a child and they have more than enough opportunities to pressure for or use a phone at school or after school, regardless of the work status of either parent.
Children today are often smarter and more technologically savvy than many adults give them credit for: and some of them will start “business” to sell “internet access” to others.
Just a comment form from dad fighting with similar issues.
Turns out his birthday money from relatives financed it. Even though he was about 11 or 12, he found a youtube video on how to get a credit card, then was able to purchase a system and create an online account to buy games.
I'm curious what the research would say about discord for example. Something centered around a participatory activity or around a group of friends.
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.
Some of my best times with my friends is LAN parties as well as going together at demo parties, traveling, coding together.
Frankly, a ban on videogames is stupid as hell. Even today on discord and over the network, it?s stil entirely unlike social media.
/smh
Moderation with video games is hard for young people. Same for social media. That's why I mentioned it.
And, I wasn't suggesting a ban on video games.
My current strategy has been steering him towards games that require a bit of thinking - like Kerbel Space Program, flight simulators, Kings Quest, etc. He gets to play a little Roblox as well, but only in very small doses. I have to help him a lot with them right now, but once he starts reading I'm hoping he'll choose these types of games on his own. In the warmer months this is easier to manage because he loves playing outside, but it can sometimes be challenging in winter.
> 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.
Smoking also has much more direct second hand effects from releasing smoke into the area of the smoker. Poor diet lack such effects.
I don't mean to distract from the main point, but sugar is not an innocent example, especially when lobbying happened to use sugar in favour of fat.
This is a fallacy. Public health measures benefit some individuals more than others; but everyone benefits. Free treatment catches TB infections, for example, which occur overwhelmingly among homeless people. We're all better off if there are no homeless people wandering around with TB.
I'm glad my neighbours all benefit from the NHS, and that I'm not surrounded by sick people.
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.
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).
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)
-----------------------------------
*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.
> 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)
This is an excellent, solid point.
> 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.
Not convincing unless it can be demonstrated that the expected harm from being isolated from social media is greater than the expected harm caused by being exposed to social media.
> Yet another point was that people will compare themselves to other people on there [...] I don’t usually compare myself to them
This is not well reasoned in my opinion: this is described as a consequence of social media usage. It hasn't been shown to be a preexisting personality trait that, combined with social media usage, causes the mental health issues. That is, you may not compare yourself to others precisely because you do not use social media regularly.
All that said, however, the first point (moderate usage) combined with the last point (excessive usage later in life) is fairly persuasive for a strategy of allowing small doses of social media.
I believe this is akin to "people who drink x% a day have no problems", it's _static_. What it totally ignores is that the addictive substance subtly changes behavior over time and x% of those people go on to become full blown addicts.
Great point, I had not heard that before.
Of course, alcohol guidance levels have been way too high for decades now, most modern orgs suggest less than 2 a week, and even use verbiage that states anything near or above 2/week increases health risks of all types - with zero upside. A dramatic difference from alcohol guidelines of yesteryear proclaiming a glass a day will improve your heart or whatever BS.
So this idea that full blown addicts are created by people who take a glass per week (the actual recommendation, not the alcohol industry funded one) or whatever is absurdity. Why were they using the substance in the first place? This will be a much bigger determining factor to their outcome - much like you can tell who social media is going to drastically affect by whether or not their support system embraces them.
It would be interesting to have her comment on "Why Nerds are Unpopular - Paul Graham" [1]
Keep up the good work.
This is a recipe for frustrating yourself. Social media is very addictive. You're currently unhappy and you're _not_ allowed to use it, imagine how much more unhappy you'll be after having only 20 minutes. You'll only want to use it more and more once you're allowed to use it. You'll be thinking about those 20 minutes and what you'll do all day, you'll get mad when the 20 minutes is up etc.
>Another thing that the article mentioned is that people these days who do not have social media may feel excluded or left out,
That's a much easier problem to treat than social media addiction. The amount of harm you can experience on social media is unbounded, and also not readily anticipated. You don't really know how much it can harm you, and you are asking to allow it to harm you a little bit so that you can then later argue that amount didn't _significantly_ harm you so more access is fine.
>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.
Have you considered other people "didn't do that" too, and that social media changed them? What if it changes you too? Do you _want_ to end up like them? "It won't happen to me" is a really common trope when dealing with addictive things.
>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.
