Social Media is dangerous

[apricior]

Hi!

As someone who's deleted most of his social media except for tumblr, I have extremely mixed feelings about this subject. Mainly, I think that social media is not dangerous per se: it is a tool like any other, and it can be used responsibly or not.

I think there's a lot of good sides of social media, especially that it gives a voice to those who wouldn't be listened to in more mainstream circles. Without it, I would have probably never learnt so much about the struggles of many communities, such as poc, disabled people or queer people, and I would have never discovered that I myself am queer and autistic without it.

It has also helped a lot of people get their art out there and further their careers, though it is true that this is just in the veeeery few cases in which someone has managed to get a big audience or has gone viral.

Still, I feel like lately the cons and pros of social media are way more inbalanced than they used to be.

I think we can all agree that the current state of most social media sites, especially the popular ones, is, putting it lightly, a mess. It's full of AI slop, ragebait content and interaction bait, and algorithms feed you whatever it needs to make you waste as much time as possible on there (which increases the amount of ads that you see and that, of course, increases the revenue that the company gets). The good thing is that I think that many people, especially younger generations, are slowly becoming aware of this (or, at least, aware that they have a phone/social media addiction). If you go on YouTube and search for "phone detox" or "social media detox", there's gonna be a lot of different videos with tips on how to use socmed less with thousands and thousands of views. So, yes, this is a problem, a huge one, but at least more and more people are openly talking about it. Even if a lot of them are not actually doing active work to change it, it's a start.

Regarding what @Nova says about cancel culture, I fully agree (and also I'm sorry you had to deal with that). This is something that I've become increasingly aware of, and not just on Twitter: someone will make a callout post, or write a list of people who are "morally corrupt", according to the poster, and people will just believe that the person who created the post is being truthful without questioning what they're reading or wanting to see the context. I know people who've had to deal with a lot of anonymous (or non-anonymous) hate and difamatory campaigns after having their opinions taken out of context (or, in most cases, not hiding the fact that they belong to a minority and talking about the oppression they face).

It's honestly so frustrating to see people taking those posts as absolute truth. Same thing happens with news; I keep seeing people sharing alarmist headlines without bothering to read the actual article, taking those articles out of context or sharing from news sites that are... questionable at best.

Honestly, at this point I've gotten tired of the state of social media. I still check tumblr because I want to see fanart and, all things considered, I've found it's the easiest place to curate your experience, but I've stopped using everything else and honestly, I feel an immense peace of mind because of it. I can dedicate more time to things I actually enjoy and I don't get as mad at things I see online as often.

[Blue]

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.

What I love about Bluesky is that all of this is due to its really good moderation abilities. You can easily use the lists feature people make for following specific topics as a block list if you don't like the specific thing. If you do this with AI/Crypto stuff, drama-filled people, reposters and right-wingers, you've basically cleared out everything you don't want to see and if you're a little lost and don't know how to make lists correctly (like me) you can end up with a list that's just people's posts without their reposts and just stuff from them.

I'm still not planning to fully move there from Twitter (at least not until they have private accounts) but it is a great place for people who want something like twitter but without the toxicity, because you can very easily remove it.

[solbeth]

one thing that makes it hard for me to effectively discuss social media is the nature of many modern social media platforms: they aren't very social at all. if you look at some of the most popular ones, you will see a divide between online spaces that provoke debates or extensive commentary (think twitter/bluesky and similar) and those that are basically content mills, made to present you with things to consume more than extensively engage with (think instagram, tiktok). some social media is not very 'social' that way, it's not about two users getting in contact, but a 'creator' and a 'follower'.

keeping this in mind, i discuss each kind of social media differently. the content mills akin to instagram are usually the ones sparking the greatest concern, and for a good reason: they are made specifically to keep the dopamine flowing in your brain, presenting you with new stimuli over and over. they are dangerous in a way any addiction can be. they fry your happy hormone receptors and lower your attention span. that is a risk i completely understand the concern over.

