People blame social media, but they never ask why social media is like that. I think that the cultural changes that lead to that have been running for far more time than people give credit for, and that social media is just the proverbial canary on the mine that made things explicit.
Those changes are multi-generational changes, and more probably there are a multitude of factors behind it. Family structure, economy factors, crime, drugs, values and taboos changing too fast, uncertainty about the future.
We will probably won't find a culprit, but if I had to bet, I would say that far reaching event like the Vietnam war, reagonomics, the downsizing mania from the 80's are probably more important factors than the recent creation of social networks. If we have to blame someone, maybe we should be looking at figures like Lee Yacoca, Carl Icahn, and Jack Welch instead of Mark Zukerberg.
To add more idle speculation, I'd posit that a greater culprit is the continued shift toward thinking government should solve all problems. It has a corrosive, disempowering, and discouraging effect on people. Once it has such mind share, government intervention undermines every facet of a healthy society, contributing to the death of small independent business and increasing the concentration of wealth into fewer huge corporations that are protected from honest competition by legislative, judicial, and regulatory capture.
Which all is cited as "proof" that the system doesn't work, and more calls that government should do even more to "solve" it. And the death spiral continues.
Can you elaborate on this? From what I can tell, the outcome that you’re speaking of has occurred for the opposite reason.
Looking at the data for the US, there seems to be an even more exponential curve between 2015-2020, which would imply that these trends could have been further exacerbated by the reduction of government regulation. The same is likely true for the concentration of wealth, the loss in small businesses, disenfranchisement, etc.
I think a possible explanation would be that the increasing desire for more government regulation, or at least functional government, runs counter to the world, which is increasingly ruled by inhuman, (even anti-human) forces. This breeds a desperation in people as they realize that humanity is viewed as a resource, not an end in itself, for the inhuman forces (call it capital, technology, whatever) to consume and mold toward their own ends. While the left is obviously more in favor of “big government”, I think it’s easy to forget that conservatives are also perpetually in rebellion against a government they feel has abandoned the goal of protecting the traditional structures they hold dear, while also delegating the role of speech police and moral authority to the dreaded socially liberal wings of Hollywood and Silicon Valley.
Are you saying that capitalism and technology are inhuman forces? That humans were in some idyllic state before 1800?
Probably not in 1800, but the post-war "big government" era from about 1950's to 1980's (depending on the area) was relatively idyllic in many places.
The government has gotten enormously bigger and more pervasive since then.
Ok, if you say so.
Don't take my word for it. Just take a look at any chart of state/local/federal spending.
No, not at all, just that (post) modern techno-capitalism has grown out of the need to justify itself via appeals to humanism. Another way of looking at this is by considering the difference between life/death drive in psychology as they relate to humanism/anti-humanism and how that manifests in systems.
I have no idea what that means.
Do you really believe that government regulation has been reduced?
Regulation and government involvement in economy very much so. This was/is the core of the neoliberal turn.
Consider all the labor regulations since. All the complexity of the taxes. The design of cars today is completely driven by regulations - for example, the tendency for cars to all look alike comes from regulation of every aspect of them.
Regulation has driven a lot of industry out of America, as it made it too expensive to operate here.
In what area has government been reduced?
Education, for sure.
In tech, while there are some regulations, I definitely believe that more need to be established, especially regarding the topic of the article. Tech is a bit too loose right now, with the exception of the health industry.
Are you sure? Hasn't government K-12 spending per student increased far faster than inflation? And how about all that federal money for student loans?
Keep in mind that money always comes with strings attached.
Yes, the reality is we've been in a starve the beast situation for decades in the US. It's a spiral as the bad actors get to say "See, we have X but X doesn't work" leaving out the conditions they've forced on X to cause these deficiencies. Repeat until the X thing is dead or completely toothless.
Do Danes, Norweigans, Swedes, and Finns agree with you? I doubt it.
Danes, Norwegians*, Swedes, and Finns will have the opinions that their governments tell them to have. Pretty much everywhere in the world and at any year of history, the average citizen will say that his government/president/king/warlord/chairman/pope is the best that has ever been. So "popular opinion" doesn't mean much.
Nowadays it's mostly commercial outlets and interests that tell us what opinions to have.
The idea of the welfare state is so popular around here that even the rightest of the right can't really criticize it much.
Almost all economic reforms are done "to save the welfare state". Especially reforms that slowly dismantle it.
This reads like it was generated by Heritage Foundation GPT.
“The era of big government is over.”
— Bill Clinton, 1990 something
We’re still living in Reagan’s World and they still don’t get it.
Big government has increased by leaps and bounds since Reagan's era ended. Just take a look at the federal budget.
Is Scandinavia poor and miserable?
They do seem rather miserable.
Maybe they just don't have to pretend to be cheerful all the time.
https://worldhappiness.report/ed/2023/world-happiness-trust-...
Hello from socialist Sweden. For generations we have looked to the government to solve a lot of our problems. Can't remember any mental illness epidemic when I was a teen though.
Malmo has some now
What are you 70? It the same here and I would guess in most of the “global Protestant north”
https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/livsvillkor-levnadsvanor....
Well, if the Big Government was not so hellbent on helping making billionaires trillionaires at the expense of the working class, maybe the poor could learn to be more self-reliant.
Pretty hard for a lot of people that doesn't make multiple hundreds of thousands dollars an year to not depend on the government, when lax fiscal policies completely devalue their money while inflating the assets and the pockets of the oligarchic class.
Get real, the oligarchs don't want less government, they want less of the big goverment money going for other people than the oligarchs. Not a single one of them want free markets, not one of them wants fiscal discipline, not a single one of them want real free trade.
