Social Media is dangerous

[bees]

This thread was started in 2021 and it's 2024 now! I'm glad to say there's been a lot more public discussion about those issues since.

I can't chime in with a personal experience* BUT I have a question. I know there are younger people on this forum who are currently teenagers or were teenagers a meere few years ago. What do you think of articles about the connection of social media and mental health? I recently saw an article that made a lot of sense to me, about the stress caused by social media and the way it can also make it harder for young people, but now I've also seen at least one rebuttal claiming that this is just masking the real underlying issues. Do you think there could be a way for kids to use social media in a healthy manner (by addressing underlying problems) or do you think that's always going to be a thing as long as you have to worry about your "brand" 24/7 and stuff like that?

* I'm too anti-social for social media, I've generally spent the last 15 years mostly avoiding it because it doesn't feel fun to me 

[BlazingCobaltX]

I can't chime in with a personal experience* BUT I have a question. I know there are younger people on this forum who are currently teenagers or were teenagers a meere few years ago. What do you think of articles about the connection of social media and mental health? I recently saw an article that made a lot of sense to me, about the stress caused by social media and the way it can also make it harder for young people, but now I've also seen at least one rebuttal claiming that this is just masking the real underlying issues. Do you think there could be a way for kids to use social media in a healthy manner (by addressing underlying problems) or do you think that's always going to be a thing as long as you have to worry about your "brand" 24/7 and stuff like that?

Not a teen but I want to add that in my local policy discourse a lot of (mostly older) folk strongly assert that social media is the reason for the demise of today's youth. Meanwhile, if you look at studies on this, teens identify both positive and negative aspects of their social media usage. And when asked about what causes them most stress, they identify different factors than the presence of their phones. I, too, think social media is just an amplifier of deeper issues within society, not even mentioning that the constant access to internet exposes today's youth to more (sometimes distressing) information than ever before.

That said, if you'd take away underlying societal issues, I think the current state of mainstream social media is still harmful in itself simply through the ways it enables you to constantly log on. We'd first have to start banning apps that have predatory features built in, and then figure out a way that these apps can never prey on people - not just kids - ever again. That seems very tough, especially with the lackluster regulation that we have right now.

[bees]

Not a teen but I want to add that in my local policy discourse a lot of (mostly older) folk strongly assert that social media is the reason for the demise of today's youth. Meanwhile, if you look at studies on this, teens identify both positive and negative aspects of their social media usage. And when asked about what causes them most stress, they identify different factors than the presence of their phones. I, too, think social media is just an amplifier of deeper issues within society, not even mentioning that the constant access to internet exposes today's youth to more (sometimes distressing) information than ever before.

That said, if you'd take away underlying societal issues, I think the current state of mainstream social media is still harmful in itself simply through the ways it enables you to constantly log on. We'd first have to start banning apps that have predatory features built in, and then figure out a way that these apps can never prey on people - not just kids - ever again. That seems very tough, especially with the lackluster regulation that we have right now.

I mean, yeah, I've heard both of those. That's why I'd really like to hear from kids themselves about their own experiences and what they'd find helpful. I agree with you, though! I think it's a combination of things. I'd definitely love to see predatory apps getting regulated much much better, both for kids and for adults. The way I see some adults interacting with each other on social media doesn't sound healthy either and it's certainly amplified/normalised certain problems :(

[starbreaker]

What do you think of articles about the connection of social media and mental health?

I think most of them are utter crap, and pushing plausible paranoia and not solid science, but a lot of reporters doing science can't science their way out of a wet paper bag. Most of them seem to be taking Jonathan Haidt as gospel because Jordan Petersen is too obvious a reactionary to be taken seriously, but has anybody who doesn't share his biases replicated his findings?

[kepler-16b]

This thread was started in 2021 and it's 2024 now! I'm glad to say there's been a lot more public discussion about those issues since.

I can't chime in with a personal experience* BUT I have a question. I know there are younger people on this forum who are currently teenagers or were teenagers a meere few years ago. What do you think of articles about the connection of social media and mental health? I recently saw an article that made a lot of sense to me, about the stress caused by social media and the way it can also make it harder for young people, but now I've also seen at least one rebuttal claiming that this is just masking the real underlying issues. Do you think there could be a way for kids to use social media in a healthy manner (by addressing underlying problems) or do you think that's always going to be a thing as long as you have to worry about your "brand" 24/7 and stuff like that?