on another side we have the more 'social' social media. we've been warned about them all the time too. how they cause depression, low selfesteem. here is where i disagree, as i truly believe that these things aren't caused my social media per se. the internet however can easily amplify already pre-existing issues someone may have. if someone has already been depressed, of low selfesteem, lonely or feeling alienated because of their differences, the compressed online social circles can make these things worse at a much faster rate. on another hand, people with high selfesteem, good private life and high social status rarely get affected by social media in the same way.

so despite how much we are warned about it, social media does not create anxiety or depression on it's own. this article in particular opened my eyes on it, the sources are an interesting reading list too.

in the end, the danger of 'social' social media comes down to compiling all the dangers of real life in one, easily accessible place. it has more people to be jealous of. feel lesser than. more people to laugh at you, ignore you or bully you. that's not the fault of social media - those are unresolved social LIFE issues given free reign.

[JINSBEK]

I think the MEDIA in social media is what killed it for me. They used to be called social networking sites!! I loved facebook, back when it was a place for connection (not a really a plug but I talk about it here - specifically the notes feature). When Instagram was a place to see what my friends were up to! MySpace changed my life, I used it to meet other kids and make friends.  Social media became icky and boring to me when shares/retweets the Main Thing. Connections became indirect: Here is a meme I found funny! Here is an opinion I agree with! I've seen neocities referred to as a social media platform, and even Melonland in this thread, but I think that's the distinction.

I think this is an interesting point that rarely seems to be addressed. The shift from “conversations with people about things you share” to a metrics-based system of “Likes” and “Shares” has radically changed how a lot of these platforms worked. Retweets, hashtags, and @mentions were actually created by third-party developers on independent Twitter clients, and those features became so attractive, that Twitter implemented them officially on the platform. I was someone—and even up till 2022—that used Twitter as a microblogging platform, and still kept to that mode of usage, even after the ecosystem had changed dramatically. I still miss Twitter for that. I’m glad to have found Status.Cafe to satisfy my needs for that, along with CSS customisation.

I think most of [the news articles reporting on social media negatively affecting mental health] 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?

Interesting that Jonathan Haidt (author of The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness) has been brought up in this thread, but only briefly. He has addressed those skeptical of the conclusions he draws with a detailed article on his methodologies, and the methodologies of researchers who contradict his findings. I find his arguments compelling. As an aside, we have whistleblowers from Meta (Facebook/Instagram) and TikTok revealing internal company research and practices that proactively prey on the psychological vulnerabilities of children of different age groups, and that acknowledge the harm done, in particular, to the teenage girls on these platforms.

The chief argument of Haidt et al. is that the loss of a play-based childhood—especially in nations where adults are increasingly restricting basic child autonomy, such as banning physical games like tag and disallowing children to play outside—in favour of a smartphone-based childhood inflicts massive opportunity costs on children, perhaps most dramatically on girls aged 11–14 across different nations and cultures. The average (not heavy-user!) American teen is on 7–8 social media platforms and bombarded with 192 push notifications from these platforms a day, about 11 notifications per waking hour, or 1 notification every 5 minutes. This results in chronic attention fragmentation of an already immature, and on top of that increasingly sleep-deprived mind, never mind the loss of embodied experiences learning how to interact with peers who are younger, the same age, and older than them: learning to communicate, compromise, collaborate, and mentor other children in embodied (in-person and live) activities are critical to a social species. We have decades of research demonstrating that the synchronous give-and-take interactions on children is key to the development of not only their “etiquette” competency, but higher executive functions such as the ability for complex sequential planning and understanding of dynamic systems and dependencies, forethought, and symbology/abstract thinking which are key to not only communications but historicity and the concept of self. At the very least, if you take this away, you literally end up with people who are more dangerous drivers because they are purely reactive and can’t think ahead or see the bigger picture of other sentient agents on the road.