They nurture crises for years so they can extract more when we cannot ignore the crisis anymore, and emergency measures are required. They have postponed the energy transition, their foundations and their grants helped to demonize nuclear when we desperately needed for it to evolve and expand. Now we are faced with an emergency, and we are pretending that nobody is going to make loads of money out of renewables, and that probably it is going to be the same people who made lots of money from oil. The bills will explode for the common folk, like they are doing in Europe, and in the end, if we escape deindustrialization, they will use the government to extract money from the people again to finally nuclearize our power generation.
So, if we want to talk about big government, let's talk about big government, but let's be honest and admit that big government, big corporate and big finance are basically siamese twins.
fiscal policies in the US have been very far from "lax" -- they have been highly engineered via "quantitative easing" to artificially grow the economy (the debt, really) through massive money-printing and asset inflation programs.
"Lax" policies would have avoided repeated and continuous intervention and let the chips fall where they may.
I smell a free market libertarian.
if it was true we should see a downward trend in west european countries
This mode of thinking is very prevalent on the left but it’s actually the opposite on the right, which is instead anti government. So it really isn’t a universal shift.
You seem to have formed your conclusion first.
Whenever anything bad happens, there's always a cry for "there oughtta be a law against it!" and laws get crafted and passed when emotions are running high. This doesn't make for good laws.
People are quick to blame social media because there are exceedingly plausible mechanisms by which social media could cause such a phenomenon, and there is tremendous profit in doing so and not just of the money variety. State level actors run secret influence campaigns on facebook, and more recently, just create and control whole social media platforms without oversight.
The time for skepticism about the scale of the effect of social media has passed.
What about the public influence campaigns that are ran openly on television? How well have we managed to quantify the effect that has on the public?
They also take place without any oversight.
People have long complained about television, both in terms of bad behavior of fictional characters and tone of news shows.
At this point, though, young people are far more likely to doom scroll, fantasize about influence or whatever online than they are to be watching television.
It's also worth noting that this is a "teen mental health crisis"- television has been around long enough for several generations to go through teenage years without a similar experience.
In the 1930's movies were blamed for the decay in society. In the 1960's comic books were blamed for teen problems. In the 70's it was rock music.
~ Socrates
Seems like every generation is doomed to lose touch with the next generation and pontificate as to why they are the worst generation yet and everything is falling apart.
Is your conclusion, therefore, that every negative observation about a younger generation is false?
The connection here does seem to be a lot more firm. Teen suicide rates are way up, and they do seem to strongly coincide with widespread smartphone and social media adoption. Do you believe those correlations are just circumstantial?
I have a different theory which is just as plausible.
These teen mental problems are a result in a shift in attitudes in America - the attitude that everyone is a victim, achievement is bad, one should get everything for free rather than the old idea that kids should work for their goodies, the mounds of presents kids get for Christmas, participation awards, everyone gets an A, parental supervision of kids play even into mid teens, and so on.
I.e. the old virtues of industriousness, thrift, personal responsibility, etc., have all but disappeared.
For example, in my day (when people walked uphill to school both ways) kids routinely got jobs as soon as they turned 16. Today, many peoples' first jobs are not until they graduate from college. That's a massive change.
Sure, we complain, and complain, but have we done anything about it?
If anything, we've relaxed our attitudes towards having a 24/7 propaganda box shouting in our living room.
The vast majority of people I know (38m,Germany) don't regularly consume broadcast TV. Even my parents and their peers don't (but to a lesser extent).
how about Netflix and co.?
Netflix's product isn't as good as social media is for getting past our defenses. Also, TV shows must be made for the masses so the propaganda is frequently obvious and the content is less addictive.
But that doesn’t happen at a global level.
The medium is the message!
Advertisements is a global phenomena. Advertisements are often made to make you depressed about your situation, so the more effective they are the more depressed people get.
Yeah that's the whole thing about advertising is it effectiveness scales with the feelings of inadequacy that it generates.
I generally get downvoted hard when I raise my hand as an advertiser, but here goes.
I think scapegoating advertising is a mistake, because I think we're missing the real problem.
Yes, advertising can and often is unethical and harmful. I can't speak for other advertisers, but I take ethics very seriously. I don't participate in advertising aimed at making problems seem bigger than they are for the sake of selling a product. It's effective (in terms of sales), but I wouldn't be able to live with myself if I did that.
But: What exactly changed about advertising around 2010 if we're going to say advertising is responsible for a radical decrease in mental health since that time?
On balance, I don't think advertisers today are less ethical than they ever were. The same bad actors exist. There are more laws today to prevent the worst abuses, but there are still ways to legally manipulate the public that I would consider horribly unethical.
Yes, we have access to more data. But from my perspective, I haven't seen data used effectively for much more than targeting, i.e. prioritizing ad budgets towards the people most likely interested in your product. It still makes me uncomfortable, but can that alone impact mental health at these levels? I don't think so.
And so my problem with scapegoating advertising isn't that it's unfair to advertisers. We deserve a lot of the vitriol sent our way. My problem with it is that if we're wrong in our diagnosis, the real problem(s) remain unchecked.
The vast majority of the people I know in advertising didn't want all this data in the first place. We were happy to just work on creative ideas, to try and paint a product in a new light so that the general public would take notice.
What changed is social media, and the social media companies themselves. I truly believe the problem is with engagement metrics and all the crap they do to keep people addicted. Advertisers, in turn, are forced to play the game, because it's the only game in town. If you're not advertising on social media, you might as well not exist. And if you don't play the engagement game, you might as well not be on there at all. It's a trap.
That's not to say there's no one in advertising who is genuinely content to do harm. They exist. They've always existed. But they didn't, and couldn't have, created the platforms and the algorithms that multiplied the problem since 2010.
Further, when I look at my own use on social media, the most toxic content isn't sponsored content or ads, it's stuff that's gone viral by content creators and political actors. It's "recommended content" that should have been flagged as wildly inappropriate rather than promoted for more engagement. Saying the problem is advertising misses all of that horrible stuff.