Perhaps, but have you considered that adults shouldn't be using these platforms either? It's not as simple as "when you're old enough, you can now jump off a cliff", maybe... don't jump off the cliff? It's a silly metaphor but still, the default position shouldn't be to use these things.
>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.
There's billions of silly dance videos on tik tok, your life isn't any worse for you not making number 9,999,234,255. Snapchat is for old people (zoomer-boomers) now, so you're also not missing much there anyways.
I'm with dad on this one, social media won't make you any happier and it's scientifically proven to make a lot of people less happy over time. If I could go back to a world where social media never happened I would choose that in a heart beat.
I've noticed in my life when I was a teenager, I had this view of phases of myself. There was my current teenager self and then there was my future adult self. My view was that my adult self would be completely different than my teenaged self. I'd be an "Adult" with a capital A. Nothing can stop me then!
Then I learned that I am still very similar as an adult to my teenaged self. The things my teenage self would get addicted to and obsess over, my adult self also has those qualities.
This rings pretty true for me. I grew up in the 90's and my parents heavily policed how much television I was allowed to watch. I was allowed 5 hours of TV a week. I'd borderline obsess over how I was going to spent those 5 hours each week. I would pour over the TV guide plan out exactly what I'd watch. I ended up angry and resenting my parents as a result.
I had a lot of the same complaints, "All my friends at school are going to be discussing what they watched, I'm going to be left out and excluded etc."
At the time a lot of the same arguments being levied against social media today were being made about television, it's addictive, it's bad for children's development etc.
I was the oldest child my parents had some very strict ideas on how they wanted to raise me, by the time my younger siblings were teenagers my parents had more or less given up or relaxed all of the restrictions I had.
All of this led me to studying Engineering.
Any problem with a complexity level that has an answer - I don't know - gets to be thought about only after you have earned your black belt not before.
Also good use of the 5 paragraph format lol. Brings me back.
It was believable until the agenda was revealed :)
See, dinosaur me would insist that young girls should enjoy dancing together. Without a camera and without sharing this with the entire world. I do not even want to think about the legions of creepy old men watching that.
Now, did she use chatGPT ? ;)
I'm just struggling with the idea because it runs counter to a couple other ideas: First, that social networking with people you actually know is the good part while broadcasting to the world through social media to collect likes and followers is the bad part. Second, that anonymity and pseudonymity bring out the most toxic behavior in people, so things like "real name" policies are better.
Text-centric social media might be a good middle ground here. I only login to the FB web site a few times a year (mostly to add/accept new friends), because I realized that I was envious of everybody in my feed living the life I wished I were living but have been unable to acquire. (Over 35 yro when I did this, for context) But I have FB Messenger on my phone, so I can still communicate with people who use FB. I have missed events, mostly general-purpose/last-minute everyone-is-invited events of a large group I was part of. But friends would often forward events to me, and obviously if it were a party that they specifically wanted me, they would notify me.
Ultimately people want to be known and valued, and being part of a general, everyone-is-invited group does not provide that. It does provide an opportunity to find the people you want to know and value, but school already provides that opportunity (and the social groups online are going to mostly be the in-person groups anyway). So I'm not sure that the value of missing general events is outweighed by the risk, and like I said, your friends will tell you about things they know you would not have seen.
People always underestimate/overestimate their ability to deal with things. Your kid is very mature, but they're dealing with forces way beyond them nonetheless.
These services are built by people who know how to hook you. Young children and even teenagers cannot fully comprehend the long term damage social media can do, and are still in a stage of development in which the effects of social media can have long term, even life-long consequences.
Now, your daughter drives a good point and is extremely eloquent.
There's two points where I feel like expanding what she said.
> 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)
I don't know how they measure time spent using social media (to me that's vague, is having iMessage running on my Mac "using social media"? If so I'm at at least 7 hours...). But if they measure "active use" (so let's say scrolling) 5+ hours is a lot. 35h/week, almost a full time job.
I'm wondering if the causality isn't reversed here (unhappy and depressed people in an environment where they aren't stimulated enough do end up scrolling 5+ hours a day as a consequence of their mental state).
To me, a kid that ends up on social media 5+ hours a day reeks of bad parenting. He/She should have hobbies and activities to fill that time.
> Yet another point was that people will compare themselves to other people on there.