Haidt in his book cites numerous studies on different national teenage populations (e.g. Spain, Australia, Ireland, Canada, the United States) and the effects of ubiquitous 24/7 Internet access on them. I find the IZA’s (Institute of Labor Economics) and the European CEPR’s (Centre for Economic Policy Research) continuing research on teens in Spain (the book cites the first study but not the second, which was conducted after the book was written) particularly damning—the fascinating thing about that research is that, fibre-optic cables were rolled out in the different regions of Spain at different times, so the researchers are able to track before-and-afters of ubiquitous high-speed Internet access on adolescent well-being.

The first study explains:

“This study exploits exogenous variation in the deployment of optic fiber across Spanish provinces between 2007 and 2019 to analyze the effect of access to high-speed Internet (HSI) on hospital discharge diagnoses of behavioral and mental health cases among adolescents. We find a positive and significant impact on girls but not on boys. Exploring the mechanism behind these effects, we show that HSI increases addictive Internet use and significantly decreases time spent sleeping, doing homework, and socializing with family and friends. Girls again power all these effects.

The second study explains:

“Spain is a leader in the implementation of HSI (High-Speed Internet) through fibre, with more than 80% of the population covered by fibre networks in 2019. But fibre penetration did not increase homogeneously throughout the territory. Optic fibre rollout was the result of a strategic decision by the industry leader, Telefónica, whose presence in the different territories had more to do with historical and political factors than with socioeconomic or demographic ones. We leverage this plausibly exogenous variation in fibre infrastructure to instrument access to HSI. Since ADSL (Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line) preceded fibre, our study can be understood as an analysis of the marginal effects of an increase in Internet quality and speed.

…When we look at BMH (behavioural and mental health) cases by condition type, we find that fibre penetration increases the incidence of anxiety, mood disorders (these two are only significant at a 10% level), drug abuse, and self-harm and suicide attempts, with most effects again due to girls. We document an exceptionally large effect on cases of self-harm and suicide attempts among girls aged 15 to 19 years (+112.3%) but no significant effect for boys.”

━━━━━━━★⊹☆⊹｡
As an aside. I love Facebook. I use it to find out where community events and concerts are happening near me. Social bike rides, volunteer opportunities, raves, vintage sales, block parties, soul food festivals. I am very happy with my Facebook usage and I strongly suspect increasing numbers of users don’t use Facebook this way, as a tool to enhance their physical lives. Certainly Twitter is almost never used this way (no I don't count a spontaneous mass protest as a community event lmao. It has its place but it's different from like Metallica fan event at the local arcade-diner-bar, you know? And yes that is a real event my local arcade-diner-bar organised and posted on Facebook and it was awesome). And I don't think Twitter is really used to organise gatherings like these, it's more like they document them and then show people who don't live in that city what's going on.

[bignoodleeee]

one thing that makes it hard for me to effectively discuss social media is the nature of many modern social media platforms: they aren't very social at all. if you look at some of the most popular ones, you will see a divide between online spaces that provoke debates or extensive commentary (think twitter/bluesky and similar) and those that are basically content mills, made to present you with things to consume more than extensively engage with (think instagram, tiktok). some social media is not very 'social' that way, it's not about two users getting in contact, but a 'creator' and a 'follower'.

i think that while yes, social media platforms have a place - primarily as a way for game companies,  comic artists ect to get news out in a quick and concise way without sending out newsletters toby fox style(which i actually wish more would do - we need more forums and just... online spaces to meet people and hang out, like spacehey and the like. the internet is turning into a massive cesspool of negativity, and it's becoming more difficult to just exist as a casual person on the net. tumblr is the closest i've ever found to that.

hope the deranged rambling makes sense i am incredibly sleepy lol

[solbeth]

He has addressed those skeptical of the conclusions he draws with a[/color] detailed article on his methodologies, and the methodologies of researchers who contradict his findings.

