44 ms·

Oh please, social media may make teens depressed and suicidal, but so too has life in general for decades or longer. If anything, teens can more easily access s

Oh please, social media may make teens depressed and suicidal, but so too has life in general for decades or longer. If anything, teens can more easily access social support from certain peers within the framework of social media when they do get into a bad spot. Teenage life has never been easy, but it has also never been easier than it is today. Your notion of social media causing some sort of enormously unique and enormous damage needs to be heavily qualified by real evidence compared to previous trends. I say all this, by the way, as someone who has enormous criticism for the intrusive, manipulative and heavy handed totalities of social media companies. However, it's one thing to hate them where they deserve hate and another to attribute very old problems of teenage life to them as if they were unique emergences today. It's popular on HN to hate on social networks (despite many people here very much being dependent on them for their large salaries) but some of this hate should be taken with a grain of salt and lots of qualification. edit: social media makes teens suicidal and depressed, but not inordinately more than many other things would in their lives in general. Being saturated by these networks is not obligatory in life. Even teens have plenty of agency and opportunities to learn about the dangers of not moderating involvement in certain things. Enough with the youth social trauma porn.

encoderer 4y ago
I’ll just say, you are acknowledging that social media does make teens suicidal but you are comparing it to the “many other things” in their lives that make them suicidal. Like what? Pressure to achieve? Being popular? Hormones? Social media is a product like cigarettes it can and probably should be regulated. You can’t mandate everybody to have friends but you can regulate Facebook and TikTok.
- idea55 4y ago
- orwin 4y ago
  Multiple things: identity crisis, fear of the future way higher than what was, even for millenials who ranked high on this scale 15 years ago. (edit: i agree with you by the way, it is to respond to your question)
- helloworld11 4y ago
  Yes, I'm saying that social media can make teens act and feel all sorts of things, and that in doing this, it's sometimes harmful in certain very specific contexts that can't simply be made to disappear through ham-fisted regulations, just like many other things throughout modern history that have been pegged to hysterias about "the children". It can be both dangerous in some contexts, beneficial in others and again, something that doesn't deserve exceptional mania about its dangers. I'd love to see how you propose regulating it for teenagers and young people. I do hope it's at least something less foolish than the previous hysterical media/public fits about also "controlling" teens access to...... certain books, certain magazines, comics, TV, porno, "dangerous school games" and of course, video gaming!!! (which barely a couple decades ago supposedly made them prone to murder at an unusual rate). Remember all of these other media-inspired catastrophes for teen development? Do school library bans on books like "Catcher in the Rye" also ring a bell? I repeat, qualification of claims: In other words, really show that some new tech or media terror actually does do inordinate, demonstrably above-normal harm to a large percentage of the bags of volatile hormones that teenagers have always been, with all sorts of mental issues that they largely end up handling reasonably well. They can grow further without being treated as if they were absurdly fragile and in need of protection from the wider world that they will anyhow have to face just a few years later, whatever its tendencies. It gets tiresome to see some new supposed danger get trotted out after every couple of teenage generations as something that supposedly needs heavy intervention, mitigation and usually ridiculous regulations. Give teenagers just a bit more credit for mental toughness.
  - encoderer 4y ago
    Bizarre take. So unlike every other industry, social media is impervious to regulation? Maybe the situation doesn’t call for prohibition but harm reduction? Why should parents and society as a whole just have to accept whatever some middle management product director at facebook thinks is right? We truly are not as enslaved to the current state of social media as you make it seem.

encoderer 4y ago

I’ll just say, you are acknowledging that social media does make teens suicidal but you are comparing it to the “many other things” in their lives that make them suicidal. Like what? Pressure to achieve? Being popular? Hormones? Social media is a product like cigarettes it can and probably should be regulated. You can’t mandate everybody to have friends but you can regulate Facebook and TikTok.

idea55 4y ago
orwin 4y ago
Multiple things: identity crisis, fear of the future way higher than what was, even for millenials who ranked high on this scale 15 years ago. (edit: i agree with you by the way, it is to respond to your question)
helloworld11 4y ago
Yes, I'm saying that social media can make teens act and feel all sorts of things, and that in doing this, it's sometimes harmful in certain very specific contexts that can't simply be made to disappear through ham-fisted regulations, just like many other things throughout modern history that have been pegged to hysterias about "the children". It can be both dangerous in some contexts, beneficial in others and again, something that doesn't deserve exceptional mania about its dangers. I'd love to see how you propose regulating it for teenagers and young people. I do hope it's at least something less foolish than the previous hysterical media/public fits about also "controlling" teens access to...... certain books, certain magazines, comics, TV, porno, "dangerous school games" and of course, video gaming!!! (which barely a couple decades ago supposedly made them prone to murder at an unusual rate). Remember all of these other media-inspired catastrophes for teen development? Do school library bans on books like "Catcher in the Rye" also ring a bell? I repeat, qualification of claims: In other words, really show that some new tech or media terror actually does do inordinate, demonstrably above-normal harm to a large percentage of the bags of volatile hormones that teenagers have always been, with all sorts of mental issues that they largely end up handling reasonably well. They can grow further without being treated as if they were absurdly fragile and in need of protection from the wider world that they will anyhow have to face just a few years later, whatever its tendencies. It gets tiresome to see some new supposed danger get trotted out after every couple of teenage generations as something that supposedly needs heavy intervention, mitigation and usually ridiculous regulations. Give teenagers just a bit more credit for mental toughness.
- encoderer 4y ago
  Bizarre take. So unlike every other industry, social media is impervious to regulation? Maybe the situation doesn’t call for prohibition but harm reduction? Why should parents and society as a whole just have to accept whatever some middle management product director at facebook thinks is right? We truly are not as enslaved to the current state of social media as you make it seem.