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Coronavirus aside, I wonder how many of these deaths are related to TikTok, Facebook, and Twitter use.

srvmshr 5y ago
ex-Adtech engineer living in Japan. You'd be surprised how many horror stories I have encountered about teenage girls commiting suicides due to peer pressure, credit card loans & inability to keep up with fashion trends.
nivenkos 5y ago
What about drugs, and video games, and Satan worship?
- mensetmanusman 5y ago
  Satan worship is in jest, but it’s interesting the root word for Satan, the devil, diablos (διάβολος) describes the ‘spirit of division’ in human societies. Worshiping conflict would aptly describe social media in many areas, so the ancients were on to something :)
- Taywee 5y ago
  Not everything is puritanical pearl clutching. Some things are actually measurably bad for you. Comparing any old criticism of something as unhealthy to the satanic panic and conservative anti video game pushes isn't helpful at all, and doesn't really make much of an argument.
  - inkblotuniverse 5y ago
    I could imagine video games making someone's life worse. They're addictive and mostly non-productive.
agent327 5y ago
You are being voted down, but I can think of little as harmful as the open sewer that is unfiltered social media, especially to younger people that haven't yet learned not to take it all personally.
- EricE 5y ago
  I grew up in the era of dialup, BBS's and USENET - and it did warp my perceptions a little. I can't imagine how being exposed to social media as an adolescent - or younger - could have seriously screwed up my perceptions of society. Elsewhere someone sarcastically asked about video games - if 1/10th the concern that was shown in the 80's and 90's over video games towards social media I think we all would be having a much different conversation. I dunno why up until recently social media has been pretty much getting a pass. It's nice to see at least some discussion of it, especially in relation to kids, showing up in more places. I'm always amazed and somewhat appalled by how many of my peers I see just hand over phones or tablets to their kids to occupy them. At least in the past when parents parked kids in front of the TV it was one way and limited to fairly "safe" content. Ha - after having typed that it sure makes the concerns voiced over TV in the past feel very, very quaint in comparison. Something I really hadn't considered before now.
prepend 5y ago
This is the kind of stuff that should be possible and valuable to study but requires TikTok, Facebook, etc to run the study since the data is all on their servers. I expect that the analysis has been done internally and just not released since it’s bad (ie, social media use is higher among suicides). Maybe a whistleblower will leak this stuff. I think an analysis is possible by building off their typical drop off analysis. I think that because I expect all drop offs are likely analyzed to restart and avoid future drop offs. So I expect they have a way to classify people who died vs left the platform. In the US we release a “death master file” that has names, dob, ssn a few years after death. If Japan has something similar it can be run against account holder data to see who actually died. I don’t know privacy law in Japan, but in the US cause of death is confidential. So we just know that a kid died and would need to predict cause of death from social media activity. With this low number, they could be investigated manually to see how many children had accounts and what patterns exist in common.

ex-Adtech engineer living in Japan. You'd be surprised how many horror stories I have encountered about teenage girls commiting suicides due to peer pressure, credit card loans & inability to keep up with fashion trends.

nivenkos 5y ago

What about drugs, and video games, and Satan worship?

mensetmanusman 5y ago
Satan worship is in jest, but it’s interesting the root word for Satan, the devil, diablos (διάβολος) describes the ‘spirit of division’ in human societies. Worshiping conflict would aptly describe social media in many areas, so the ancients were on to something :)
Taywee 5y ago
Not everything is puritanical pearl clutching. Some things are actually measurably bad for you. Comparing any old criticism of something as unhealthy to the satanic panic and conservative anti video game pushes isn't helpful at all, and doesn't really make much of an argument.
- inkblotuniverse 5y ago
  I could imagine video games making someone's life worse. They're addictive and mostly non-productive.

agent327 5y ago

You are being voted down, but I can think of little as harmful as the open sewer that is unfiltered social media, especially to younger people that haven't yet learned not to take it all personally.

EricE 5y ago
I grew up in the era of dialup, BBS's and USENET - and it did warp my perceptions a little. I can't imagine how being exposed to social media as an adolescent - or younger - could have seriously screwed up my perceptions of society. Elsewhere someone sarcastically asked about video games - if 1/10th the concern that was shown in the 80's and 90's over video games towards social media I think we all would be having a much different conversation. I dunno why up until recently social media has been pretty much getting a pass. It's nice to see at least some discussion of it, especially in relation to kids, showing up in more places. I'm always amazed and somewhat appalled by how many of my peers I see just hand over phones or tablets to their kids to occupy them. At least in the past when parents parked kids in front of the TV it was one way and limited to fairly "safe" content. Ha - after having typed that it sure makes the concerns voiced over TV in the past feel very, very quaint in comparison. Something I really hadn't considered before now.

prepend 5y ago

This is the kind of stuff that should be possible and valuable to study but requires TikTok, Facebook, etc to run the study since the data is all on their servers. I expect that the analysis has been done internally and just not released since it’s bad (ie, social media use is higher among suicides). Maybe a whistleblower will leak this stuff. I think an analysis is possible by building off their typical drop off analysis. I think that because I expect all drop offs are likely analyzed to restart and avoid future drop offs. So I expect they have a way to classify people who died vs left the platform. In the US we release a “death master file” that has names, dob, ssn a few years after death. If Japan has something similar it can be run against account holder data to see who actually died. I don’t know privacy law in Japan, but in the US cause of death is confidential. So we just know that a kid died and would need to predict cause of death from social media activity. With this low number, they could be investigated manually to see how many children had accounts and what patterns exist in common.