* I'm too anti-social for social media, I've generally spent the last 15 years mostly avoiding it because it doesn't feel fun to me 

teen here: everyone's experiences are drastically different, so I doubt I alone could answer this for you, but here's my personal experience.

I never had much social media as a younger kid (first social media account at age 13. that was considered very late), and I can tell you, my mental health was significantly worse than people who did. If anything, I almost wish I could have had something somewhere, it might have made for good escapism. my mental health actually improved around the time I got my first social media account (wattpad), but again, that was due to a bunch of other factors, like finally getting a friend group and no longer being bullied. I LOVED wattpad. it gave me community, and opened me up to friendships with people who genuinely shared my interests. I live in a small town. If you live in a small town and don't immediately hit it off with someone, you're not going to ever really make friends. social media let me meet people from across the world.

because I got social medias like wattpad, and later amino and tumblr (which do not put heavy focus on one's IRL life), I've never had to really worry about my "brand". it could be partly because my mom told me never to reveal my name, age or face online (still haven't, probably never will). there might be people who do genuinely care, in fact there almost certainly are, but I am unaware. a lot of people don't even seem to be trying to gain that many followers on their social medias of choice: a lot of accounts which belong to ppl in my year are private. social media, for most, is an extension of their IRL social life, rather than a quest for fame which many seem to make it out to be.

there is something to be said about how social media negatively affects attention span, but that's only tangentially related to the topic at hand.

Social media has its issues. I'm not denying that. but I think we need to consider that the declining mental health of teens probably has a lot of other factors. I have two friends who are avoiding the draft for the Russian/Ukranian conflict. I lived through a global pandemic before I was the recommended age to watch stranger things. I have seen the direct impact of climate change simply by looking outside and comparing it to the previous year. there are a lot of things which are weighing down on my mental health, but social media is very rarely at the top of the list.

[DiffydaDude]

We can help ya if you want! :) Have you checked your phone's screentime log to see your statistics? It's a great way to start grabbing the problem by the horns. I went from 33 hours of screentime in 7 days, to 11 hours the next week, only with like 2-3 adjustments!

sorry for not replying to this thread in forever, i'd be down with that.

[Memory]

The sad thing is, people on Social Media is so deep into it that I've seen twitter basically deny the fact harms.

Yeah , it sucks. The toxicity , danger , and the corporateness [is that a word? if not it is now] has been normalized. Which just makes it worse.

[bees]

I never had much social media as a younger kid (first social media account at age 13. that was considered very late), and I can tell you, my mental health was significantly worse than people who did. If anything, I almost wish I could have had something somewhere, it might have made for good escapism. my mental health actually improved around the time I got my first social media account (wattpad), but again, that was due to a bunch of other factors, like finally getting a friend group and no longer being bullied. I LOVED wattpad. it gave me community, and opened me up to friendships with people who genuinely shared my interests. I live in a small town. If you live in a small town and don't immediately hit it off with someone, you're not going to ever really make friends. social media let me meet people from across the world.

My experience was similar when I was a teenager. I found it really hard to find people I clicked with in the small town we lived in but forums around specific interests/fandoms helped me remember that I wasn't alone or all that weird for just liking different music or books. :)

I'm guessing a lot of it probably depends on the platforms you join. I didn't share my picture, real name, etc. online back then and I think that helped with expressing myself and feeling less self-conscious about things like dorky hobbies, but it would probably have been different if Instagram had been a thing and everyone at my school had an account or something.  I'm glad you're still having positive experiences and finding nice online communities! 

Maybe it's a bit like politics and other issues, some teenagers seem really aware of things and think more outside the box (For example, you seem aware that global warming is an actual issue that exists and will affect you even more in the future, but I've met teenaged climate change deniers  ), others do not... same as in the past, really, just maybe more amplified.

(Just randomly thinking out loud, sorry for rambling.)

[Memory]

BUT I have a question. I know there are younger people on this forum who are currently teenagers or were teenagers a meere few years ago. What do you think of articles about the connection of social media and mental health? I recently saw an article that made a lot of sense to me, about the stress caused by social media and the way it can also make it harder for young people, but now I've also seen at least one rebuttal claiming that this is just masking the real underlying issues. Do you think there could be a way for kids to use social media in a healthy manner (by addressing underlying problems) or do you think that's always going to be a thing as long as you have to worry about your "brand" 24/7 and stuff like that?

