Slashdot Mirror
Facebook and Twitter 'Harm Young People's Mental Health' (theguardian.com)
Instagram and Snapchat are really bad for young people's mental health, according to research by two health organisations. Virtually all major social media platforms have a negative impact on the well-being of 14-24-year-olds, the study adds. Instagram was the worst -- followed by Snapchat, Facebook, and Twitter. From a report on The Guardian: Instagram has the most negative impact on young people's mental wellbeing, a survey of almost 1,500 14- to 24-year-olds found, and the health groups accused it of deepening young people's feelings of inadequacy and anxiety. The survey, published on Friday, concluded that Snapchat, Facebook and Twitter are also harmful. Among the five only YouTube was judged to have a positive impact. The four platforms have a negative effect because they can exacerbate children's and young people's body image worries, and worsen bullying, sleep problems and feelings of anxiety, depression and loneliness, the participants said.
No shit sherlock.
Living is the leading cause of death.
Film at eleven!
I smell a class-action suit! Lawyers will not be able to help themselves.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Facebook and Twitter 'Harm Young People's Mental Health'
Facebook and Twitter 'Harm People's Mental Health'. There, FTFY.
Pretty sure Slashdot ruins the mental health of young techies, engineers & scientists aged 18-24.
The only true, and also oldest form of "social media" is IRC. It's all you need and you will actually have to learn things to use it for your first few times.
Has anyone found the actual survey data? I'm curious how the survey was worded.
It makes lots of money so how bad can it be??
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
..b-b-but all my friends!
THEY'RE NOT REAL. GO OUTSIDE, meet REAL people, make REAL friends.
..b-b-but how will I keep in touch with people?
How did you do it before so-called 'social media'? DO IT THAT WAY AGAIN, FOOL!
..b-b-but Facebook brings people together!
LOL, no, it doesn't, it gives them a reason to STAY APART. Knock that shit off!
..b-b-but my boss requires me to have Facebook!
BULLSHIT.
..b-b-but where will I find out what's going on in the world?
YOU IDIOT! Get your news from a REAL NEWS SOURCE, NOT SOCIAL MEDIA, YOU FUCKTARD!
Seriously, isn't it time to abandon this running troll/meme/joke called 'social media'? Or are you STUPID?
so why don't I kill me?
Are they certain it's a casual relationship? If one were to look at a many Facebook and Twitter comments one could just as well conclude that the platforms attract people who already have mental health problems.
I was on IG for about a year and a half, and it was my only form of social media. One day I just realized one day how corrosive it is. I felt like a chicken, always peck peck pecking at my phone, trying to keep up with my feed. I was mainly involved with motorcycle builder, buying/selling parts, etc. People would visciously gang up on others, and do all kinds of nasty things if they didn't like you, or you wouldn't sell parts as cheap as they wanted. I had real-life friends that would get fired up and angry over things that happened on IG. I know people who stopped being friends because of some things that happened in the comments of IG.
I just walked away from it when I woke up to this. Having been around the internet since 1990, I've seen all this stuff before. But with things like IG it has a very low entry point, meaning anyone can join the fray. It's not just for the technically inclined, and quite honestly I think it shows off the worst parts of society. It can do the opposite, but it seems as in life, the ones who make the most noise and are most aggressive ruin it for the rest.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Don't turn that computer on until you put on your Twitter Helmets.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
In school I never understood or tolerated bullying and I was bullied quite a bit. General strategy was to verbally goad the bully into throwing the first punch. I was tall for my age and obese, I usually mopped the floor with them. Fat guy strength is a thing. That generally brought a solid end to the bullying; at least for a good while and never again from the same source. I graduated a few years before MySpace. So when I went home, the whole horrible drama of high-school ended and I could just dial my friends' pagers and play Diablo 2. It was such a relief sometimes to get home. I dreaded going to school but I had a sanctuary at the end of each day. These days it's zero tolerance. Moves I made to thwart bullying would get me expelled in today's schools. It doesn't stop people from being assholes. For these kids the day to day pressure of dealing with social clicks, bullying, being judged, being different, feeling awkward, not fitting in, measuring up... it never ends. They leave the school then go to their screens and it just keeps. on. going. I guess it always did, but at least I didn't have to watch it play out in slow motion on the Internet. How can we get people to just follow Bill & Ted's advice?
