Social media may harm kids. US Surgeon General says so The US Surgeon General on Tuesday issued an advisory warning that social media, despite potential benefits, presents a risk to the mental health of children and adolescents. The advisory [PDF], by Surgeon General Dr Vivek Murthy, is intended to call attention to the widespread use of social media by young people. It focuses on …
Don't be silly.
I am not a user of social media. But I know many people who are. And almost without exception it is a major benefit to them. They keep in better contact with friends and family, they can access interesting content and services they need, they can get information on new or important topics, they can be comforted by their friends when they have problems, etc etc. Some of them are disabled and it is literally life-changing to be able to be in contact instead of isolated as they would have been in the past.
Sure - social media wastes a lot of time, but so does TV or any other entertainment. Although I don't use it, I respect that 99.999% of people who do find it beneficial.
Those are certainly positives, but you've completely skipped the (very) bad bits: echo chambers, political and social extremism of all sorts, intolerance (by all sides), "othering" particular groups (and I don't just mean minorities). The list goes on.
Also, girls are suspected to be more susceptable to the negatives of social media, making them feel more anxiety and feeling attacked (this a generalisation, of course).
A large part of why people are as crazy as sometimes they are online is down to the above and it's wide spread and seemingly getting worse. It's also affecting institutions and certainly the media, who have behaved like activists rather than (at much as they can be) neutral parties trying to bring us the news.
I don't like social media, but I think I have to defend them here. Their comment is in reply to this:
> ...despite potential benefits...
I have yet to figure out what they may be.
They may not have been saying that social media is great on balance. They were just trying to explain the benefits that cause users to use the platforms. We all understand that these things have features that people enjoy using as well as their many detrimental aspects, so it's a bit disingenuous to pretend as if they're purely negative for their users, even if their positives are not things we're interested in.
Sure: extremism & intolerance is present. But it just doesn't appear in most people's feeds. Ordinary people get a feed of (in my opinion) dull stuff about what their friends and neighbours are doing. They seem to like it. The "bad" stuff that goes by they can ignore - just like they ignore the drunk guy ranting on the street.
I do agree that the media are choosing to try to "compete" by dumbing down. That is unfortunate but hardly the fault of a tool which provides people with easier ways to gossip and chat instead of reading serious media.
Both a false equivalency AND an irrelevant whataboutism.
Both kill people/kids. One they might be able to do something about short time by getting a consensus and setting regulations. The other is a hot button issue (sometimes driven by that same social media) that SHOULD be geting a lot more thought and attention (and regulation. imho, as a non USian) but that everybody knows isn't going to get solved or even slightly fixed any time soon. Just because one issue exists doesn't mean we should just ignore the other.
We have laws for protecting kids from using guns, smoking, drinking, it's only the ubiquitous availability of access to the internet that's the problem. The internet, as we all know, is basically a giant network and nothing more, where it went wrong is how easy we made it for people to slap a big pile of shit on top of that network.
Social media is mostly a bullshit cesspit of crap hosted by tedious narcissists constantly boasting about how great they are and expecting every else to worship them, even sending them money. We used to scoff at idiots sending money to TV evangelists back in the 1990s now some 15 year old girl sits with here cleavage on display, playing video games and a bunch of dribbling morons send her disgusting suggestions and offer money if she'll do them. That's just the stuff like Twitch streaming that's easy to find, let's no even get into the seedier side of OnlyFans and other awful locations out there.
Next we have the basically mind bending cults like Facebook , TikTok and Instagram where they pride themselves on how addictive their algorithms make people to their services. Take a trip on public transport these days and 80% of the people around you will be sitting there like zombies "doom scrolling" their phones to kingdom come, empty vacuous eyes just looking to keep those dopamine levels up enough so they can cope with their own boring, shit lives, thinking that seeing one more video or pic of a smiling big-titted/muscled moron outside a mansion will make them happy as they can dream that's what they'll have one day if they wish hard enough.
When we have kids of 8 out there who want to be an "internet influencer" when they grow up, humanity has lost the plot.
"When we have kids of 8 out there who want to be an "internet influencer" when they grow up, humanity has lost the plot."
When you were a child, what did your peers say? Would I be completely wrong in assuming that some of them wanted to be a rock star, actor, or sportsman? To the unfamiliar child's mind, jobs like this look like you get a lot of money and fame for doing something fun and everyone likes you. They don't have the information to understand how it actually works, and it probably looks more engaging than my job where I spend hours in front of a computer complaining about interfaces, whatever those are, or any of the other jobs they see people doing. So children have a bad understanding of how the adult world of jobs works. What else is new?
In my opinion, social media has lots of downsides, but this isn't really one of them. If we were able to teach them what an influencer's job is really like, they still won't understand the realities of adult life. Fortunately, as they age, more of them will figure this out, though if we could help speed that up it could be a good idea.
Come on El Reg - let's see some real journalism here. The US Surgeon General makes some populist claims without, apparently, citing any evidence.
There is no mention in the article of any actual data. You know, evidence, one way or the other.
I don't use or like social media. But I don't see any justification for whipping up a witch hunt without evidence.
My guess (which is no better than anyone else's, but no worse either) is that many more suicides are prevented by social media (friends, family, even influencers persuading people that their problems can and will be solved) than are encouraged by social media. Most ordinary people, even kids, don't spend their time on 4chan - they spend their time on Facebook with their friends, family and very dull "celebs".
Life "harms kids". Is it more or less bad if the kids are on social media? That is what we need to know - evidence and data for forming policy, not hysterics.
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