Yes , I think there is. As a minor who's been on the internet for probably longer than I should've , there have been a few gems. For example scratch, the kids coding program is amazing. It has [heavily supervised] community spaces that I have lots of fond memories of! Social media is incredibly stressful , I used to constantly be worried about "I gotta keep my followers updated". It took a huge toll on my mental health and is a big reason I've struggled with it. Sadly I don't think it's likely that within the next 10 years social media will improve. Sorry about the rant haha

[wygolvillage]

I know there are younger people on this forum who are currently teenagers or were teenagers a meere few years ago. What do you think of articles about the connection of social media and mental health?

I don't think social media causes mental health to lower but I do think that there is correlation.

I think social media is more like a drug. Society under capitalism has become isolating, frustrating and scary, which I think is the underlying cause that results in those with mental health issues turning to the internet and social media as their coping mechanism because it provides short-term distraction. It's addicting and takes advantage of the specific societal factors that cause people to seek it out, so it causes people to lean into unhealthy online behaviours. But it's not the main cause of mental distress among the youth.

[bees]

BUTCHBONEZ and wygolvillage, that makes sense, I feel like social media often brings out the worst in people and there's a lot of pressure and toxicity, so I'm not surprised it exacerbates underlying issues and affects people negatively. BUTCHBONEZ, I'm sorry you went through that! I had no idea Scratch even had a followers feature, it's incredible how even kid-friendly spaces include elements that are just unhelpful in creating a positive atmosphere. You're right about it not improving, though. I don't want to sound pessimistic but social media sites are often designed to engage people, even when it's a negative kind of engagement.

[bignoodleeee]

like anything else, social media is bad if you have too much or spend too much time on it. and just like everything else, it can be a tool used for good. however, with the pandemic most have become "chronically online", addicted to social media, and generally wrapped up in pointless online discourse about pointless and inconsequental non-issues. at the present i believe that we shouldnt be letting kids on social media. we've seen how it changes their brains and ruins their attention spans. do i think social media and the internet is entirely to blame for this? no. at the end its the parents fault for allowing their child to be online so much in the first place. hope my rambling made sense, haha.

[Blue]

I never had much social media as a younger kid (first social media account at age 13. that was considered very late), and I can tell you, my mental health was significantly worse than people who did. If anything, I almost wish I could have had something somewhere, it might have made for good escapism. my mental health actually improved around the time I got my first social media account (wattpad), but again, that was due to a bunch of other factors, like finally getting a friend group and no longer being bullied. I LOVED wattpad. it gave me community, and opened me up to friendships with people who genuinely shared my interests. I live in a small town. If you live in a small town and don't immediately hit it off with someone, you're not going to ever really make friends. social media let me meet people from across the world.

I had a very similar experience like this. Though, being a little bit older, when I was a teen smartphones were just starting to appear, so most of my social media experience was with a computer until I got my first smartphone at 13 (quite late, as at that time, a lot of kids were having even iPhones while I had a Nokia phone that didn't even have a front camera) Prior to that, I had a Facebook account that was made with my moms email and was used to play games like pet society and coco girl, something that was popular at the time. In fact, all of the online stuff I did until I was maybe 12 was play games (important to note that I'm not from an English-speaking country and my English got to a decent usable level when I was around 13-14) and didn't really communicate with people who weren't my classmates until then. Another factor that played into all of this is that until I was 13, we had a family computer, and only at 13 I got my mom's old laptop and could do stuff in my room.

Another thing that I think had an impact on how I approach social media is that i was always part of fandom. that sort of community, regardless for what it is, is much different than what you see in other places online. I always used Deviantart and Qoutev for the longest as my 'main socials' (though I wouldn't call those social media in the same sense Twitter and Instagram are) until I succumbed and tried out Tumblr and Twitter + DeviantArt's inevitable fall to ugly eclipse thing that removed customization and ruined the look of the site, making me permanently move from there.

Most of my problems, when I was a kid, came from school and the kids there, quite literally because I was a quiet kid who liked anime and wasn't particularly looking into 'older teen' stuff, for the lack of a better word. Imagine being (at that time) a girl and being told 'why aren't you wearing a full face of makeup' at 12? mind you, this was 2012-2013, makeup wasn't even on my mind at that age nor was it easy to get it as a kid whose parents asked about everything so it wasn't like you could just get whatever.

