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I think that people aren't giving enough credence to the reason Utah gives for the restrictions: The teen mental health crisis. Social media has radically chan

I think that people aren't giving enough credence to the reason Utah gives for the restrictions: The teen mental health crisis. Social media has radically changed the social lives of adolescents, and as a result anxiety, depression, self harm, and suicide have all skyrocketed. The data on this is not ambiguous [1]. And there's now a lot of evidence that social media and smartphones are the cause of the crisis: they screw up childhood in a way that has serious health consequences [2]. Time spent in person with friends by 15-24 year olds has dropped from an average of 155 minutes per day in 2003 to an average of 42 min per day in 2019, a drop of 3x [3, figure 4]. How could that not have huge effects on psychological health? I think these restrictions are a good thing - it's a crude approach and will have some negative consequences, but the scale of the health crisis requires something to be done. [1] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/the-teen-mental-illness-epidemic https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/the-teen-mental-illness... [2] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-illness-epidemic https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-ill... [3] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/the-new-cdc-report https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/the-new-cdc-report

prh8 4y ago
[flagged]
- whats_a_quasar 4y ago
  > How about not having a theistic culture? How about not stigmatizing kids who don't fit into the blonde white monoculture that Utah pushes everywhere? The teen mental health crisis is happening everywhere in the US, and in Canada, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand. It started about the same time everywhere. Utah's particular culture doesn't have anything to do with it. They're just the state that has reacted first [1]. The suicide rate among 10-14 year olds has doubled since 2010, nationwide. If you can present data that shows the suicide rate increase is caused by any of those things, I'd love to see it. There's now lots of evidence that smartphones and social media changes childhood in a way that does not meet fundamental psychological needs [2]. Those changes are causing enormous psychological and physcial harm. Regulating technology is the only way to deal with that. [1] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/the-teen-mental-illness-epidemic https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/the-teen-mental-illness... [2] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-illness-epidemic https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-ill...
  - hedora 4y ago
    There’s no evidence regulation would help, and strong evidence the form of regulation being proposed will make things worse, which the article outlines. Things that could work, that are not known to be harmful: - Parental education campaigns. - Elimination of tracking and other privacy invading technologies for all age groups, not just children. The latter eliminates the need for age blocks, and matches consumer preferences of 90+% of the US population. It also de facto bans technologies that track and encourage mental illness (such as cambridge analytica, and arguably youtube/tiktok content targeting).
    - whats_a_quasar 4y ago
      > Strong evidence the form of regulation being proposed will make things worse, which the article outlines. The only evidence in the article that the law will be harmful is a quote from a free speech lawyer, which doesn't cite any research. If there is strong evidence that the law will be harmful it hasn't been presented yet. These laws certainly might be harmful! But I think it's much more likely they will have no effect or a positive effect. But we don't know, because restrictions like this haven't been attempted before. Regardless, it's the state legislature's job to protect public health. I think there's assumed ill intent because it's Utah, but I think the evidence is stronger that this measure will stop so many kids dying by suicide.
      - hedora 4y ago
        > But Common Sense Media and other advocacy groups warned some parts of the new legislation could put children at risk. So, at least three groups concurred. Also, the only proponents quoted in the article were “commons sense media”, which is either a typo (implying the proponents are actually ambivalent) or someone trademark squatting (implying malicious intent).
    - api 4y ago
