Interesting. Is the narrative around kids and social media nothing but a moral panic? Only time will tell...

This author seems to be reflexively defending their own social media problem.

Social media is rotting everyone's brain, the hope was to try and minimize its damage to the most vulnerable.

It may be that using phones all the time is keeping kids from bullying each other as much thus lowering teen suicide rates. However at the same time it may also be true that their excessive screen time is frying their brains. One metric getting better doesn't prove that all the bad metrics are not real.

Social media is rotting everyone's brain?

I don't know whether to answer "speak for yourself" to that, or what. I consider participation in online communities one of the most intellectually interesting things I do every day. If you believe social media is rotting everyone's brain, then I wonder why you're posting this on social media.

Of course it is, and "time will tell" is all well and good; in a world where governments are rushing to introduce age verification laws and other authoritarian anti-Internet policies, we don't have a lot of time before they irreversibly damage everything good and beautiful about the world. :(

or you know, their future is just shit

I consider participation in online communities one of the most intellectually interesting things I do every day.

That sounds kind of depressing? If this is genuinely the most intellectually interesting in your day, do you never wonder what you could be doing instead?

I have by now been participating in online communities for more than two thirds of my life. Started regularly doing so at age 10, in my early 30s now. So it is somewhat difficult for me to imagine a life where I don't do it.

But I am absolutely certain that it has turned me into a smarter person than I would be without it.

Social media is rotting everyone’s brain: random reputable link

I am open to discussing the positives of social media, but let’s not hide the negatives.

As with all other issues the top 25% keep doing better and better while the bottom 25% keeps spiraling down. If you can pull some kind of average that looks good then you can make ”positive” news out of anything.

This:

So it is somewhat difficult for me to imagine a life where I don't do it.

Contradicts this:

But I am absolutely certain that it has turned me into a smarter person than I would be without it.

Is what I'm saying. Meaning no offense, but the "I cannot imagine life without it" is kind of indicative of the brain rot people are talking about here.

If there is anything detrimental to intellectual development it’s things that leave you unable to imagine life without it. It makes you less likely to try something new and question your beliefs and habits.

I think it's more like the algorithm is rotting everyone's brain. Lemmy is resistant to this by nature

lemmy users were not in this study

Can't have a suicidal thought if you don't have any thoughts

Not arguing for or against here, but that's not a very good test. I can't imagine what my life would have been like without my best friend of over 20 years, but I can still say for certain that I'm in a vastly better place than I would have been without them. Even if I just limit it to my intellectual development.

There are valid criticisms of social media, but I don't think that's one of them.

This reduction is all off the back of the peak (of teen anxiety and thoughts of suicide) during Covid returning to more normal levels now that the crisis is over. Celebrating it as a vindication of social media being bad for people is.. Disingenuous at best.

The article then goes on to subtly imply that all those feeling shit are probably just LGBTQI (what you see below is an implicit false equivalence).

But the data show that many teenagers, especially girls and teenagers who identify as lesbian, gay or bisexual, are still struggling. Thirty-three percent of high school students reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness in the last 12 months, down from a peak of 42 percent in 2021. Fourteen percent of teenagers reported that they had seriously considered attempting suicide, down from 22 percent in 2021.

The level of depression/anxiety is 33%, it had been on an upward trend from 2012 onwards..... Gosh. Remind me when social media got big?

The level in the 1990s hovered around 20%.

And if you look at the source report being discussed, you will see that social media use has declined (page 19) in the most recent figures..

This article is worse than worthless, it's misinformation.

I appreciate the actually reputable link, absolutely love me a systematic review ❤️

Fair enough, but I think the point is less about the inability to imagine an alternative and more about outsourcing agency or thought. This is something Byung-Chul Han’s writes about: religion, social media, capitalism, etc. can become frameworks we rely on so deeply that we stop questioning them. It is undermining our ability to think for ourselves and question our beliefs.