So again, not trying to say advertising is good for the soul. Not saying it's a net positive for society (although I think whether or not it's a positive has more to do with WHAT is being advertised than the act of advertising in it of itself).
But let's not mistake advertising as the cause of the mental health crisis, at least not without solid evidence to back that up. I don't think the evidence in the original post would support that conclusion at all.
I think what changed, which is pretty easy to identify is an increased invasiveness in placement and format of advertising.
Advertisements in the past had always been fairly simple to ignore. Billboards, commercial breaks, and print or even radio ads were disconnected from the content.
Today ads are in many cases often indistinguishable, even if labeled from content.
Facebook ads look like regular posts, and many ads ARE regular posts. A fitness podcast talking about their sponsors product with the same tone and passion as the content or simply being paid to influence on a product.
Everyone pretty universally used to recognize and be annoyed by commercials and pay little attention to ads.
Now, especially young people, can barely even recognize ads. Especially those done by so called influencers which are just part of the regular content flow.
Google, Amazon, And Facebook are 3 of the 6 largest companies in the US and are effectively advertising companies.
That's a huge change.
That type of content has always existed, though. They were called advertorials. Endless books going back to at least the 40s advocated making ads look as similar to regular content as possible for the very effect you're describing.
So I'm not arguing that that's not a bad thing. It is a bad thing, in my opinion. Anything that's done to deceive the audience in any way is unethical.
I'm saying it's not new, and certainly didn't suddenly take off in 2010. It's been a mainstay in mass media for almost as long mass media has existed.
Further, what Facebook has done is treat all ads the same as regular content. That's not something advertisers chose to do; it's something Facebook chose to do. Blaming advertisers for a decision they had no part in is missing the mark.
To be clear, I think many advertisers are probably pretty happy with what Facebook did there. But that's not the same as the advertisers being responsible for that decision. Facebook did it because it led to more clicks and therefore more revenue for Facebook. Same thing with how Google has progressively made search ads nearly indistinguishable from regular search results. Advertisers didn't do that. Google did. Advertisers didn't decide to make the first 75% of results on Amazon be sponsored or promoted products. Amazon did that themselves.
They're media companies, not advertisers. They sell advertising, as virtually all media companies do (with exception for publicly funded or high-subscription-fee companies). Advertisers buy advertising space.
So if your argument is that Google, Amazon, and Facebook are making advertising worse, I agree. If your argument is that advertisers (the people buying the ads) are making things worse, and that this correlates to the drop in mental health, I don't completely discount the theory; but I'd need to see a lot more evidence to support that contention.
My childhood memories of advertising was:
• Slushy machine!
• Buy our cereal, it has a buff friendly tiger with a dashing neckerchief!
• Buy our chocolate, the sexy cartoon rabbit lady/ambassadorial guests say it's wonderful!
• Here's a small man made of butter playing a trombone!: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGHLriHhvtg
• This anthropomorphic telephone wants you to get a loan!
• Weird adverts that turned out to be for perfume or sometimes beer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mp646_H_xo
None of this seemed to be aiming at getting anyone depressed.
None of this seemed to be aiming at getting anyone depressed.
Every single one of those adverts gave the message "If you don't buy this product you'll be unhappy/unattractive/hungry/missing out/uncool." Every single one. None of them aim to make people depressed, but they all do exactly that if you don't buy the product.
It's worth noting that all the adverts you remember are for products that were wildly successful at the time. People are very willing to pay to avoid being unhappy, even if when the message is coming from a cartoon rabbit.
People can't take television everywhere as easily as we take social media apps with an ever increasingly refined UI in our phones.
Social media is far worse because (A) cutting off social media cuts part of your social connections too (B) social media is an effectively infinite feed so it's harder to get bored and ignore it (C) social media is algorithmically customized to your preferences and TV by definition isn't.
Social media didn't cause the problem, but it very much accelerated it. I think the media aspect of it is related to the uptick in 24-hour news that began with Ted Turner and CNN, and got its own acceleration with 9/11. Social media sort of piggybacked onto that and blew it wide open.
"The problem with capitalism is not that it creates problems for humans but that it exploits the problems that we would have regardless, drastically exacerbating the consequences."
–Chris Cutrone
Capitalism solved many problems, like regular famines.
It also created other famines.
Example?
Even if it did, the average height increase the world over shows that capitalism has been an enormous win in food production and elimination of starvation.
Wow, I think the exact opposite. The wonder of capitalism is that it harnesses the problems that we would have regardless and at least points them in the general direction of social benefit. At least I can't think of any other system of economic organization that has been tried in the history of the world that I would prefer.
s/social media/books/g
Social media is nothing like books. It's also nothing like eBooks, Wikipedia, regular discussion forums, telephones, etc. Modern social media has some completely novel characteristics that are responsible for its damaging effects on mental health.
- It's optimized to "maximize engagement," which is code for making it addictive. When anyone says engagement in our industry it's usually a euphemism for addiction.
- It does this by sorting content to present "engaging" content first, which due to how humans' brains are wired tends to be content that is emotionally triggering in some way.
- It's primarily consumed on a device that people carry with you and that has an interface that makes infinite scrolling easy, replicating the basic design of a slot machine.
There were dumb panics about books, but citing those to dismiss concerns over social media is intellectually lazy. They are very, very different things. Books don't watch you while you read them and fine-tune their content in real time to maximize the amount of time you spend reading them.
Sounds like the rack of newspapers and magazines that have now disappeared from the newsstands, which now sell consumer packaged goods.
Fair point comparing infinite scroll to slot machines. Books end, newspapers and magazines get thrown away. Always more to scroll.
Wikipedia on its own with zero-cost internal hyperlinks was also addictive. There were people going down Wikipedia rabbit holes well before they were getting themselves into Youtube rage bubbles.