i've read the article and while i do agree with many of his base arguments, i find it funny to assume that there is absolutely no other theory presented on why would a 'mental health crisis' happen all around the world at the same time than the rise of iphones and social media. like, global financial crisis of 2007? (he addressed this one but did not consider that despite the stock rateings and so on rising, the damage for many families already has been done, lower class is still struggling to this day more than ever) easier and faster communication making it simpler to study and hear about people's personal struggles? publication of dsm 5, and earlier, release if icd 10 and growing awareness about mental health? trying to find a cause for sudden rises of acknowledged mental health problems in popularisation of social media reads to me as trying to fault rising autism diagnosis rates in popularisation of vaccines.

him implying that climate change couldn't possibly be the problem if it's the 'crisis that mobolizes young people' is a great simplification and ignores the fact that despite the mobilisation the crisis is still happening and that it is a major source of hopelessness in younger generations. it's almost like we can fight for a cause And be extremely distressed about it... droughts, floods, disease, food scarcity in poorer countries, those things don't go away just because we 'fight for the cause'.

overall his theories seem very US-centric despite him proclaiming that his theory explains the issue on a global scale. that's an other reason why i am taking his word with a grain of salt.

aside from that, i do agree with one core idea - being bombarded with stimuli and information constantly isn't what our brains are meant to endure. late stage capitalism made sure that we are constantly surrounded by news, drama, and most prominently: ads. ads that sell you things that will make you conform. ads that will make you feel like you are lacking something in your life unless you buy into the newest trend.

[JINSBEK]

@solbeth That’s the thing. First, the major disasters commonly cited, e.g. the global financial meltdown of 2008, do NOT coincide with the rise of BHM in youth. It is smartphones—note that many of Haidt’s detractors misrepresent his argument as social media platforms existing, when his argument is actually about the ubiquity of smartphone usage and the design changes that came about in all information technology as a result of that. Basically, people have not been able to “turn off” from disastrous information (e.g. doomscrolling), and the passivity and community atomisation that has been accompanied with these new habits disempowers the collaborative bonds that keep people resilient collectively in the face of disaster.

And you see the same in Spain: austerity measures ended in 2014, with the deepest cuts ending in 2013. Yet with the worst of austerity over in one of the most hardest-hit European countries, why does provincial teenage mental health continue to deteriorate, and why does it coincide with the provincial roll-out of high-speed Internet?

I’ll quote from his book:

“Even if we were to accept the premise that the events from 9/11 through the global financial crisis had substantial effects on adolescent mental health, they would have most heavily affected the millennial generation (born 1981 through 1995), who found their happy childhood world shattered and their prospects for upward mobility reduced. But this did not happen; their rates of mental illness did not worsen during their teenage years. Also, had the financial crisis and other economic concerns been major contributors, adolescent mental health in the United States would have plummeted in 2009, during the darkest year of the financial crisis, and it would have improved throughout the 2010s as the unemployment rate fell, the stock market rose, and the economy heated up. Neither of these trends is borne out in the data. In figure 1.7, I superimposed figure 1.1, about teen depression, on a graph of the U.S. unemployment rate, which spiked in 2008 and 2009 as companies threw employees overboard at the start of the crisis. Unemployment then began a long, steady decline from 2010 to 2019, hitting a historic low of just 3.6% in early 2019.

There is just no way to pin the surge of adolescent anxiety and depression on any economic event or trend that I can find. Also, it’s hard to see why an economic crisis would have harmed girls more than boys, and preteen girls more than everyone else.”

[solbeth]

@solbeth That’s the thing. First, the major disasters commonly cited, e.g. the global financial meltdown of 2008, do NOT coincide with the rise of BHM in youth. It is smartphones—note that many of Haidt’s detractors misrepresent his argument as social media platforms existing, when his argument is actually about the ubiquity of smartphone usage and the design changes that came about in all information technology as a result of that. Basically, people have not been able to “turn off” from disastrous information (e.g. doomscrolling), and the passivity and community atomisation that has been accompanied with these new habits disempowers the collaborative bonds that keep people resilient collectively in the face of disaster.

okay, that makes more sense - given this threads topic i was focusing more on social media per se. i do agree that the changing information technology and the constant flow of information can have negative impact on our mental health. i do still believe that the same factors lead to more data and openness about mental health itself though. people talking about their experiences and having more resources thus being diagnosed more.