In 2018 "obesity prevalence was [...] 21.2% among 12- to 19-year-olds." [0] according to the CDC. That's one out of 5 being obese, not just overweight. And it has more than tripled since the 70's [1]. I have to wonder if it's related. A lot of teenagers are bombarded with images of perfectly healthy bodies that, quite simply, won't match what they see in the mirror.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/childhood.html
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/obesity_child_15_16/obe...
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.
You can't pick your kids friends but you can do your best to curate the pool they are picking from.
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.
Simply the fact you are NOT from the immediate so-intimately-familiar-they-know-the-smell-of-your-farts family means that what you say and do has novelty and therefore engagement right there. Even if you are a friend who drops by every day.
Not saying that parents shouldn't engage - we should. But it isn't easy keeping it fresh from inside the fart bubble. :-)
Craziest take on addiction ever.
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.
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.
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.
But social media very strongly underlines another reality. Not everyone can become a star, stardom is often very short lived, stars may not be the happiest people, fans might not be the nicest. Those smart enough to last a long time in public would probably be able to tell you a lot about necessary the sacrifices too.
But the fear of missing something or being left out is probably exactly what drives anxiety, especially in those that might have a bit more self-awareness.
Parents could support social media use, of course, but I would compare that to putting children up for a beauty contest.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
> “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.
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.”
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.
Of course, nobody cares about men in and of themselves, so that's not really a problem.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
My point was to focus on the center of the venn diagram, where men and women do the same or similar jobs, especially jobs in which the balance has shifted over time, so that we can see that even in the midst of a general undervaluing of humans, separate from the extreme undervaluing that happens at the edges, women are undervalued even more than usual.
For some reason, many people find it hard to understand this.
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.
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.
> 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.
It’s hardly fair to call that a “leap”, especially given the comparatively limited body of evidence in support of your preferred hypothesis.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Christchurch shooter was an australian (to our eternal shame). But he shot up a school in New Zealand instead of in australia because it was easier to buy guns in NZ. (Was easier. They pushed through stricter gun controls after that incident).
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.
Climate change might be exactly the right metaphor. Despite widespread public support for action, the australian federal government is still doing very little about the problem. Its not a good look.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Couldn't the why be due to (at least in part) these innate gender differences?
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.
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?
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.
One thing that I thought about this is that while unemployment might have been low, both parents were more likely to be working.
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.
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).
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.
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.
I don't regret what I did, but it definitely was isolating. Granted this is not my most socially pro-active kid (the most socially pro-active kid used a friend's phone to sign up for social media and meet up with strangers).
It's fine I guess if that's what you wanted out of it but it's a pretty harsh punishment all things considered. I would have taken the grounding every time.
A phone is clearly a non-essential thing since she was able to function the first 13 years of her life without one. We have rules around proper phone use and there was a violation that was both significant, and a repeat offense, so the phone went away for an extended period of time.
P.S. I don't know what kind of grounding you had, but I sure as hell wasn't allowed to talk with my friends when I was grounded (by the time I got a phone in my room, it was removed whenever I was grounded).
Yes.
I just don't see how someone can be shocked that their daughter couldn't make plans after they took away the prominent communication device everyone uses. It isn't like when we grew up and you'd call the landline or get on your bike and knock on your friend's door.
Except for the fact that 3 out of 4 of our kids are willing to do that.
or they simply don't act the same as your sample size of 4.
I don't see how anyone can be shocked that taking away how people communicate leads to less communication. I really don't. Whether it's right or wrong or worth it is up to you and what you think is best.
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.
There are for sure still some kids that don’t use social media. So those kids won’t be completely alone with that decision.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.statista.com/chart/20822/way-of-meeting-partner-...
To be fair I'm actually shocked by how high bars are on that chart, at least given my anecdotal experience.
Even back in 2015 or so, it seemed that the overwhelming majority of people met IRL, whereas just a few years later everyone was meeting online.
Might be a changing demographic thing (I was 22 in 2015, and 26 in 2019), but something definitely happened.
It's unfair to blame #metoo, but it isn't unfair to blame a modern version of PC that expresses itself as puritanism. This is the least sex-having generation of all time. They're afraid that saying the wrong thing to each other is genocide or rape, especially the wrong sexual thing.
It reminds me of the Solzhenitsyn quote about knives. If a criminal is caught with a knife he doesn't know any better, it's his tradition. But if you're caught with a knife, this is a serious crime, and you must be harshly punished.
Approaching girls in public has high social consequences. I've read enough reddit [0][1][2] or seen enough news articles about people banned from businesses because a guy was seen as creepy.