That's to say-- I think it matters what one is getting addicted to.
Society can bounce back from people who got addicted to studying too much of various bona fide topics like constitutional law and industrial hygiene.
On the other hand, society would have a harder time recovering if a critical mass of citizens are quantized to mostly low-effort rabbit holes, like believing the earth is flat, or fiat declarations that maritime and common law are the only legally binding forms of constitutional power.
People made the same arguments about violent video games (a major panic in the 1990s), about youth literature, about Dungeons and Dragons, and so on. All about depraving children and getting them hooked on smut for profit.
Social media is "adversarial" in the sense that yeah, most platforms want to maximize engagement, and maximized engagement might not be best for you. But that's also the relationship you have with companies selling you sugary food or expensive shoes. They're not your friends and they want you to spend money in ways that might not benefit you. We manage.
Ultimately, you have agency to shape your experience. You're not "addicted" to it any more than one gets "addicted" to chocolate or Louis Vuitton. Social media ended up replacing social life for many teens, and it's probably useful to ask why - this isn't Mark Zuckerberg's design.
At some point, adults in the developed world decided at some point that it's not OK for children to play unsupervised outdoors, walk to school on their own, and so on. It's probably a function of increasing standard of living and plummeting birth rates. Just 50-100 years ago, you had multiple children with the expectation that not all of them will make it to adulthood. Nowadays, most families will have one kid - their single most important "investment" - and they have the means to tightly monitor and control their physical environment. The internet is sort of the only place where you can meet with friends and have fun unsupervised. It's an escape hatch.
I don't see how banning or regulating TikTok or Facebook really solves this.
The algorithmic feed and what is shown is absolutely by design. I don't use social media so I don't know how good / bad it is but there's clearly intent.
Comparing social media or Youtube to literature or D&D doesn't really work for me. This is more akin to a billion channel cable service where your remote only works some of the time. You use it to socialize with your friends, but you're also forcefed content that you didn't ask for, that may or may not be good for your mental health.
And yes, adults have agency but this article is about teens who have agency but are still growing and don't have the experience to make good decisions.
They aren't the same arguments at all. All of those things are about the occasional indulgence of a hobby vs the time sink of constantly sitting on your phone and spending time with companies that want ALL of your time. Companies that, themselves, have lots of internal reporting concluding their platforms increase division and cause mental health issues.
I don't see how you can compare it to Chocolate? It's in our pocket and it's infinite.
Well said! Here is a phrase from TFA:
We can take this even further: it's a Phone-Based Education and Social Discourse
What has happened in the "Anglosphere" is that we have opened a for-profit Pandora's Box of resentful and manipulative discourse that makes no damned sense to people who are looking to their society for sense and guidance.
As you say, the system is full of manipulative actors. Not all of them are foreign.
Social media is like that because it was deliberately designed to be addictive and we have a decade of documentation to back that up.
That is something I've been think about, what if social media wasn't designed to be addictive? There shouldn't be anything inherently wrong in keeping in contact with your high school buddies on Facebook, so what if all the doom scrolling, likes, and corporate profiles where removed from Facebook? Would it be safer?
I think there's are huge risk that we are about to realize that either social media cannot be made safe, at all, or that it has been made dangerous in order to make a profit. Either way is terrifying and should lead to a larger skepticism of new technology. The horrible reality of social media, and the ad funded Internet is what has fueled my reluctance to accept crypto currency and AI into my life, as much as it is within my control to do so.
People have been screaming that at the top of their lungs for years.
But what do we do with that information? Un-invent social media, ban it? How would such a ban work and what should it cover?
At this point I feel like we should pick a time in history, say the late 1930s or 1940s, somewhere around there, and use that as a frame of reference. Any new technology would be assessed based on the value added to average persons life, vs. the overall cost to society and the planet. Only if it hit a certain threshold is it to be implemented. Social media is out right away, negative impact on individual and society and provide little value that postcards and "letters from the readers" didn't already cover.
That's a very romantic approach ("good old times"), but it's fundamental broken even if we could implement it.
The late 1930s and 1940s weren't exactly the greatest time to be around, and using that as a yardstick sets us up for a large downhill climb. And then there's the problem that often, changes interact with each other, and their full value (or cost) is only clear when it's together with other inventions.
You can't ask "what would social media in a 1930s society be like, what's the impact". It requires the existence of computers, of the Internet, of ubiquitous device access. These require advanced electronics, rocketry, etc etc.
This also goes in the opposite direction - a "social media is out right away" would end up leaving a ton of people completely isolated. It can't be simply undone, the genie is out of the bottle. (It might also require removing all group texts apps, and you go from there)
We can only do what we've always done - assess risks before implementing, possibly implement, assess actual changes after implementing. There is no idyll we can return to. Only daily work to make things better.
My grandfather used to say: So when was the good old times, because I don't remember them? He was born in 1921.
The point of picking a somewhere in the past would be to avoid debating which things we'd want to get rid of, and instead focus on which technologies would we have adopted, if we had the current knowledge of it's ramifications. E.g. we'd skip the mass adoption of internal combustion engines and go for EVs if we had the full future vision and technology in 1940, so we should get rid of gas and diesel cars.
To it was just to have a reference point where living standards where fairly high and where most of us wouldn't be completely lost, and use that as a starting point for judging the value of various technologies.
Banning dragnet spying and/or making retaining data about people very risky, has some chance of killing algorithm-feed social media (by drying up ad dollars) and would be a good thing to do anyway.
Making companies liable not for content they host or deliver/show to an explicit recipient or set of recipients, but for content they both host and actively elect to promote, would kill the algorithm feed, suggested videos, et c, but not ordinary Internet hosting services or messaging platforms (or even traditional forums!).
Neither is impossible, and either would probably be good to do anyway.
If the core problem is companies shoving shit at you based on what drives "engagement" and with little regard for anything else, those are policies to look at.