There is just no way to pin the surge of adolescent anxiety and depression on any economic event or trend that I can find. Also, it’s hard to see why an economic crisis would have harmed girls more than boys, and preteen girls more than everyone else.”

this is why i did not say that there is one specific reason why people have been more troubled and recognised as such. i also wasn't saying that social media have no negative impact at all (social media and not smart phones because it was the original topic of this tread). the influx of information that smartphones provide bring to light, condense and emphasise all the societal issues - those of social class, misogyny (god, how i understand these young girls), disasters around the world, bigotry and of course the constant ads. these issues have always been there, now they have a better chance to spread and harm us though. are smartphones bad because they make it possible to be so? are they to be eradicated because of the power they have? well, that is definitely easier to achieve than have us take responsibility and learn how to be better people, to have corporations exploit us less, to have politicians not manipulate us, i give you that.

[Nova]

Note: I just now noticed the post about people branding themselves has either been deleted or edited. Either way condider this me quoting it before it changed.

That's what I also feel like social media has corrupted our minds about.

Everyone isn't seen as a person, but as a brand. A mascot. A face for their product. We're told to treat a person as if they're the leader of their little ring, instead of as like, you know, A PERSON.

We're treated as something that generates views, not as someone who just wants to share art and similar interests with others, and popularity is founded on this belief.

I've definitely learned over time that I don't want to be put on a pedestal or be seen as a brand, I just want to share the silly doodles that I make.

Don't get me started on stans...






Sorry but the only person I'll stan is Stan Pines from Gravity Falls. /joke

[JINSBEK]

I can relate heavily to the unrelenting pressure to brand. I think it’s an extension of the social hustle culture these platforms have built—it’s no longer enough to have a discussion, you need Views, you need Likes, you need Followers. And somewhere along the way almost every young digital artist has gotten it into their head that they have to be “metrically successful” in order to be successful, let alone whether they’re making any money on their passion (or if they even want to monetise everything that makes them happy or not!). It’s the primary reason I pulled my art from the Internet, actually. I didn’t want to play that game, so I stopped.

On the subject of branding, I want to quote this r/nosurf reply to a post on It feels like Social Media turns people into the same person:
“It really isn't surprising. Internet surfing and social media inserts mostly into time we used to spend with ourselves daydreaming, reflecting, spacing out, pondering, hobbies etc. All those mental processes are important to becoming unique individuals but when one becomes chronically online those moments of boredom, negative emotion or uncertainty can often instead get filled by going by to your favorite internet platform of choice.

Essentially what is happening is that our internal world is slowly being replaced by digital world. And in doing so instead of developing a personality from within it becomes centered around the Cyberspace give mind replacing it

Honestly in my opinion this psychological grafting of the internet into the self is one of the most terrifying parts of internet addiction and it isn't really talked about much”

I think what I hate most about modern social media, personally, is the proliferation of instant dogpiling and cancel culture based on bite-size morsels of posts and reposts/retweets/reblogs/QRTs. I’ve been cancelled for thought-crimes, cancelled for “lying about [my] mental health” (are you fucking kidding me?), cancelled for being too mentally healthy ("lying about my mental health" again, but, the other way), dogpiled for Tweeting that I did not want to be called "shawty" (who the fuck are you people? Why do you care? LMAO), dogpiled for talking about the problems of my mother culture (and no the people who dogpiled me did NOT know my ethnicity and nationality), I was banned from the indie horror game dev community that I've been a part of for years because some rando in the Discord looked at my personal Twitter account and saw that I was investigating how environmentally friendly non-Proof-of-Work (essentially, non-Bitcoin) blockchain protocols were and how some independent artists were leveraging this new technology. And no, asking questions about blockchain tech is not, and was NEVER a prohibited rule in that dev community, let alone on my own fucking Twitter away from actual game dev shit! Social media has forced me to communicate in other languages during the times I actually want to communicate in English and, y'know what? I'm done. None of these idiots can have an adult-fucking conversation nor have any self-awareness of the clinically significant cognitive distortions they suffer under and inflict on others in their emotional splash damage (or sometimes they do, they just don't care about being shitty to other people) so I'mma out.