      Regulation is needed to kill the peer pressure factor that almost forces teens into social media. Without it even if the parents try to enforce healthy boundaries it won’t stick. Network effects are a thousand times more powerful for teens that are deeply and pervasively immersed in peer pressure and social anxiety. This is the same reason alcohol, cigarettes, gambling, and drugs have age limits. Anything addictive needs to at least be age restricted until people are old enough to enforce their own boundaries about it. At this point it should be obvious that social media is highly addictive and is designed that way on purpose. In some cases the same kinds of spaced repetition techniques as slot machines are used.
- rayiner 4y ago
  How do those things help the vast majority? What you deride as “theism” and “monoculture” have been declining in sync with broad indicators of mental health showing more problems. Your problem is minoritarian thinking, where you’re focused on how those social structures might harm small groups of people, while overlooking the benefits they provide for the broader majority. For example, scientific studies consistently show that religion is correlated with better mental health, greater longevity, and greater happiness: https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicolefisher/2019/03/29/science-says-religion-is-good-for-your-health/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicolefisher/2019/03/29/science..., https://news.stanford.edu/2020/11/13/deep-faith-beneficial-health/ https://news.stanford.edu/2020/11/13/deep-faith-beneficial-h..., https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23146600/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23146600/
  - dgacmu 4y ago
    These generalizations ignore the specific - Utah has long been an outlier on things like teen suicide rates (about #10), antidepressant use (#1) [1], and before that valium. It has a very specific set of cultural features that are not necessarily the same as the broader studies you note. (I'm from Utah; three of my friends killed themselves as a teenager, and all three had aspects of what the GP was talking about. It's a culture that blames people's mental difficulties on themselves, instead of encouraging getting help) [1] https://www.brainerddispatch.com/community/study-finds-utah-leads-nation-in-antidepressant-use-role-of-women-cited https://www.brainerddispatch.com/community/study-finds-utah-...
    - rayiner 4y ago
      Utah isn’t an outliers: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/suicide-mortality/suicide.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/suicide-mortality/.... Sparsely populated rural areas tend to have high suicide rates. Vermont and Oregon are at the opposite end of the spectrum in terms of theism and culture, but have similarly high suicide rates. New Hampshire and Maine are also higher than Mississippi and Alabama. Reducing theism (mandatory social interaction and social support) may well increases suicide rates in these places.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- warning26 4y ago
  > How about, hmmm, having more mental health resources? This rings hollow, in the same sense that every time there is a shooting in the US, we are always treated to comments explaining that "well actually, you see, the REAL problem is that there aren't enough mental health resources", shifting discussion away from how easy it is to get a gun in the US. Solutions are allowed to be multifaceted; we can both restrict social media and have better mental health resources.
chrisan 4y ago
I don't have any answers to the problem but teen mental health issues have grown quite a lot since social media. My wife works in PICU and she has never seen so many suicide attempts in all her career (going back to 2006) as she has in past few years. She talks to other doctors who come from other areas and their concerns/experiences are the same. I feel like every week she is talking to me about some new kid's attempt.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > My wife works in PICU and she has never seen so many suicide attempts in all her career (going back to 2006) as she has in past few years. Social media has been around a lot longer than the last few years. (In fact, while they weren’t even the first wave of widely-used-by-young-people social media, both Twitter and Facebook opened to the public in 2006.) There have been a few major events that have occurred in the last few years, though, that aren’t social media that might relate to the effect under consideration.
  - whats_a_quasar 4y ago
    I will continue posting links to Jonathan Haidt's review docs all over this thread. Social media and smartphones became widespread in the early 2010s, and that's exactly when teen suicides started rising. [1] COVID does not appear to have significantly affected teen mental health [2] If you have evidence that something else is driving the rise in teen suicide rates, I'd love to see it. [1] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-illness-epidemic https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-ill... [2] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/the-new-cdc-report https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/the-new-cdc-report