A 20-year friendship is obviously a very different kind of thing. Maybe a friend you are far too dependent upon and doesn't want you to hang out with other people is a more fitting comparison to most people's relation to social media.

But I am absolutely certain that it has turned me into a smarter person than I would be without it.

Dunning-Kruger effect in full display here...

And intentionally makes you feel bad all the time so you keep talking to them.

Heroin addicts will tell you not to take heroin then do so themselves, that doesn't mean their advice is wrong.

Debatable. While Lemmy doesn't have a ragebait algorithm, it's very easy to isolate yourself into a rage-bubble through your choice of instances and communities. For example, a fuckcars community is built around a negative emotion, as opposed to a "here's how you can promote alternative transportation methods" community.

What's the evidence for this?

Maybe. In the throes of a moral panic I think we need to be careful about our intuition though. We are being inundated with "common sense" narratives about the harms of social media, which undermines our ability to think clearly.

That's not to say you're wrong but I would challenge you to find evidence for this position, since that's the only way to be sure we're not just suffering from group-think here.

Me.

Negative emotion smegative emotion... We're talking about what rots your brain

It's the reward schedules and the pipeline.

The most addicting form of a feed is to limit good dopamine producing content to the minimum level that will keep you scrolling. The more garbage content they can force you to scroll past without closing the app, the more likely you are to continue to doom scroll

The pipeline is the way that the "good" content gets more saliant over time. More impactful, which happens to be more extreme and usually anger inducing

It's like if you're training your dog to sit, you can start by feeding them kibble every time. But if you want them to sit on command even outside of training sessions, once they understand the command you move to a high value treat, like cheese, and you want to slowly reward them less and less often for performing the behavior. That's how you make them obey every time without thinking or looking for the cheese... You can ingrain the behavior so deeply that sitting becomes the default response to hearing or seeing the order

It's just operant conditioning, but there's another layer to the puzzle when it comes to the algorithm.

When you're doom scrolling, you're not evaluating information, you're hunting for dopamine. When you find rage bait, your brain is not going to evaluate it, you've been conditioned to scarf down the treat and look for the next one

That's how the pipeline works. It exposes you to more extreme information over time while you're in a receptive doom scrolling state. Maybe the first time you see that "illegals are stealing Medicare funds" you might think "that doesn't even make sense, that's not how federal funding works, and you need documentation to sign up for Medicare anyways"

But through repeat exposure over time and this training schedule, propoganda will slip past your mental defenses. It works on everyone - some bit of that information will be internalized without conscious evaluation

You can find all the echo chambers you want on Lemmy, but the way information is presented is not carefully engineered to rot your brain. The sort algorithms are simple, they're not tracking your clicks on rage bait and giving you an extremism score to custom tailor your feed, and if you spend 20 minutes scrolling you're usually going to hit stale content

It's the difference between looking for blackberries in the woods and going through reinforcement training to use slurs

maybe like with autism we just detect it more and it isn't really rising

how much attention was really given to your feelings before 2010

The good Internet has been dead for at least a decade already.

And now the narrative violation continues, as the latest CDC survey data shows that mental health concerns among teens have been declining since their 2021 peak (i.e., as we were coming out of the worst of the COVID crisis).

I’ll emphasize:

2021 peak (i.e., as we were coming out of the worst of the COVID crisis)

and then this blog post does nothing to explore that? I’ve always frowned upon TechDirt as a source. Fortunately, the NYT article that TechDirt is basing this screed on does:

“Those declines in depression and suicidal thoughts are very striking, particularly that they’re lower than 2019,” said Jean Twenge, a psychologist at San Diego State University who has studied the mental health impacts of smartphones and social media use on teenagers. “This isn’t just post pandemic anymore, this is a more longstanding trend in improvement.”

Still, I would hesitate to jump to the conclusion TechDirt does. I do not see sense in the argument that depression falling must mean social media never played a role in depression.