For all the talk about "mental health awareness" that social media ostensibly conduces, how many of these people actually go on and Google "cognitive behaviour therapy", "DBT worksheets", "how does psychotherapy work", "CE-credit available workshops" (the cheaper alternative to paying for a therapist hundreds of dollars monthly) and so on? For most people (and no, I did not say everyone) the whole "mental health" thing just seems like virtue-signalling.

[Nova]

I can relate heavily to the unrelenting pressure to brand. I think it’s an extension of the social hustle culture these platforms have built—it’s no longer enough to have a discussion, you need Views, you need Likes, you need Followers. And somewhere along the way almost every young digital artist has gotten it into their head that they have to be “metrically successful” in order to be successful, let alone whether they’re making any money on their passion (or if they even want to monetise everything that makes them happy or not!). It’s the primary reason I pulled my art from the Internet, actually. I didn’t want to play that game, so I stopped.

On the subject of branding, I want to quote this r/nosurf reply to a post on It feels like Social Media turns people into the same person:
“It really isn't surprising. Internet surfing and social media inserts mostly into time we used to spend with ourselves daydreaming, reflecting, spacing out, pondering, hobbies etc. All those mental processes are important to becoming unique individuals but when one becomes chronically online those moments of boredom, negative emotion or uncertainty can often instead get filled by going by to your favorite internet platform of choice.

Essentially what is happening is that our internal world is slowly being replaced by digital world. And in doing so instead of developing a personality from within it becomes centered around the Cyberspace give mind replacing it

Honestly in my opinion this psychological grafting of the internet into the self is one of the most terrifying parts of internet addiction and it isn't really talked about much”

I think what I hate most about modern social media, personally, is the proliferation of instant dogpiling and cancel culture based on bite-size morsels of posts and reposts/retweets/reblogs/QRTs. I’ve been cancelled for thought-crimes, cancelled for “lying about [my] mental health” (are you fucking kidding me?), cancelled for being too mentally healthy ("lying about my mental health" again, but, the other way), dogpiled for Tweeting that I did not want to be called "shawty" (who the fuck are you people? Why do you care? LMAO), dogpiled for talking about the problems of my mother culture (and no the people who dogpiled me did NOT know my ethnicity and nationality), I was banned from the indie horror game dev community that I've been a part of for years because some rando in the Discord looked at my personal Twitter account and saw that I was investigating how environmentally friendly non-Proof-of-Work (essentially, non-Bitcoin) blockchain protocols were and how some independent artists were leveraging this new technology. And no, asking questions about blockchain tech is not, and was NEVER a prohibited rule in that dev community, let alone on my own fucking Twitter away from actual game dev shit! Social media has forced me to communicate in other languages during the times I actually want to communicate in English and, y'know what? I'm done. None of these idiots can have an adult-fucking conversation nor have any self-awareness of the clinically significant cognitive distortions they suffer under and inflict on others in their emotional splash damage (or sometimes they do, they just don't care about being shitty to other people) so I'mma out.

For all the talk about "mental health awareness" that social media ostensibly conduces, how many of these people actually go on and Google "cognitive behaviour therapy", "DBT worksheets", "how does psychotherapy work", "CE-credit available workshops" (the cheaper alternative to paying for a therapist hundreds of dollars monthly) and so on? For most people (and no, I did not say everyone) the whole "mental health" thing just seems like virtue-signalling.

Holy shit I can relate to ALL of this.

In my first post in this thread I mentioned I was cancelled offa Twitter, but I'ma drop the tea:
It was because of some 13yo didn't like the fact that I didn't wanna be friends with them anymore, but I had my reasons to cease contact.