    - dragonwriter 4y ago
      > Social media and smartphones became widespread in the early 2010s Among adults (or in “household” surveys where adults were surveyed? Sure, but the majority of teen internet users were using “social networking sites” in 2006.) [0] If your contention is that adult social media use is driving teen suicide rates…well, that’s actually more plausible than teen use, but none of the policy responses address that. [0] https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2013/05/21/part-1-teens-and-social-media-use/ https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2013/05/21/part-1-teens...
api 4y ago
I’ve been calling social media companies “the tobacco companies of the mind” for years. Modern social media like Instagram and TikTok are not even social. They are just skinner boxes that crowdsource and amplify addictive content to keep people staring and scrolling. Social media started to stop being social when algorithmic timelines, weighting of content for engagement, and monetization were introduced. The next major innovation in the field will be pure AI generation of the feed. No more human sources at all, just endless amounts of mindless addictive filler fine tuned for each person. You can already see it on kids channels on YouTube where the content is at least part machine generated and is pure mindless drivel. The adult version is coming I’m sure. Edit: actually I think Replika may be the first adult AI Skinner box of note. Imagine that model crossed with TikTok.
- MandieD 4y ago
  It's amazing how differently my toddler reacts to classic Schoolhouse Rock math videos (examples: "My Hero Zero" and "It's Elementary, My Dear!", both from around 1973) and the educational content with soulless, repetitive backing music that YouTube puts up after them.
Fatnino 4y ago
Kids hanging out with classmates on Discord instead of in person certainly leads to a reduction in teen pregnancy
- ngngngng 4y ago
  As a parent I'd much rather my kid gets pregnant in high school than kills themselves. I witnessed and experienced first hand the mental health issues that Tumblr caused so I consider myself qualified to speak on this.
  - Fatnino 4y ago
    Tumbler is a giant mental health issue enabling echo chamber. Some doctors could probably make an entire career out of trying to fix that place.
- AlgorithmicTime 4y ago
  I'm still not convinced teen pregnancy is a bad thing. We evolved to have children pretty young. Running after toddlers is way easier when you're younger than when you're in your 30s. If I'd had kids at 19, they'd be almost done with high school by now. And if my wife had decided to be a stay-at-home mom at 19, she would have been done with the most time consuming parts long ago and well into whatever she decided to do after that part of her life.
Mizoguchi 4y ago
It would be interesting to see also how much time are couples spending with their kids as it seems to be more common to have now both parents working long and tiring hours (purely observational). With the continued increase in the cost of living it would be reasonable to think that many kids are actually spending more time alone at home, particularly those in lower income families.
thomastjeffery 4y ago
> And there's now a lot of evidence that social media and smartphones are the cause of the crisis There's one pesky problem with that assertion: social media isn't a pill. It's not a chemical in the water, or a bacterial infection. It's not a binary switch. Social media is content. Social media is interaction. To treat such a thing as a scalar value is to have meaningless data. What are the implications of removing a child's access to social media? Does it keep them from getting bullied? Does it keep them from obsessing over their looks? Does it stop them from hearing criticism about their parent's religion? All of the above. Every one of these is a strong contributor to the mental health of children. By insulating children from their peers, you can avoid a lot of damage: damage that has become significantly more available and engaging than ever before. By insulating children from their peers, you can avoid a lot of growth: growth that has become significantly more available and engaging than ever before. This strategy is not a solution: it's a workaround. You get the pros and the cons in equal measure. Surely we can find a better way. --- The obvious problem with social media - that is actually specific to it - is engagement. That applies much more broadly to our society than the mental health of children. It applies to our political divide. It applies to our economy. It applies to every human relationship that it can. What children - and the rest of us - really need is a viable alternative. Something that their peers will follow them to. Without that, there is no solution: only avoidance.