Men need to learn what is ok and not ok when communicating with women. This is already an challenge because what is ok with one woman is not ok with another. Add in the shifting society view of what is appropriate turns it into an impossible task.
It just seems safer to do nothing and wait for the girl to make the first move.
My read on it is that, like cold calling and door-to-door sales, this is a skill. You can be naturally good at it, you can develop it, or you can be self-aware that you suck at it and do something else.
As someone who has met all his partners in places other than bars/tinder and without any dramatic public approaches like what you're describing I would say that it's important to keep in mind that there are plenty of ways you will meet people. Obsessing over the ways that you won't meet people is counterproductive.
If you mess up, you could lose your job, kicked out of your social safety net, or lose access to your favorite business.
For the most part girls will not do this. Any woman who has ever dated men eventually learns that if a man is interested he'll make it known and if you have to chase him he's not interested. For that reason most eventually give up on making the first move because those situations never go anywhere, whereas when men make the first move they do. It's not necessarily fair but it's the typical dynamic so waiting around for girls to make the first move is very unlikely to work out in your favor. Also, the thing about men being creepy for approaching is very overblown online. In real life as long as you're pleasant and polite and willing to take no for an answer most women will be happy and gracious if you approach them. Go for it!
Bars were not a good place to find dates decades ago either. That’s more of a tired movie trope.
The bigger issue is that people just don’t seem to get out and do things as much as they did in the time before we all had unlimited entertainment options at our fingertips from the comfort of home. As soon as you do break the cycle and start doing activities in the real world, you discover that there are a lot of interesting people just a few degrees outside of your friend groups and activities.
This is why people advocate to have hobbies (i.e., not-monetized ways to spend your time) outside of work, or at the very least a "third place" where you can meet new people in low-friction ways.
You can still ask to buy a stranger a drink. You're allowed start a conversation with someone you find attractive. But it's long odds. It's much better to do something with a group: join a choir, go to yoga class, take art or cooking classes, etc. It's a win-win too, because you won't meet someone right off, and while you're building that community you still get to sing/exercise/create/eat.
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.
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.
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.
It will. Men in their 20s are disadvantaged for the same reason that women in their 40s are: there's a lot more younger women dating older men than the reverse. The numbers will gradually shift in your favor over time.
And yeah, Tinder is usually a bad deal for everyone except the most attractive men, and women who prefer hookups to relationships.
Just keep enjoying and putting effort into your work, family, friends and hobbies, and you’ll be a more attractive potential partner at 30 than the guys who mostly have their looks to offer.
And maybe try learning how to knit.
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.
I think most people who are skeptical of causation would point to a hidden latent variable that is actually causal. One way this could take place is some feature, say "susceptibility to fomo", that's actually causal. Folks who have a higher susceptibility might see frequent, sharp decreases in mental health outcomes from social media usage. Folks with low susceptibility might be relatively unaffected from social media usage. It could be interesting to see what the prevalence of this susceptibility is in the general population, whether there are certain cohorts that have high prevalence, and whether there are interventions that can be performed to decrease this prevalence.
A similar analogous cause is the presence of schizophrenia in an analysis of psychedelic use. Most folks are fine using psychedelics infrequently. However, folks with a predilection for schizophrenia frequently have bad outcomes from psychedelic use and may even accelerate the onset of latent schizophrenia.
The above "fomo susceptibility" might even be too simplistic a model. There might be a cluster of features, combinations of past experiences and perhaps biological traits, that actually act as "fomo susceptibility." I loosely think the real model works something like this. Age may be a controlling factor as well. Regardless, I'm not convinced there's causation here. Social media usage research is like a lot of other poorly understood psychological and mental health phenomenon where studies are underpowered, causality is hard to establish, and effect sizes are small which all lead to conflicting conclusions.
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?
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.
Same for political polarization (sidebar: the notion that political polarization is an "other...factor" outside of social media seems poorly considered.)
But there was a major terror attack after a controversial election where the victor had half-a-million fewer votes than the loser. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11_attacks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_United_States_presidentia...
Then there was a war. And CNN became a thing 24 hours a day. And then a 2nd war. And then there was a Great Recession, blamed entirely on one party or the other, depending on whom you asked.
Why can't people read the article in question? Is this not something we learn at uni, or even high school?
> 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.
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.
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.
How can you rely on self-reporting? Self-reporting requires awareness and it can't be assumed that people are aware of their affliction; it also requires that the doctor takes it seriously.