Just banning more or less all advertising would probably do the trick. In general advertising and marketing are an even bigger problem for mental health too.
Cost presupposes value. If I'm the buyer in a transaction, I am trading value in exchange for value. The 'cost' is value that I am parting with.
I'm making this pedantic argument to say "cost to society or the planet" is the same as saying that "society" and "the planet" value things, and that those values are at odds with what the individual values.
The concept of "value" presupposes the question "of value to whom and for what?" Only individual people can value things. "Society" is just an arbitrarily defined group of individuals, each with their own values. So at best, what "society" values is what the majority of the individuals within that group value. And "the planet" is a rock. It values nothing.
While I don't think it's your intent, this word game (what "society values") is often used as a sneaky way of justifying transferring value from certain individuals to other individuals. Whoever gets to "represent society" gets to place their values first and claim that it's OK to target the individuals that are "costing society."
The way to approach the issue of social media causing damage is to demonstrate that it is providing a dis-value to all individuals and that each and every individual has healthier alternatives that they can choose that present a greater net value. In some extreme cases, if there is no healthy alternative, and the majority of individuals decide that the dis-value is great enough, they may vote to pass legislation to make the "thing" in question either more expensive or illegal ... such as with the case of tobacco for example.
In broad terms, you've basically described the Amish.
But who gets to decide this? How do you prevent people from making new unapproved technology and using it?
Decentralize it, so that nobody is able to make it more addictive for profit.
I’m curious, what if there is something inherently wrong with having too many superficial connections? What if it’s replacing all deep connections, and part of the reason people are feeling unfulfilled?
Or maybe there's also a problem with social media removing friction. E.g. I want to find out what my old high-school buddy is up to, but instead of meeting up of having a phone call, his updates are pushed to my feed, removing the impetus for real social contact.
Software engineers can be weird people (e.g. hyper-introverted) who are averse to thinking through the impacts of the technology they're building. Then there are entrepreneurs whose search for successful products effectively turns them into psychopaths. These are the people who are architecting our society.
Social media in the late 2000s was basically this. It was before they really figured out how to super-charge the addictiveness. I remember it and it was a lot less toxic.
Media in large groups was always toxic.
BBSes were, once they exceeded a certain size threshold. Usenet had its toxic corners. Large IRC channels without strong moderators were a hellscape.
There are two ingredients to toxicity, as far as I can tell. One is sheer size of a group - you get a million people in a room, you have 1000 assholes of a 1-in-a-1000 caliber in there. It's a pure numbers game.
The second is strong moderation. Moderation that actively intercedes at the first sign of toxicity keeps group conversations less toxic. (For the free speech argument here: I believe we're better off with moderated groups as long as everybody is free to run their own moderated group. Everybody is free to speak, but the rest of the world must be free to choose to not listen - this is where big social media really fails)
Ask Metafilter made the point that possibly "cost of entry" might help as well, but I strongly believe that's ultimately the size argument combined with selection bias reducing the need for moderation.
So what you remember as "less toxic" might well just be "social media was smaller back then". Or more selective groups.
Social media not designed to be addictive includes hacker news and PHP bulletin boards. Early Facebook might qualify as a relatively unaddictive UX as well, though they quickly started with the "optimizations".
There's nothing inherently "wrong" with communication, which at its simplest form is what "social media" is. It is just communication, with media. We have had this for a long while.
The difference came when the businesses started optimising for engagement rather than happiness or connectedness to friends.
Using engagement, which drives ad revenue, as the metric for success means you design a system that is addictive.
The issue is optimising for engagement because humans are hardwired to find certain things moreish. Our dopamine system is easily abused and hijacked.
Digital communication is good. Engagement optimisation is bad. This means businesses need another model of revenue outside ad revenue, which sadly is the most profitable.
At a lower level, capitalism thrives on over-consumption. Fast fashion, doom scrolling, high-waste food produce supply chains; it's all over-consumption that takes advantage of human psychology to fuel energy gradients from which profits can be found as cash transits across the gradient as people expend energy maintaining it.
This might sound reductive, but until we realise that sustainability in ALL things is very important, and we built that into consumer mindset, we will keep being hijacked on every front.
The question is, how do we design things that are SUSTAINABLE from revenue to user psychology? Given that we can't collectively manage to do that to save our own planet, I don't hold much hope in us even looking for an answer. The system is broken. Sustainability isn't profitable. Humans are myopic.
Agreed. It's like dining out versus having a healthy home cooked meal. Restaurants will sell you delicious food loaded with sodium, sugar, and fat because they want you to crave their food. Likewise, when you outsource your family values, entertainment, news to social media, you meet a similar problem.
Relatedly, beware of the hidden ads in social media. It takes much less money to astroturf a community like reddit than to advertise through conventional means (e.g. commercials, product placements, banner ads). You may be aware of ads on youtube, but you may not be aware of the ads in the comment section. I've seen youtube comments as follows:
</ad scam>That was my re-enactment of their discussion. Sure, that was an example of an obvious ad. But think of all the times you read a conversation about a product or service and became convinced to try something just based on a conversation between two supposed strangers online? I've never bought anything from a conventional ad, but I've purchased plenty of things after reading what the socials say about a product, and that makes me ashamed of myself. Word of mouth is effective for a reason, but it's insidious online. And that's where they get you. Steel your mind, when online.
What's worse is that people do genuinely advertise products they like, so it's hard to tell if a conversation is astroturfing. I've done the same thing. I see it particularly for video games and software. There's a meme about how Hollow Knight fans advertise it so much that they suggest you play Hollow Knight even if you were asking about a completely different genre.
All this can go to 100x with generative AI, unfortunately.
I don't even know anymore where to get reliable information about...anything.
For-profit actors make their products as “palatable” as possible. Amazing.