They were EXTREMELY mentally unstable and always tried to turn anything to have some kind of sexual context or subcontext, not to mention the oversharing of deeply personal/intimate details and constantly threatening to self-harm/commit suicide over the smallest of things JUST to get anyone's attention, all of these which made me EXTREMELY uncomfortable. On top of that they always latched onto people with so much ease due to whatever was going on in their head, this was especially bad because they were clearly being conditoned by groomers to be a proshipper and the idea of zoophilia is okay.

I tried my best to help this kid but any help they either tossed it to the side or always constantly kept getting back into old habits quickly as soon as they tried to break them. It was clear they needed professional help and I was not their therapist.

Once I cut ties with them they tried HARD to paint me as a groomer BY DIGGING INTO MY PAST AND BRINGING UP SHIT I HAD DONE 10 YEARS AGO THAT I NO LONGER STAND BY OR NO LONGER DO. They had made TWO docs, the second one being sadly successful and it resulted in me not ONLY getting banned from TWO games I enjoyed playing on Roblox (and maybe more), but also lost friends in the process AND getting banned from friend communities I had been a part of for a LONG time.

All because some mentally unstable child who clearly should not be on the internet was jealous of me and didn't like the fact that I "abandoned" them.

This kid is also going out of their way to try and stalk me too, they have messaged me two times on Bluesky saying "I will always follow you wherever you go" and shit like that.

There are some people who CLEARLY do not belong on the internet, and regardless on their mental state, beliefs or moral standings, if you go out of your way to cancel someone over something for any reason, I'm sorry but who you are does not excuse your actions. You're just hurting people and needlessly destroying lives. it doesn't matter how old you are either, you need to stop.

[DiffydaDude]

Im gonna encourage anyone who sees this thread to also look at this one (https://forum.melonland.net/index.php?topic=2700.msg36985;boardseen#new) here

[BlazingCobaltX]

I have not read the entire thread but I do wanna reply since Haidt's been mentioned: There's plenty of criticism in how he has cherry-picked studies that favour his point and and making causal inferences from correlational data. For instance, these two:
- https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00902-2
- https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/parenting4digitalfuture/2024/05/15/haidt/

There's merit to the things he discusses but we need to be cautious with taking his conclusions at face value just because it is a point that we all favour. For instance, in the Netherlands you CAN connect the rise of mental health issues to factors other than social media. More meritocratic values in society and decimation of public playgrounds are just two of the top of my head. I could go more in-depth but I'd have to get my information ready.

My personal stance, though, is that even if we don't know the effects of social media on wellbeing for sure, we are right to be cautious about it and reduce our dependency on it. I don't think that all technology is bad, though, but that the current combination of big tech malevolence and devices optimised to be mini slot machines IS a problem.

[JINSBEK]

There's merit to the things he discusses but we need to be cautious with taking his conclusions at face value just because it is a point that we all favour. For instance, in the Netherlands you CAN connect the rise of mental health issues to factors other than social media. More meritocratic values in society and decimation of public playgrounds are just two of the top of my head. I could go more in-depth but I'd have to get my information ready.

Again, that’s the thing that some of Haidt’s detractors fail to mention. His book and other writings specifically points to the destruction of performance-free (no metrics and no trophy) third spaces for children, including and especially playgrounds, as major factors for the rise of mental illness in children. One of his co-thinkers (they correspond) is evolutionary psychologist and child development researcher Peter Gray, and I see Haidt’s book an extension of Gray’s Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life (in fact Haidt recommends Gray’s book in Anxious Generation). Interestingly, it feels like most opposition to Haidt is based on “social media-size bites” that focus exclusively on some clickbait title about Instagram, instead of the arguments he actually presents in his book.