prh8 4y ago

[flagged]

whats_a_quasar 4y ago
> How about not having a theistic culture? How about not stigmatizing kids who don't fit into the blonde white monoculture that Utah pushes everywhere? The teen mental health crisis is happening everywhere in the US, and in Canada, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand. It started about the same time everywhere. Utah's particular culture doesn't have anything to do with it. They're just the state that has reacted first [1]. The suicide rate among 10-14 year olds has doubled since 2010, nationwide. If you can present data that shows the suicide rate increase is caused by any of those things, I'd love to see it. There's now lots of evidence that smartphones and social media changes childhood in a way that does not meet fundamental psychological needs [2]. Those changes are causing enormous psychological and physcial harm. Regulating technology is the only way to deal with that. [1] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/the-teen-mental-illness-epidemic https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/the-teen-mental-illness... [2] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-illness-epidemic https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-ill...
- hedora 4y ago
  There’s no evidence regulation would help, and strong evidence the form of regulation being proposed will make things worse, which the article outlines. Things that could work, that are not known to be harmful: - Parental education campaigns. - Elimination of tracking and other privacy invading technologies for all age groups, not just children. The latter eliminates the need for age blocks, and matches consumer preferences of 90+% of the US population. It also de facto bans technologies that track and encourage mental illness (such as cambridge analytica, and arguably youtube/tiktok content targeting).
  - whats_a_quasar 4y ago
    > Strong evidence the form of regulation being proposed will make things worse, which the article outlines. The only evidence in the article that the law will be harmful is a quote from a free speech lawyer, which doesn't cite any research. If there is strong evidence that the law will be harmful it hasn't been presented yet. These laws certainly might be harmful! But I think it's much more likely they will have no effect or a positive effect. But we don't know, because restrictions like this haven't been attempted before. Regardless, it's the state legislature's job to protect public health. I think there's assumed ill intent because it's Utah, but I think the evidence is stronger that this measure will stop so many kids dying by suicide.
    - hedora 4y ago
      > But Common Sense Media and other advocacy groups warned some parts of the new legislation could put children at risk. So, at least three groups concurred. Also, the only proponents quoted in the article were “commons sense media”, which is either a typo (implying the proponents are actually ambivalent) or someone trademark squatting (implying malicious intent).
  - api 4y ago
    Regulation is needed to kill the peer pressure factor that almost forces teens into social media. Without it even if the parents try to enforce healthy boundaries it won’t stick. Network effects are a thousand times more powerful for teens that are deeply and pervasively immersed in peer pressure and social anxiety. This is the same reason alcohol, cigarettes, gambling, and drugs have age limits. Anything addictive needs to at least be age restricted until people are old enough to enforce their own boundaries about it. At this point it should be obvious that social media is highly addictive and is designed that way on purpose. In some cases the same kinds of spaced repetition techniques as slot machines are used.
rayiner 4y ago
How do those things help the vast majority? What you deride as “theism” and “monoculture” have been declining in sync with broad indicators of mental health showing more problems. Your problem is minoritarian thinking, where you’re focused on how those social structures might harm small groups of people, while overlooking the benefits they provide for the broader majority. For example, scientific studies consistently show that religion is correlated with better mental health, greater longevity, and greater happiness: https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicolefisher/2019/03/29/science-says-religion-is-good-for-your-health/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicolefisher/2019/03/29/science..., https://news.stanford.edu/2020/11/13/deep-faith-beneficial-health/ https://news.stanford.edu/2020/11/13/deep-faith-beneficial-h..., https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23146600/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23146600/
- dgacmu 4y ago
  These generalizations ignore the specific - Utah has long been an outlier on things like teen suicide rates (about #10), antidepressant use (#1) [1], and before that valium. It has a very specific set of cultural features that are not necessarily the same as the broader studies you note. (I'm from Utah; three of my friends killed themselves as a teenager, and all three had aspects of what the GP was talking about. It's a culture that blames people's mental difficulties on themselves, instead of encouraging getting help) [1] https://www.brainerddispatch.com/community/study-finds-utah-leads-nation-in-antidepressant-use-role-of-women-cited https://www.brainerddispatch.com/community/study-finds-utah-...
  - rayiner 4y ago
    Utah isn’t an outliers: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/suicide-mortality/suicide.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/suicide-mortality/.... Sparsely populated rural areas tend to have high suicide rates. Vermont and Oregon are at the opposite end of the spectrum in terms of theism and culture, but have similarly high suicide rates. New Hampshire and Maine are also higher than Mississippi and Alabama. Reducing theism (mandatory social interaction and social support) may well increases suicide rates in these places.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
warning26 4y ago
> How about, hmmm, having more mental health resources? This rings hollow, in the same sense that every time there is a shooting in the US, we are always treated to comments explaining that "well actually, you see, the REAL problem is that there aren't enough mental health resources", shifting discussion away from how easy it is to get a gun in the US. Solutions are allowed to be multifaceted; we can both restrict social media and have better mental health resources.

chrisan 4y ago

I don't have any answers to the problem but teen mental health issues have grown quite a lot since social media. My wife works in PICU and she has never seen so many suicide attempts in all her career (going back to 2006) as she has in past few years. She talks to other doctors who come from other areas and their concerns/experiences are the same. I feel like every week she is talking to me about some new kid's attempt.