More likely the libertine social movements of the sixties leading to a breakdown of social standards and family life.
While it may be taboo to say so, I believe this is a strong factor. Most changes in life have tradeoffs, winners and losers. Divorce may be great for the general happiness of the adults involved, but despite all boomer rationalizations in the line "I can raise happy kids if I am not absolutely happy", it generally sucks for kids.
What does that even mean?
You just said it, and it's also been said by countless people ever since the aforementioned 60s.
It's not taboo, it's trite.
it’s taboo because they are advocating a limitation of rights for one party to benefit another others
the us isn’t a collective society but an individualistic one
I think you mean simply "controversial".
If it was trite, there wouldn't be as much resistance to it. It's important to use words accurately. Contentious, controversial, unpopular, iconoclastic maybe, not trite.
Idk, as a young adult with divorced parents, I can say with utmost certainty I was better off with them separate rather than putting up with each other in the same house I grew up in
I grew up in a dysfunctional family, and while the breakup was tough, it was miles better than listening to my parents screaming their heads off at each other (after drinking) every night. Maybe the boomers thought divorce was good not because of their own happiness, but because many of them experienced the "stick together at all costs" culture of their parents and didn't want to put their kids through that.
What would reagonomics and the Vietnam War have to do with teen mental health in say northern Europe?
Everything.
(Username not related)
Please explain?
A lot, I recommend finding a library subscription to read a portion of "Diplomatic History - Europe and the Vietnam War: A Thirty-Year Perspective" [0].
The effect was quite dramatic for all of Europe. Way too many things to even enumerate here.
[0] https://www.jstor.org/stable/24915113
Everything US spreads to Europe. If you follow American politics, you'll notice the talking points dripping down with some delay of some months or year.
Nothing, except that the poster was probably at an age where his or her worldview became cemented around that time.
There will be people in 50 years from now blaming everything bad that happens in 2074 on Trump.
It's capitalism. That's the answer you're looking for
We had capitalism for a LONG time before we had the international teen mental illness epidemic.
And this teen epidemic would be the first complaint I’ve heard lodged against capitalism. Can’t be that.
Not this level of capitalism. The post-war consensus economy of the west had heavy state intervention and economic involvement.
Things started to change towards "free market" neoliberalism (AKA voodoo economics) in around the 1970's, and the rate of the change exploded after the fall of Soviet Union.
So long as we're making sweeping claims without any attempt at supporting them, you're wrong, this is all downstream from the Protestant Reformation.
Capitalism (an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit) was invented prior to written history so the reformation only exists in the context of private property being a core assumption of society. That assumption is NEW in the history of humanity, the concept of "property" has only existed for about 50,000 years
The protestant reformation then was an attempt to wrest property away from the catholic organization and distribute it. The goal being to eliminate the primary economic organization and "democratize" it.
The concept of hoarding property flowed from scarcity anxieties that are only socially maintained and hoarding property is the root issue
You can read my proof here: https://kemendo.com/Myth-of-Scarcity.html
Comrade, have you ever studied the history of the USSR? Give it a try, it's fun. It tells a story how 1/6 of the planet's land surface for 80 years was turned into garbage. They did it with one simple trick.
There’s very little doubt that social media is hard to use in a positive way these days, and very little doubt that a race to the bottom on all our worst impulses is a big part of that. But the causal arrow is trickier.
The exact time period over which social media has become front and center in daily life is the same period of time in which we’ve watched financial crisis (massive net wealth transfer to the richest) move into loony ZIRP stuff / asset bubbles and attendant massive net wealth transfer to the richest, explode into a cultural war that seems pretty clearly about wealth inequality and social mobility underneath the tribalism paint job (the tribalism stuff is real but people living great don’t go in for populism in insane numbers) slide into a disastrously mishandled pandemic (during which we blew through all previous notional and discounted measures for what rich means), and now everyone is being told that inflation and unemployment are good (they’ve been cooking the CPI forever, that was going on in the 90s that I’ve seen, this made up stuff about abundant good jobs is new).
So whether it’s teens or Gen Z or whatever the case: they have parents and older siblings and can guess about their prospects. Your parents going crazy from economic stress or your adult sibling moving back home has got to be at least up there with unhealthy kinds or amounts of screen time as a stressor.
Now AI is looking like nothing but the biggest lever for hockeystick inequality in history and is overwhelmingly controlled by a few people who give many the creeps.
Is an unhealthy retreat into screen time (and fentanyl) the cause of social collapse? Or are people embracing escapism, tribalism, and substances while eschewing social activities and even sex because the donor class is going for the jugular and they’re looking to pull it off?
So yeah, I think you’re on to something looking a little further back, but it at a minimum very correlated with mortgage meltdown to the present.
China, India, Poland, Australia and Brazil weathered the 2008 financial crisis relatively well. Poland and Australia avoided a recession entirely.
Yet the rise in teen mental health is still in parallel in all of the above nations with those heavily affected by the crisis.
Also retrospective studies of areas that adopted smartphones well after the financial crisis showed delayed effects that make it implausible to tie them to the crisis.
Horseshit. I use Facebook and Instagram and love both. When I see something I don't like, I click the 'Don't show me stuff like this' option. I have an endless feed of old european castles, guitars and a couple other obscure hobbies & interests. I have learned things about my hobbies I never would have otherwise and practice them at a higher level.
Even what you describe is an incredibly poor method of consuming information. There's no reasonable way to say you wouldn't have otherwise learned about something just because you learned about it in the way you did.
I learned far more quality information about my hobbies when there were vast Internet forums of users dedicated to discussing them.
Facebook groups and other social media has supplanted most of those forums but presents the information in a much more inferior fashion. However it creates far more engagement by exploiting the same principles as gambling addiction or animal training. Variable expectation of results and the level of work required, scrambling the feed, burying information, creating an inconsistent expectation of experience. That in and of itself wreaks havoc on brain chemistry and brings forth depression just like gambling addiction.