One of the two groups, http://www.yhm.org.uk/ Young Health Movement, appears to be a subgroup of https://www.rsph.org.uk/ Royal Society for Public Health.
Looks like a single politically motivated activist group. It is also involved with campaigns to stop smoking, to label alcoholic beverages with calorie information, and the "Health on the High Street" campaign, whose mission is described as to "...ensure that local authorities have the powers they need to curtail business practices which may undermine the public’s health."
In other words, their aim seems to be to increase government intervention—in this case, within the realm of social interaction amongst the proles.
I would interpret this as a thinly veiled attempt to justify some kind of policy to further police language on these platforms to protect those who might be triggered or otherwise require a safe space. It is also kind of a stretch to include YouTube with "social platforms," because that is much more oriented toward pulling desirable content than it is toward open discussion.
I had this conversation with my wife last night. She watches (nowhere near as much as she used to though) several Youtube families. One in particular is a Mormon family with about 5 kids; the father started making the videos years ago and ended up starting a youtube/video production company that got bought out by Disney. So they have literally made millions because of Youtube. In any case, they always projected being the perfect, happy (not so) little family in all of their videos. But it just came out that the father has been fooling around with cam girls and is an alcoholic.
It's a perfect example of why people need to teach children not to put so much stock into social media: all you ever see are the good times, and the personas that people want you to see. It gives children the impression that if their life isn't one exciting or fun event after another then they are missing out or something is wrong with them, which fuels depression. It makes them feel like everyone else is having fun all the time, and gives them unrealistic outlooks on what life is supposed to be like. And this is only part of the problem. Add in the ability of social media to allow bullying to follow children home from school and it's no wonder kids these days have so many issues. Parents really need to be parents and make their kids cut back on the social media. It would all their lives so much easier.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
A lot of users don't understand the purpose behind gamification of social sites; which is primarily to keep you using them.
I've seen users get extremely agitated over follower counts, number of likes, reblogs, retweets, etc. They begin to associate self worth with those statistics. It gets into their heads and makes their lives miserable, yet they continue coming back to the sites / apps to try and increase their widget counts.
I don't know if people get an endorphin rush if their post gets 20,000 [metric] and I certainly don't fully grasp the psychology behind gamification, but can't help but feel like there is something sinister at work (well, beyond the alarming amount of data-mining that is).
crazy dynamite monkey
Or maybe people who have feelings of inadequacy and anxiety choose to use social media in an attempt to mitigate those feelings (futile.)
There have been many studies like this that show social media in general increases feelings of isolation, inadequacy, etc. that were already there. Coming of age is a difficult time for a lot of people, and having a non-stop 24 hour feed of your "friends" posting all sorts of positive status updates, vacation pictures, etc. doesn't help if you're going through a rough time.
- People tend to post either overly positive aspects of their lives on social media. Most people don't post an equivalent number of bad or boring things that happen to them. The exception to this is when people post about their family members dying or similar to try to get some sympathetic reactions.
- Social media narrowly targets your interests and makes it possible to only see one side of things. I heard a pretty scary statistic the other day that the majority of people get their news from Facebook. I tested the results out - created a fake Facebook account and started clicking on and reacting to sensationalist crime stories (every single grisly murder out there, other "shocking" stuff and so on.) Sure enough, the news feed was soon almost 90% crime stories - which could lead someone to assume the world is falling apart because this is all they see.
- The pressure to be online all the time and sharing is unhealthy in my opinion. It takes too much effort to "maintain your social media brand" and constantly put a steady stream of positive comments, likes, pictures, videos, tweets, etc. out there.
