It's pretty bad to compare social media to smoking, or call it "the new smoking" because... teen tobacco usage is far from a solved problem. Teens today vape an

It's pretty bad to compare social media to smoking, or call it "the new smoking" because... teen tobacco usage is far from a solved problem. Teens today vape and it will have long term consequences both for them and society at large. Honestly the panic around "screens" remind me of the moral panics around Dungeons and Dragon back in the 80s [0] and video games in the 90s and 00s. The media hysteria did try to blame many acts of violence on DOOM. Some researchers have now spent 30 years trying to prove a link between violence and video games, without any success. To put things in perspective, during the same time period neural networks were completely abandoned by AI researchers, before coming back and giving us the deep learning revolution and the leaps in self-driving and language models. > Young folks comparing themselves to Instagram models is very analogous to air-brushed magazine models in the early 2000’s to cite a recent example. In 2018 "obesity prevalence was [...] 21.2% among 12- to 19-year-olds." [1] according to the CDC. That's one out of 5 being obese, not just overweight. And it has more than tripled since the 70's [2]. I have to wonder if it's related. A lot of teenagers are bombarded with images of perfectly healthy bodies that, quite simply, won't match what they see in the mirror. The solution? Ban mirrors. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/18/us/when-dungeons-dragons-set-off-a-moral-panic.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/18/us/when-dungeons-dragons-... [1] https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/childhood.html https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/childhood.html [2] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/obesity_child_15_16/obesity_child_15_16.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/obesity_child_15_16/obe...