Those rich people created the wealth. Wealth was not "transferred" to Bill Gates, for example.
Gates created products. He then sold these products to people, who believed those products were worth the money they paid for them - i.e. it was an equal value trade. That is how Gates made money. It wasn't a transfer.
Theft, taxes, donations, subsidies and welfare are examples of a transfer of wealth.
This is the kind of worldview that comes from years of navel-gazing in a therapist's office. "Why do I beat my kids? ...Because my father beat me! Now that I understand why I do it, I can stop beating my kids..." Or, you could just stop beating your kids.
It doesn't matter why it happens, it just matters that it happens. But instead of preventing or discouraging kids (or people in general) from using social media, you can blame the ghost of Ronald Reagan--the gift that keeps on giving.
Which of these approaches is more likely to result in someone changing their behaviour? Is there any evidence that advice to “just stop X” is as or more effective than causally aligned methods?
What an unusual attitude for an engineer to have. I suppose you fix bugs by “just not writing bugs in the first place”, too.
There is clear evidence that taking longer to stop beating your kids is more harmful to them so less effective than just stop beating them.
This is funny because most therapists these days practice CBT or one of its variants, which is explicitly focused on behaviors and outcomes and gives minimal weight to investigating "root causes" like that. The kind of worldview that comes from never doing therapy I guess.
I understand such therapy is rather formatted that when the patient asks “why do I strike my children?” the therapy looks not for root causes but immediate ones. “What do you feel leading up to these violent incidents? Once you understand that, it becomes your choice to head them off.”
Now Reagan caused teen mental illness, too?
What's next, Reagan caused Covid?
He's responsible for a ton of AIDS deaths, so we'll let him be with one pandemic.
Now Reagan caused the worldwide epidemic of a mysterious disease of unknown origin?
No, he just ignored it.
https://www.vox.com/2015/12/1/9828348/ronald-reagan-hiv-aids
Don’t forget The War In Vietnam
The medium is the message.
For folks who don’t know, this is a great read and explores how we are connected and communicate is more important than what is communicated. Highly highly recommend.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Medium_Is_the_Massage
The slightly alternative title is a play on words that was originally an error.
I have to say that I was very interested in the ideas but found the book barely readable.
Please explain to me how The War In Vietnam is causing a mental health crisis today
I'm really not sure how OP meant with the "Reaganomics"; In regard to the Vietnam War, it caused a major mental health & drug crisis in the U.S. that greatly increased homelessness, addiction rates, issues with child rearing that is being felt today now that those kids are adults, etc.
Vietnam was terrible on the home-front.
Undermining trust in institutions.
Prior to the truth of the Vietnam war coming out, ordinary Americans tended to gave the benefit of the doubt to the government. They lost the baby boomer’s trust with Vietnam.
Bush 43’s Iraq war did the same to Gen X.
For Millenial Americans it was the government’s ruinous response to the 2008 financial crisis.
Then the COVID debacle happened.
Fast forward to the present moment where the vast majority of Americans have never seen functional institutions in their or their parent’s or grandparent’s lifetime.
A shockingly high percentage of gen z colleagues I speak with see government institutions, the American government itself, healthcare, tech, banking, capitalism, etc to be a giant scam. They believe they’re on their own and cannot count on society in any way for support.
They feel like they’re alone in the woods. I think it contributes to their anxiety.
No, what you are saying is factually wrong. Now if you are lying or just wrong would depend on how much of your income depends on it.
The culprit is manipulated mass media, the current version of it is social media so before mark Zuckerberg the culprit was television owners, not whatever excuse you are trying to find to not blame media.
Social sciences and psychology are not physics or math. Your extreme confidence in your preferred explanation is not warranted by the current record of social and psychological sciences.
You may well be right, I concede that I also believe that mass media is at least part of the explanation, but I don't think we should act so certain and refuse the debate. The current state of psychology and social sciences don't warrant by now this extreme level of confidence in a handful of studies that seems to corroborate this hypothesis.
My preferred explanation (and the post preferred explanation) is the one with most evidence available. Yours is a very strange theory that got ranked above all the discussion about the negative influence of social media and the responsibility of the owners and workers. We are past the time to think that this is coincidence.
Social media is of course not responsible for all our problems, but I do blame specifically social media for making people (including myself) who are materially well off and live a comfortable life irrationally angry about things outside of their control and think that everything is going to get worse and worse (which is a reinforcement loop because then some of these people start exhibiting destructive behaviour which does make things worse).
I know the various social media companies supposedly optimize for engagement and angry posts supposedly do best as that ...
I can't imagine an entirely neutral social media platform would be any different.
people are going to follow whoever engages them the most. the inventives, regardless of the algorithms used, are exactly the same. no manipulation by the social media companies required. all that's needed is a public voice and followers
Of course, people are people and react to certain stimuli.
But I still remember the internet of old. Not only the small, semi-gated internet forums, but at also when Facebook just started out and you would just talk to your friends and not everything would be about polarising subjects.
This is clearly something that has changed due to social media algorithms, though maybe as a society we're now already brainwashed by it and I'm not sure if we can go back.
Social media is an amplifier of negative aspects of social interaction. We've not had anything like that before.
The algorithms are aimed at farming attention for the paying customers; advertisers. To do that, the algorithms shovel outrage, instant trends, negativity, and massively amplified in-group out-group dichotomies... They do all of this on purpose. This is new.
None of today's teenagers are impacted by the Vietnam war, by Reagan, or anything from the 80s at all. Gen X felt those things. But a teenager today was born between 2003 and 2010. Most of them don't even know who Jack Welch is or that Chrysler used to be one of the "Big 3" (and used to be called Chrysler). But they know what TikTok is, they know Twitter, and Twitch, and YouTube, and Instagram. And they suffer from interacting with a system designed to manipulate attention. These systems are far more immediately detrimental to mental health, especially for someone entering adolescence when negative emotional complexes arise naturally as a neurological consequence of maturing, than any of the business or political activities of the 80s.