dragonwriter 4y ago
> My wife works in PICU and she has never seen so many suicide attempts in all her career (going back to 2006) as she has in past few years. Social media has been around a lot longer than the last few years. (In fact, while they weren’t even the first wave of widely-used-by-young-people social media, both Twitter and Facebook opened to the public in 2006.) There have been a few major events that have occurred in the last few years, though, that aren’t social media that might relate to the effect under consideration.
- whats_a_quasar 4y ago
  I will continue posting links to Jonathan Haidt's review docs all over this thread. Social media and smartphones became widespread in the early 2010s, and that's exactly when teen suicides started rising. [1] COVID does not appear to have significantly affected teen mental health [2] If you have evidence that something else is driving the rise in teen suicide rates, I'd love to see it. [1] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-illness-epidemic https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-ill... [2] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/the-new-cdc-report https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/the-new-cdc-report
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    > Social media and smartphones became widespread in the early 2010s Among adults (or in “household” surveys where adults were surveyed? Sure, but the majority of teen internet users were using “social networking sites” in 2006.) [0] If your contention is that adult social media use is driving teen suicide rates…well, that’s actually more plausible than teen use, but none of the policy responses address that. [0] https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2013/05/21/part-1-teens-and-social-media-use/ https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2013/05/21/part-1-teens...

api 4y ago

I’ve been calling social media companies “the tobacco companies of the mind” for years. Modern social media like Instagram and TikTok are not even social. They are just skinner boxes that crowdsource and amplify addictive content to keep people staring and scrolling. Social media started to stop being social when algorithmic timelines, weighting of content for engagement, and monetization were introduced. The next major innovation in the field will be pure AI generation of the feed. No more human sources at all, just endless amounts of mindless addictive filler fine tuned for each person. You can already see it on kids channels on YouTube where the content is at least part machine generated and is pure mindless drivel. The adult version is coming I’m sure. Edit: actually I think Replika may be the first adult AI Skinner box of note. Imagine that model crossed with TikTok.

MandieD 4y ago
It's amazing how differently my toddler reacts to classic Schoolhouse Rock math videos (examples: "My Hero Zero" and "It's Elementary, My Dear!", both from around 1973) and the educational content with soulless, repetitive backing music that YouTube puts up after them.

Fatnino 4y ago

Kids hanging out with classmates on Discord instead of in person certainly leads to a reduction in teen pregnancy

ngngngng 4y ago
As a parent I'd much rather my kid gets pregnant in high school than kills themselves. I witnessed and experienced first hand the mental health issues that Tumblr caused so I consider myself qualified to speak on this.
- Fatnino 4y ago
  Tumbler is a giant mental health issue enabling echo chamber. Some doctors could probably make an entire career out of trying to fix that place.
AlgorithmicTime 4y ago
I'm still not convinced teen pregnancy is a bad thing. We evolved to have children pretty young. Running after toddlers is way easier when you're younger than when you're in your 30s. If I'd had kids at 19, they'd be almost done with high school by now. And if my wife had decided to be a stay-at-home mom at 19, she would have been done with the most time consuming parts long ago and well into whatever she decided to do after that part of her life.

Mizoguchi 4y ago

It would be interesting to see also how much time are couples spending with their kids as it seems to be more common to have now both parents working long and tiring hours (purely observational). With the continued increase in the cost of living it would be reasonable to think that many kids are actually spending more time alone at home, particularly those in lower income families.

thomastjeffery 4y ago

> And there's now a lot of evidence that social media and smartphones are the cause of the crisis There's one pesky problem with that assertion: social media isn't a pill. It's not a chemical in the water, or a bacterial infection. It's not a binary switch. Social media is content. Social media is interaction. To treat such a thing as a scalar value is to have meaningless data. What are the implications of removing a child's access to social media? Does it keep them from getting bullied? Does it keep them from obsessing over their looks? Does it stop them from hearing criticism about their parent's religion? All of the above. Every one of these is a strong contributor to the mental health of children. By insulating children from their peers, you can avoid a lot of damage: damage that has become significantly more available and engaging than ever before. By insulating children from their peers, you can avoid a lot of growth: growth that has become significantly more available and engaging than ever before. This strategy is not a solution: it's a workaround. You get the pros and the cons in equal measure. Surely we can find a better way. --- The obvious problem with social media - that is actually specific to it - is engagement. That applies much more broadly to our society than the mental health of children. It applies to our political divide. It applies to our economy. It applies to every human relationship that it can. What children - and the rest of us - really need is a viable alternative. Something that their peers will follow them to. Without that, there is no solution: only avoidance.