You know how many people commit suicide, but unless you leave a detailed note behind your reasons are completely unknown and all that is left is a medical history which in itself may not be reliable or complete.
This is where the pain of dealing with a suicidal loved-one kicks in: you don't know what they were thinking. You can only fill in the gaps: they were happy all of a sudden, etc.
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.
BTW the chart you linked shows that we had higher rates in the 1980s than now. It makes the recent increase look like it's just part of a long-term cyclical trend.
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.
The parallel being drawn here is that social media platforms, being presented with the consequences of their products ie: teen mental health declines with use, are complicit in those consequences at some point in the value chain, either by marketing, product design, accessibility, etc. If the assumptions hold, then the conclusions are sound and valid.
There's two ways to disagree with this. Either the assumptions are not valid, or the argument is not sound.
The effects are most obvious with teens but I see this stuff as bad all around. Social media algorithms have really driven today's insane political polarization, and there's lots of examples of adults having their brains sucked out by social media rabbit holes.
Here's one pile of examples:
https://www.reddit.com/r/QAnonCasualties/
It seems pretty obvious to me at this point that if you connect a bunch of people together and then artificially prioritize content to maximize engagement, the result is unbelievably toxic.
This phenomenon isn't fundamentally new. Media has understood "if it bleeds it leads" for hundreds of years. What I think is new is how tight the optimization loop is, how personalized it is, and the way crowdsourcing the inputs leads to a firehose of content that isn't even attempting to be accurate or sane. It's a machine that automatically curates randomly sourced content for maximum inflammatory response and maximum addictiveness.
Here's another pile of examples unrelated to conspiracy theories:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ElsaGate/
This is what you get when you run the recommendation algorithm on random crowdsourced kids' content.
0: https://www.childtrends.org/publications/teen-suicide-databa...
So is it really related to smart phones? What was causing the decrease?
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.
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.
Notably I did cut out reddit which imho is the most toxic social network I was a part of.
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.
I also don't like restricting access to information in the general sense, but social media isn't "information" in anything but the broadest sense of terms.
Do you think that maybe you could make your stepdaughter's life easier not by restricting her access to information, but by teaching her how to interact with that information in a way that is healthy?
It's not just that it can be challenging to deal with your peer group being present in your life constantly, it's that you have little recourse or ways to escape without intentionally withdrawing from your social peer group, especially as a teenager where social media is so embedded in their very existence. As an adult, it's easier, we can be much more intentional about our relationships and lifestyle, but teenagers exist in a microcosm of the larger society, with all of the same problems but without the same recourses.
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.
Yes, you can go on buy your son new gaming console to play with friends while telling girls they are not allowed to use technology to talk to people. In a world where no social media means no way to organize in person encounters too. That is what the proposal amounts to.
The people who play them awful lot and get addicted tend to be overwhelmingly boys. Typically people treat them more of as a boy toy then a girl toy.
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
; It's exhausting for many of us to withhold nonverbal emotions all day; and so after school a minute to just chill without typical questioning may or may not help prevent bullying on the internet
TIL Iceland provides vouchers for whatever after school activities: taxes pay for sports and other programs.
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.
You don't want them to know your real name and age? Then don't use them. Social media is harmful and so it needs more regulation and safety. You can't enter a casino right now without an ID. You either accept that the casino will know your name and age when you enter it or you don't go to the casino. It's so funny when tech folks think their little shitty thing is something special that should not have to follow any logical common sense laws like everything else in the world.
Besides, the whole point of social media is to connect with friends, family and other real people. Being anonymous is anti social. People who are scared of disclosing their real name are the ones who shouldn’t be on social media anyway. If we all had real identities on social media it would be so much less toxic than it is today.
You clearly aren't going to take anything I say seriously with a response like that, so I'm not going to continue to engage.
Besides, my main point was that there are good faith arguments to be had, including the one argument I made in my original post. I hope you can see now that good faith arguments exist.
> Remember, even websites like HN and Pornhub would need to verify your age with your ID.
That’s not true. How do you know what legislators would come up with? It’s perfectly possible to have Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and TikTok to have implement ID and age verification but not HN.
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...
Bingo. The entire thing is a psyop designed to artificially limit and homogenize groups to make them more predictable and easier to control.
Govts are always looking to control the population, especially the military, police and media but it starts in the classroom with not running in the corridors, being made to sit for extended periods of time which makes it a stress position in some military circles.