Zuckerberg's own company had studies that showed this to be true. Studies that showed dramatic increases in suicidal tendencies among teenage girls on social media as compared to those who avoided it, for example. They know their systems are harmful. Social media is this generations Big Tobacco.
If we have to blame someone, maybe we're looking at exactly the right people in 2024 when we cast our gaze at Zuckerberg, Pichai, and the government running TikTok.
Yeah, it is just weaponized 24/7 always online peer pressure and bullying that follows you around in your pocket. Kids have always been awful and now its harder to escape them than ever before. Unless someone has convincing evidence that the obvious cause isn't the real cause there's no need to start getting so counterintuitively clever by searching for other explanations.
11 years ago I visited Lombok, and island adjacent to Bali in Indonesia, where people generally lived very traditional village lifestyles and most adults over 30 were illiterate. They had recently been provided 4g cellular coverage, and all the teenagers and young adults were lounging around doomscrolling Facebook lite on their $50 android phones. There was no multigenerational transition for them.
Literacy was over 95% in 2010 in Indonesia. It takes 5 seconds to Google for it. Since most of Indonesia are Moslems, they learn to read the Koran at an early age. Yes, I know that small parts of Lombok are Hindus.
None of these ring a bell here in China. My Indian friends are probably unaffected by Carl Icahn, yet the problem is present there too.
Social media is an artifact of the internet spreading, it will fade away or we'll adapt to it, but during the transition period, people who cannot deal with it are being rejected, somewhat violently. It's like blaming the depression of horse riders on the war policies of the time.
I think the wide gist of this point is correct, but then you're going and doing something a lot of people responding are also doing, which is ignoring the finding and pointing to specific historical factors that apply to your country.
The only real constant I can see across all countries is increasing interconnectedness, human movement, and rate of change. Kids increasingly find themselves living in a world far different from their parents and even more radically different from their grandparents. Laws, culture, school, and parenting all can't adapt quickly enough. If social media is doing anything on its own, it's the same as what regular media was doing but bigger and faster. More information is coming at you from more directions, your parents and family don't know about it, it's increasingly less trustworthy (compare viral Tweet to Nighttime News to wisdom handed down from a grandparent), the perspectives are increasingly divorced and different from what your family or culture would have presented to you.
It's a lot. None of it is necessarily bad. But it's a lot. If dealing with anything at all presents a challenge, then dealing with more of it presents more of a challenge. The threats humans face are increasingly benign, threats to beliefs and identity even as health, hunger, and survival are mostly taken care of. But there are nonetheless more of them and they come at you faster, at least if you stay connected and pay attention, and the human psyche is not equipped to deal with that. We do well with one major threat every few days that is familiar. It may be a tiger lurking in the trees that can kill us, but we know they're there and there aren't a lot of them. Four mean kids at school can't kill you, but they may torment you every single day. A social media feed full of bad events, people telling you the world is terrible, people telling you your culture is terrible, whatever it is, may be "words" rather than sticks and stones, but even if they hurt less, they do hurt, and there are so many more of them. Think of differences in experience from living on an island with a few giant predators who might attack once a month on average, mostly in a specific season, and you're good all the rest of the time, compared to being perpetually covered in mosquitoes and rats. It's breaking a leg but healing compared to chronic pain that never goes away.
Modern life, first with newspapers and cities, then with schools and office politics and rat races, then with 24 hour news cycles and political horseraces, now with social media, and trending toward the latter. The threats are individually tiny but there are so damn many of them that people feel overwhelmed if they can't step back and disconnect.
This is true everywhere and has nothing to do with unions disappearing or the breakdown of family values in the US. These are just the manifestations of modernity as they happened here, but something analogous and equally anxiety inducing happened somewhere else.
Social media is like that because a dopamine slot machine is about the best way to get people wired up ton stare at their phones all day, which it turns out is profitable for the people making the slot machine.
Social media is like that because people are like that. The only way you’re changing based human instincts is through punishments like we’ve done in real life or gatekeeping of information.
It truly incredible how every bad thing is caused by the politicians and leaders I hate. What a coincidence.
The linked substack frequently asks why social media is like that.
Yeah, I'd be more willing to say it's the collapse of community oriented society in a lot of places along with a general feeling of economic despair (you'll own nothing and be happy).
Because they value profits over anything else? The only thing they care about it is having people spend more and more time on the webpages. You'd be surprised at the caliber of talent that spends their valuable years optimising for this. More ad revenue at the expense of mental health is totally acceptable for interwebs comps.
During COVID when the world got inside we just realised how sick 'social connection' sites are, from doomscrolling to outsourcing self-esteem to Tinder. It's an organised system of hijacking attention and minds.
While I agree with the point that the causes of the current trend might be intergenerational, I think that this very important to mind fact is irrelevant for the topic.
Social media is a problem to in societies and economies that are wildly different to the US, unless you mean us forming modern societies with groups bigger than 100 people is the problem or you mean those factors lead to the shape of social media as we have it today.
I would imagine that social media would fuck with teenagers in ancient Rome in a similar way than it would with todays teens. There is something universal there.
The problem is that social media in the way they are structured have zero incentives to build good structures for young adults to thrive in and 100% incentives to keep them in a state where they can be influenced. And that is an astable state of insecurity. Which is why many want to be influencer, because then at least you are the one doing the influencing.
This is like trying to dismiss cigarette/cancer links by pointing out that we have also built more power plants and have more cars and our lifestyles have changed and that must be why we have more lung cancer.
No, it's cigarettes.
I refer to social media companies as "tobacco companies of the mind."