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Comment by superkuh | Hacker News Reader

It's crazy how far from scientific consensus these extremist states on both "sides" of the USA have strayed in their performative legislation. There is no such thing as social media addiction no matter how many times celebrities, politicians, and scammer detox camp repeat it. It's not that the DSM V or ICD 10 haven't addressed the issues. They repeatedly have and each time come away saying there's no evidence to support using the word addiction to describe computer or other rich multimedia system usage. If this were 1800s it'd be a bill banning newspaper addiction. 1900s banning electrical addiction. 1920s, radio addiction, 1950s TV addiction. Whatever is the big new thing involving lots of money (and so attention from these kinds of people).

But it's not just funny sad: it also has real effects on real people and invokes the use of force in a situation where there is no coercion or damage being done.

View on HN

Yes, social media is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39983233 - April 2024 (1164 comments)

Health advisory on social media use in adolescence - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35874670 - May 2023 (169 comments)

Smartphones and social media are destroying children’s mental health - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35095031 - March 2023 (189 comments)

Social media is a cause, not a correlate, of mental illness in teen girls - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34901571 - February 2023 (640 comments)

Taking a break from social media makes you happier and less anxious - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31405859 - May 2022 (474 comments)

Teen mental health is plummeting and social media is a major contributing cause - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31268222 - May 2022 (1074 comments)

Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25928310 - January 2021 (348 comments)

Quit Social Media, Your Career May Depend on It - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12998698 - November 2016 (548 comments)

Edit: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/social-media-teens-menta... ("Social media harms teens’ mental health, mounting evidence shows. What now?")

> Researchers delved into whether the platform’s introduction across college campuses in the mid 2000s increased symptoms associated with depression and anxiety. The answer was a clear yes, says MIT economist Alexey Makarin, a coauthor of the study, which appeared in the November 2022 American Economic Review. “There is still a lot to be explored,” Makarin says, but “[to say] there is no causal evidence that social media causes mental health issues, to that I definitely object.”

https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20211218 ("Social Media and Mental Health")

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-29296-3 ("Windows of developmental sensitivity to social media")

Presumably similar articles existed in the 1950s for the TV

Policymakers are doing their jobs based on evidence. Ignore the vocal minority and push on. Parent better? Hah, in this fucking macro? [1] [2] Will power? Not a thing, that's why GLP-1 agonists are so effective against addiction [3]. Social media operating under existing legal frameworks? We can change the framework to better serve the human (see: here).

[1] https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/parents-under-pressu...

[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2023/01/24/parenti...

[3] https://recursiveadaptation.com/p/the-growing-scientific-cas...

Evidence shows many die each year due to lack of medical care; we can find all kinds of cases where policymakers engage in pageantry and little else

Policy makers do the job the public says and the public is fine not arguing for new systems, just improving their own lot through minor reforms. See teacher strikes; soon as they get theirs, they quit bothering with the labor organization…more pageantry, little else

If healthcare was the tent pole of our economy; still needs STEM Ed, still needs technology, still needs the physical logistics we have; doesn’t need stupid jobs people could do on down time

We need to stop with the minor reformism of trickle down which was only ever an obfuscated sarcastic joke about poor people

Yes. But aside from the occasional moral panic that went a little overboard, and while the causation is a little fuzzy, they were basically right. Sitting in front of the TV all day is unhealthy both mentally and physically.

The first of those is a reaction to another piece:

> Psychologist Candice Odgers recently stated the skeptics' case in an essay in Nature titled The Great Rewiring: Is Social Media Really Behind an Epidemic of Teenage Mental Illness?

The second and third are by the same person, who keeps mentioning his new book for some reason.

The fourth includes a counterpoint:

> “Those who feel worse may turn to social media for solace or community,” Dr Amy Orben, research fellow at Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge, said of the research. “It’s not a vacuum, it works both ways."

The fifth is an opinion piece by a computer scientist about careers.

Oh, you added some more while I was writing this. Stop it?

So for the two extra ones: the APA one opens with "Using social media is not inherently beneficial or harmful to young people." The other one is by the same guy as the NYT opinion piece, who incidentally also has a new book out on the subject.

The comment I replied to said there is no proof of social media addiction. That is false. One does not need to convince folks on HN, only policymakers. California and Florida (both enacting such regulation) are the first and third most populated states in the US, respectively, with a total population of ~61.5M people. Federal legislation is pending in Congress.

https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/421...

OK, congress can't be wrong.

What makes you right on the topic? A belief system based on a personal mental model? Genuine question. Provide evidence it is a net positive compared to the robust evidence of harm it causes, or evidence that revoking or regulating access for children is going to cause harm vs being neutral; children lived lives before social media, for example.

Continued unregulated access to social media is likely to cause harm to children and teens, based on available evidence. Not having access? What harm does that cause?

What "robust evidence of harm it causes"? Which of your many links is the robust one? And why is this on me? Yes, I think it's a moral panic, there are many previous examples of x entertaining thing supposedly corrupting young minds (or female minds, going further back). But you have to show how it's harmful. What is meant by "addictive" in the "addictive online feeds" that this prohibits? Extra points if you manage not to say "dopamine".