I've met some very nice people over social media, and when you're in fandom, that sort of interaction is different compared to what you'd normally see. There are definitely drawbacks to social media, especially when not regulated and used mindfully via blocking trolls and not engaging with stuff that's toxic or flat-out mean. The only I've definitely seen the issue is TikTok, which I have to heavily regulate, compared to other socials that usually auto-regulate after a while.

[KiwiMeowo]

I've started to notice that if I see a political Tweet on Twitter regardless of the political alignment of the owner, you'll always see Tweets from opposing sides, most of which are making remarks and insults. Starting to believe that Twitter is doing this on purpose, since the algorithm benefits from anger as it results in more engagement.

Would also explain why Twitter seems to be the hub for arguments and people getting angry over nothing.

In the recent years of Twitter, I have noticed that Twitter keeps showing me upsetting content, like depressing news or just rage-bait. I realised the possibility Twitter intentionally encourages doomscrolling and arguments, and that's how I decided to start reducing my time on Twitter, or at least short enough to only see cute hamster pics.

When it comes to posting on social media, I used to be extremely jealous of my friends' posts getting more traction than mine, not to mention that if you want to be successful as an artist/content creator, you gotta hop on a trend or you risk being obscure forever unless you do something groundbreaking. The algorithms of social media make it worse, and the content you've worked so hard on gets shoved away from the public eye. My work often gets shoved away constantly unless I do something, and it made me and my content feel worthless as a result. You have to put tag, keywords and so on to have your work noticed, and it would often backfire unless a miracle happened. I was even demotivated that I couldn't post anything new for months at point. I hated that I viewed my close friends as rivals when it came to art and so on. In social media, the first thing you unconsciously do is try to get popular or else you'll fail trying to. It makes you feel miserable if the content you created never ever succeeds later on and it makes you wonder where you went wrong when it's the algorithms that are making you suffer. I suppose social media serves to make you angry with the drama if shoves into your face and takes the spotlight away from you every time you post content you made, all while the corporations that manage those platforms profit off of your suffering.

I also had a similar situation. I used to post art on social media like Twitter and Facebook, but rarely do they get any attention. There are some artwork that I am especially proud of, but the fact they got zero likes hurt me a lot. I see a lot of people's artworks get hundreds and thousands of likes, wondering what I have to learn from them in order to get people's approval... Though I got out of this mentality after knowing some artists got these likes just out of luck, or they need to please the platform's algorithm, which I don't feel like doing at all (not related to art whatsoever).

During my time in using Twitter, I've tried literally everything to block and mute certain things and limit my interactions to friends only, but even then, I can see my friends discussing about drama in the timeline, and my mutes and blocks don't even work for the most part. That's just my experiences with Twitter, and I would literally use literally anything else other than that bird site.

Same, there are stuff that I muted, but they often appear because either the mute function doesn't work, or the post doesn't have the keyword, but the image is related to that word.

The original concept of social media is great, you get to interact with people and see their posts very conveniently. But the problem is that social media nowadays makes the platform more hostile to get people to post more. I miss the days of finding cool fanart on Twitter, but it isn't really worth hurting my mental health just to maybe see a few posts that I wanna see.

One good thing about social media's bad decisions is that bots and AI actively discourage me to use their platforms, like what's the point of reading posts when they aren't even made by real people?

[Nova]

I'm so glad that people are now noticing that social media has gotten worse over the years, especially with Twitter being acquired by a Muskrat who disgraces all other muskrats for existing.

I had been cancelled off of Twitter months ago for something I won't dosclose, but all I can say from personal experience is that as soon as you're cancelled, it's literally over for you over there. No matter how much things might eventually debunked there are still the people who will continue to parade the false allegations around to drown out the truth, it's created an environment where people will cancel each other simply over petty things.

And even if you do try to come back in any manner, no matter how much time passes, someone who didn't like you back then can easily sniff you out and you can endn up having your account deactivated against your will. The landscape over there is THAT bad with so much drama.

I've since migrated over onto BlueSky, and while it IS a Twitter look-alike, the fact I can tailor it so that I don't see drama on my timeline, combined with turning notifications off, means I look at my screen less. And when I DO look at it I'm looking for art people have posted. Basically cutting it down greatly as much as I can, and focusing on other things as I should be.

Personally I feel like social media needs to have user-side tailoring instead of doing it for you which is what causes a lot of doomscrolling to begin with, by shoving news that just kills your mood. Hell there should be a limit at how long you look at it for a day too, so to cut down on it more.

tl;dr Social media (Twitter mostly) has made itself to become addictive and it's causing problems.