If someone's already depressed or suicidal, this narrow targeting of bad news punctuated by glowing updates from your friends could be that push they need. I'm a little surprised that Steve Cornell killed himself, just because he's likely rich beyond anyone's wildest dreams _and_ a famous celebrity to boot. But, maybe I could see that if he felt totally alone. Then again, how could anyone with access to that much money, fame and influence be depressed? There must have been any number of diversions available to him.
Where it would it score on the positive-to-negative impact?
Mod this post up if you think this is a good question.
I'd like to see the raw data. Based on what's in the report I'd have to say I disagree with the conclusions. Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram all show small net negative results, but YouTube shows a large net positive. "Social media", taken as a whole, has a small net positive. This is hardly a "harm to young people's mental health" and a need to take action as the RSPH is demanding.
Of course, the devil's in the details, which are sadly missing. The survey called out 14 factors and asked participants to rate how much each social media platform affected them. The two biggest negative factors across all platforms are "sleep" and "fear of missing out". These don't sound like things that are going to destroy western civilization. On the other hand, all platforms were rated a medium-to-large net positive on "emotional support", "self-expression", and "self-identity". Which do you value more? There's no discussion about how the categories were weighted.
I'd also like to know more about the methodology. How were the 1479 people selected? It makes a difference if, say, 1500 surveys were sent out and they got a 98% response rate, or if 150000 surveys were sent and fewer than 1% could be arsed to send them back. In the former case the data is likely to be representative of the population as a whole, but not so in the latter.
So I'm suspicious that the data were selected to support a pre-determined conclusion. But even taken at face value, the data as shown in the report show only a slight net effect, and a definite positive effect in several important areas. I just don't see any justification for the report's own calls to action.
Young Health Movement
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
Said it before.
Facebook is not a social network, it's is a global mental illness.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Usenet, Plato Talkomatic and Notesfiles, and many others just called and want their due. IRC is a relative newcomer from the late 1980s.
Reruns of Batman and Three Stooges 'Harm Young People's Mental Health'
I heard that back in the early 1970's when I in kindergarten and the early grades. Teachers didn't like kids using their jackets as capes, jumping off high surfaces and screaming "BATMAN!" at the top of their voice, or trying to poke out each other's eyes like the Three Stooges. Fun times.
I'd be happy if there was a built in capability for Android to limit available apps during school hours. We often tell our kids that they can't take their phones to school when it is time for a tune up on late assignments etc, but this has two problems: 1) I got them the phone because the school forces them to take a bus between classes occasionally and I would prefer to know where they are, and 2) most teachers give research time in class and expect kids to do it on their phones, putting my kids at a disadvantage if they don't have their phone that day. Being able to select what applications they can run between 7-3 would certainly be a great thing.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
I could only find this : https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/p.... Had to follow a couple of links. Seriously, this Guardian article should not even be considered when it starts mentioning research and not even providing sources.
It's so easy to say "new technology will doom us all". I'm not using facebook, but I'm always cautious when reading those full-of-bullshit articles.
... according to research by two health organisations. Virtually all major social media platforms have a negative impact on the well-being of 14-24-year-olds,
Researchers need to widen the age range. I imagine social media has a negative impact on most of us.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
"Facebook and Twitter 'Harm Young People's Mental Health'"
Brought to you by the Department of No Shit, Sherlock.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
In my day I had to hang out all day at the nickle arcade and play the "home version" of games on my Atari 800 with Iron Maiden or Metallica on the turntable to harm my mental health!
"The only legitimate use of a computer is to play games." - Eugene Jarvis
Watch out, that might be Canadian cheese you're grating!
Facebook harms my mental health and I don't even use it. Just the anguish of trying to minimize the information they collect about me and how many images of me that normal people share is enough to cause me stress. Maybe those of us who don't use Facebook can sue for the mental anguish of knowing Facebook exists.
Oh, those young people! They should do something wholesome, like rock and roll.