>many previous examples of x entertaining thing supposedly corrupting young minds

My reply to that is that in fact newspapers, paperback romance and adventure novels, jazz, rhythm and blues, rock music, television, video games and pornography probably have been broadly harmful (particularly to children and teenagers) but we didn't have a detailed neuroscientific description of the mechanism of harm when they were introduced, so the people pointing out the harms were ignored or shouted down, and now that those things are no longer in the news, people believe they know all they need to know about them, with the result that most believe that the verdict of history is that those thing are benign.

And it is tricky because all of those things plus social media and Youtube can be and often are used in such a way that they do not cause harm. And they all have positive effects as well as harmful effects.

You forgot to mention the letter P, which of course stands for Pool.[0]

Seriously, I don't see how one can even call this a falsifiable theory, let alone a "fact". Care to elaborate as to why you believe this?

[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LI_Oe-jtgdI

Hee. I applaud the boldness of this theory, and I will be wary about seductive rhythms and over-exciting fantasies in future.

(I must confess to being a jazz user.)

Maybe I'm in the group that tends to be harmed by newspapers, paperback romance and adventure novels, jazz, rhythm and blues, rock music, television, video games and pornography unless they have the knowledge needed to have a healthy relationship with them (knowledge which is not exactly routinely taught in high school) and your in the group that tends not to be harmed by them.

I don't believe any evidence would be sufficient to meet your requirements to make policy actions legitimate unfortunately. The harm is diffuse, so while action to counteract it (regulatory and policy) will be imperfect, it is still necessary based on the evidence collected so far (imho). The cost to regulate is low, and the harm by regulating is also low. Good enough.

Thank you, that's reasonable. Pugnaciousness aside, I did genuinely wonder how "addictive" is defined.

Bill text:

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...

> “Addictive feed” means an internet website, online service, online application, or mobile application, or a portion thereof, in which multiple pieces of media generated or shared by users are, either concurrently or sequentially, recommended, selected, or prioritized for display to a user based, in whole or in part, on information provided by the user, or otherwise associated with the user or the user’s device, unless any of the following conditions are met, alone or in combination with one another: (1) The information is not persistently associated with the user or user’s device, and does not concern the user’s previous interactions with media generated or shared by others. [And some other more trivial exceptions.]

So basically it's banning suggestion algorithms accompanied by tracking. And since I personally hate suggestion algorithms accompanied by tracking, it's hard to feel very upset by a law against it ... except that makes me feel sleazy and unprincipled if I base this only on my own preferences. The general idea is to prevent the unwitting sinking into echo-chambers where the world is made to look a particular way by a feedback effect (an automated one, in fact). That might be a good law.

I do, as I think you asked somebody else, [edit: as somebody else asked somebody else] object to the inaccurate use of the word "addiction".

> Oh, you added some more while I was writing this. Stop it?

Now how is this offensive to you?

Because it's a scattergun approach, and a dirty trick. The large volume of references gives the impression of being overwhelmingly supported by evidence, but they're really low quality, the points are contentious, and many are the same author repeated.

Also, to argue back, we have to actually read the fucking things.

tldr for others: no evidence up to 2019, suddenly spike of depression/anxiety after 2019. I wonder why? So do they. I can think of many things that changed at the end of 2019 but social media wasn't one of them.

>There is no such thing as social media addiction

What a silly statement. There is 100% such a thing as social media addiction and it is real.

Apps consume mass amounts of data in attempts to keep you using their app for as long as possible and build a uniquely tailored experience just for you to keep you coming back.

Do you just not like the word "addiction" being used? Or you really don't think there are negative side effects from social media and how companies run it and encourage use?

I object mainly to the misuse of the word addiction. If they were not able to misuse this word then the causation of the proposed harms would shift. Imagine just for a moment that the concept of addiction does not apply here. How would the blame for the perceived harms (self reports of being sad, anxious, etc) shift? Addiction implies control and loss of volition. Removing addiction from this context and there is no control by the third parties and no loss of volition for the minors.

The mitigations for the actual situation would be much different than the performative situation. Anxiety/depression in minors has indeed gone up since 2019. But the causes are not screens. Rising housing, food, etc prices relative to incomes, the whole worldwide pandemic, knowledge of environmental damage, and increasing totalitarianism and conflicts around the world account for most of that.

In terms of what government can do, they can address the core issue of fractional reserve banking without periodic debt forgiveness meaning there is always more debt than money supply leading to worse lives and conflict for everyone including young people. To truly make peoples lives better we should have government act to create a sustainable system not pretend mandating what's on screens will fix things.

You are so out of touch with reality. Unlike the other mediums you mentioned, you can't leave the house without your phone.

This won't convince you, but heuristics obviously indicate people are using social media too much [1] and that it's bad [2]. Nobody used newspapers like this. People didn't watch TV at school 2 hours a day in the 90s. You're going to nitpick that the study doesn't say people use social media for 2 hours a day at school but that's a conservative estimate based on my experience in high school and college. That and like... talk to young people.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2022/08/10/teens-social...

[2] https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/social-media-teen-mental-h....

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