Just look at the rivalry or disputes between different geographic regions like Europe or the Balkans, some disputes have gone of for so many generations that nobody knows what the original dispute is for.
So when you say its a psyop, yes I would say social media is, but its been hijacked by everyone and anyone. Take the Angry Karen meme, https://www.reddit.com/r/AngryKaren/
I heard this was a business interests invention to reduce the number of items women return for exchange or refund as they are the traditional shopper who do the returns. Look at how that has morphed on social media, its also a way to highlight female abuse to challenge the normal or traditional view of women in society.
In my opinion, I think alot of women become psychotic once they have kids due to the demands on their body, as whilst there is some tacit recognition of post partum psychosis, I think alot of goes unrecognised by the medical experts, in much the same way the belief in religion is a lawful medically unrecognised form of delusional thinking.
What do you mean by that? And how is this currently achieved?
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.
The Brick Test is a simple example, how many uses can you come up with for a house brick?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guilford%27s_Alternate_Uses
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divergent_thinking
Anyway I could argue you are using rule 4 from the section Twenty-Five Rules of Disinformation found on this webpage https://cryptome.org/2012/07/gent-forum-spies.htm
There are many tentacles to the state, which in itself can create cognitive dissonance, but the other problem you have is, you cant kill an idea. Take your anger out on a cop, the law prosecutes you for murder of a human, not a uniform, ergo you cant kill an idea, like law, religion & money.
why must every piece of shared information be viewed through the lens of conspiracies and mental instability?
i feel the tireless, never ending scroll has taken away peoples creative interpretations above all else
Make your point without the nonsense.
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...
Also, previous studies that look into detransition have been methodologically wanting. [1]
[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8213007/ [1] https://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2021-80256-001.pdf
That guy is a total hack
Dogshit research
I'm tabula rasa on this one, so here we go...
reads
That article lays out the dispute among researchers about interpreting the history of follow-up studies spanning decades which show that anywhere between 65 to 94% of those who initially identified as transgender eventually ceased identifying as transgender.
Two different schools of thought are summarized, followed by a section discussing various critiques of the methodologies used in the above mentioned studies.
Behold-- there is a handy table showing how much more stringent the guidelines were in 2013 for identifying gender dysphoria than similar guidelines back in 1994[1]. Right off the bat I see the 2013 guidelines a) give a minimum duration for the symptoms (whereas the older guidelines give no duration), b) require more symptoms from the list to be present in the child for a diagnosis, and c) include some bullet points about negative feelings (the older guidelines only mentioned positive ones). Those were just my impressions upon reading the table; the relevance of the discrepancy between the guidelines is discussed in the article.
According to the writer, the researcher whose study showed 63% of participants desisting conceded that the old guidelines probably let through some number of false positives. That researcher then went on to say this about drawing conclusions from his (and others') relevant research:
"The only evidence I have from studies and reports in the literature ... is that not all transgender children will persist in their transgender identity."
There's an ellipsis there, so let's make sure I'm not misinterpreting the researcher or repeating a misquote.
Okay, later in the article:
> Steensma [the same researcher I mentioned above] stands by the study’s methodology. But interestingly, he added that citing these findings as a measure of desistance is wrongheaded, because the study was never designed with that goal in mind.
> “Providing these [desistance] numbers will only lead to wrong conclusions,” he said.
And then goes on two describe two predictors, which are fascinating IMO.
I also see the very same researcher remind the readers not to use those predictors as a litmus test. Will do.
So, we have a researcher who is:
* cautious about starting social transition for patients in his clinic due to documented desistance in his own research (as well as other's research)
* using persistence predictors derived from his same research, and
* decidedly not using the statistics from his or any other research to gauge how many of his patients ought to "grow out of it."
It appears at first glance that your assertion is not supported by the cited article. Additionally, one of the researchers who found evidence of desistance explicitly warned the reader against making such an assertion.
To be fully transparent-- if the article had indeed turned out to support the assertion "most of them grow out of it," my response would have probably just been, "damn, I had no idea the numbers were that high." (Although I'm willing to bet if that were the case there would have been a reply here with a similarly concise counter-retort followed by its own citation worthy of this level of verification.)
1: I only want to point out it's a bona fide HTML table filled with bona fide HTML table data. Nice job, KQED.
Edit: My summary is 1/3 the length of the article! Anyhow, I hope someone out there gets a kick out of that. :)