Returning to the topic of social media in general, I’m currently reading this book by Marie Le Conte, a French-Moroccan political correspondent born in 1991. Below, I am reproducing an extended excerpt recounting her experience with social media in 2010, when she had been part of those activists using social media to organise protests against tuition hikes at the University College London, and in 2016, 4 years after the end of the tuition protests, after she had stably established herself in her career in journalism. I find it interesting and illustrative in how modern aggregated social media platforms discourage… frankly human change and development in individuals. I can also relate to some of her struggles, here, being of the same generation (a millennial born in 1995 who has seen their positions in life and political understandings change and develop).

“…The problem is that I nailed colours to the mast when I joined Twitter as a student activist; that was the version of me that British online circles were introduced to. …I was not seen as a young French woman who, among other things, happened to be stridently left-wing. …

I stayed on Twitter and did not give it much thought. I turned 21, 22, 23 and my career went from odd shifts at various newspapers to increasingly steady roles. I evolved and changed because it is what you do when you are that age. I got a full-time job as a political journalist when I was 23 and suddenly my tweeting could no longer be as self-indulgent as it once had been. I could still be silly, of course, but I took my job seriously.

When Jeremy Corbyn was elected Labour leader in 2016, I did not welcome him with open arms. I did not think he would be sharp enough to get the party into government and some of his policy stances, on foreign affairs and at home, struck me as desperately unpopular. It shouldn’t have mattered; I was a reasonably junior journalist and no one had to care about my views. Instead, all hell broke loose. I received abuse online every day; people tweeted mean things at me and about me, about me being a repulsive sell-out and careerist scum. People who were still friends with me on Facebook would take to Twitter to discuss how much they hated me, day after day after day after day. People I had cooked for and received in my home blocked me so they could talk about me without giving me a chance to respond.

In hindsight, I am not sure what hurt more. The real-life friends who denounced me to keep their social standing in left-wing circles pierced my heart, but the strangers who felt betrayed by the fact I had changed baffled me even more. They did not know me and I did not know them; why would they care? Was I, a person among so many others, not allowed to change? Was I really accountable to them?

Much as it was painful at the time, my bruised feelings aren’t the reason I am bringing this up. Instead, I find the reasoning of the people who loathed me worth exploring. The extent to which they could not stand me makes me think that their sense of betrayal was entirely sincere. They thought me one of them even if they did not know me, and me getting a career in political journalism felt personal.

On the Internet, people are not allowed to change and time is not allowed to pass. I wonder if it is because everything we have ever posted on, say, Twitter or Facebook, will still be there by default, unless we made the active decision to delete our archives. People confronted me by pulling up posts from 2011 and comparing them to things I had posted in 2017.

The change in tone and opinion looked jarring because the old posts and the new tweets looked exactly the same…”

—Escape: How a generation shaped, destroyed and survived the internet. pp. 211-213

[Nova]

On the Internet, people are not allowed to change and time is not allowed to pass. I wonder if it is because everything we have ever posted on, say, Twitter or Facebook, will still be there by default, unless we made the active decision to delete our archives. People confronted me by pulling up posts from 2011 and comparing them to things I had posted in 2017.

The change in tone and opinion looked jarring because the old posts and the new tweets looked exactly the same…”[/color][/font]

—Escape: How a generation shaped, destroyed and survived the internet. pp. 211-213

THIS THIS THIS.

I understand that the phrase "if it's on the internet, people will never forget it" is a strong thing, but people fail to realize this is but a snapshot of a person's life and that snapshot is only but a temporary glime into who they used to be in the past. Same goes for opinions, they change overtime.

People online get so used to how someone acts on the internet before they leave for who knows how much a period of time, and when they come back they're completely different and to those familiar with the old, it's completely foreign and goes against what they believe in to the point they either denounce them or embrace them (most of the time it's the former), OR try and bring up the old stuff to try and chase them off again.

People are adverse to change if they become comfortabe, forgetting it's neccessary to grow, social media has made it so that stagnancy is good, change is evil. And if something changes, chase it off with what they used to be and ignore the fact the person MIGHT be self-improving or no longer like that.

I can understand if this stemmed from the roots of chasing off people who had shown patterns of being awful online but it's gotten to the point it's being abused GREATLY to a detrimental effect.