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This recent article suggests other factors might be more important to adolescent mental health: Time spent on social media among the least influential factors

This recent article suggests other factors might be more important to adolescent mental health: Time spent on social media among the least influential factors in adolescent mental health: preliminary results from a panel network analysis https://www.nature.com/articles/s44220-023-00063-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/s44220-023-00063-7 > There is growing concern about the role of social media use in the documented increase of adolescent mental health difficulties. However, the current evidence remains complex and inconclusive. While increasing research on this area of work has allowed for notable progress, the impact of social media use within the complex systems of adolescent mental health and development is yet to be examined. The current study addresses this conceptual and methodological oversight by applying a panel network analysis to explore the role of social media on key interacting systems of mental health, wellbeing and social life of 12,041 UK adolescents. Here we find that, across time, estimated time spent interacting with social media predicts concentration problems in female participants. However, of the factors included in the current network, social media use is one of the least influential factors of adolescent mental health, with others (for example, bullying, lack of family support and school work dissatisfaction) exhibiting stronger associations. Our findings provide an important exploratory first step in mapping out complex relationships between social media use and key developmental systems and highlight the need for social policy initiatives that focus on the home and school environment to foster resilience.

908B64B197 3y ago
> Time spent on social media among the least influential factors in adolescent mental health But it's the one that's easy to assign blame to: it's the evil (sometimes foreign) big tech companies fault. Increasingly poor economics prospects, environmental crisis and over-competitive society are much tougher issues to crack, and perhaps, in the case of housing for instance, certain demographics would prefer to blame the "evil screens" rather than their own generation's behavior over the years...
- orhmeh09 3y ago
  although I believe the big tech companies are doing their very best to capture attention at all costs, it is a good question to ask why people are in a position to spend so much time on social media and are doing so in place of other activities. For example, the lack of public spaces where one can spend time without spending money, relatively recent parenting practices and legal obstacles to having unsupervised time outdoors, etc.
  - barbazoo 3y ago
    I can see it in myself and I suspect others feel similarly. And I suspect kids feel it even more strongly but that's just an assumption of mine. The way "big tech companies are doing their very best to capture attention at all costs" is by designing their apps such that it's physically addicting. Once you're addicted it's hard to do the other things you mentioned because they don't release the same chemicals in your brain.
    - westurner 3y ago
      Would it be abusive or advisable to adapt edtech offerings in light of social media and slot machines' UX user experience findings? While they should never appease students, can't infotech and edtech learn how to keep their attention, too? Perhaps prompt engineering can help to create engaging educational content with substantive progress metrics? "Build a game in JS (like game category XYZ) to teach quantum entropy to beginners" And then what prompt additions could help to social media-ify the game? How should social media reinforce human communication behaviors with or without the stated age of the user? Should there be a "D- because that's harassment" panda video to reinforce? Which presidential role models' communication styles should AI emulate? I find it sad to consider that the most impactful thing to do to improve children's lives would be to ban them from social media due to their age; though, for the record, e.g. Facebook did originally require a .edu email address at an approving institution. Hopefully, Khanmigo and similar AI edtech offerings will be more engaging than preferentially reviewing unacceptable abuse online; but kids and people still need to learn to interact respectfully online in order to succeed.
- Night_Thastus 3y ago
  I don't believe it's the tech companies fault necessarily - but social media definitely plays a big role in my view. It is extremely easy to get sucked into groups that perpetuate racial/sexist-related hate, self-loathing and suicide, unhealthy self image/comparison to others, endless doom-saying and bad news, etc. Those can have a huge impact on someone when they're young. (Frankly, they have a huge impact on everyone else, too)
  - 908B64B197 3y ago
    > unhealthy self image/comparison to others Is it such a bad thing that they compare themselves to their peers? 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 their peers' perfectly healthy bodies that, quite simply, won't match what they see in the mirror. The solution? Ban mirrors. [0] https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/childhood.html https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/childhood.html [1] 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...
    - Night_Thastus 3y ago
      Of course obesity is a massive problem in the US. That's undeniable. There is, of course, the opposite side of this where some people become anorexic which is well-documented. (Less common, of course, but still important) But there are other issues of self image too, like wealth and success, beauty, etc. Spending all day seeing nothing but seemingly "perfect" individuals with "perfect" lives (even if a lot of it is fabricated) can do a lot of harm, in my view.
- whats_a_quasar 3y ago
  "Increasingly poor economic prospects" isn't true. The world is far wealthier and youth have far better economic prospects than they did in previous generations, when the world was poor and the rate of teen depression/suicide was low. The two main arguments on mental health "it's the phones" and "the world actually sucks and the kids are right to be depressed." But in the actual data doomerism doesn't correlate with the crisis. Phone usage and decline in face-to-face interaction does. Two sources: - "No, teen suicide isn't because the world is objectively worse": https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/02/teen-suicide-depression-girls-social-media.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/02/teen-suicide-depress... - "Don't be a doomer": https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/dont-be-a-doomer?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=web https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/dont-be-a-doomer?utm_source=su...
  - WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
    >Increasingly poor economic prospects" isn't true. We've gone from the celebrated one-income households in the 1950s to increasingly fewer jobs than people to fill them (beginning ~1972) to 3-4 typical incomes necessary to support a household in my (formerly affordable) state. Our long trend certainly seems to fit within a description of Increasingly Poor Economic Prospects
    - throwaway2037 3y ago
      3-4 typical incomes necessary to support a household This makes no sense. It sounds like you are talking about California. No, it doesn't take 3-4 incomes to live a middle class life in California. Yes, it takes two.
      - WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
        California has huge differences in living expenses so saying it takes # of typical incomes to survive would only be sensical in certain places. I live in FL. A bit over a generation ago, we could survive on one typical income but it was tight. It is now tight with 3 typical incomes and a home expense in the low-mid range.
jacobn 3y ago
Jonathan Haidt has an interesting response to this (and related) criticisms: https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/why-some-researchers-think-im-wrong https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/why-some-researchers-th...
Brusco_RF 3y ago
An interesting nuance, but I don't think this should be used to dismiss the mental health effects of social media. Social media affects virtually ALL adolescents, while those other factors listed only affect some. Only a subset of adolescents lack family support or are bullied. The third factor, dissatisfaction with schoolwork, would be extremely hard to discern as a cause or effect of depression
- whats_a_quasar 3y ago
  Yeah, to add on to this, the article seems to imply a logical leap from - "social media isn't as bad as bullying or having an unstable home" to - "social policy ought to focus on the home and school rather than social media" But I don't think that follows at all. I don't think anyone disagrees that bullying is bad and stable homes are good. And I think that's always been a goal of child social policy. Social isolation caused by technology might have a weaker effect size, but it affects everyone, including adolescents in stable homes who aren't being bullied. It would be great if we had a lever to pull to get rid of bullying, but in the meantime if the goal is to increase child well-being we ought to act on social media.
  - xpe 3y ago
    I have no particular expertise on bullying but I am confident there are levers (I.e. policies, interventions, support mechanisms) to reduce many kinds of bullying, much of the time. Different types would need to be dealt with in different ways: physical, emotional, and online. Of course, it is complicated. Bullying arguably is a manifestation of deeper, psychological and social issues. Some forms of bullying are very difficult to find, much less prevent. Unfortunately, many of these kid / young adult practices persist well into adulthood. Personally, I sometimes find it quite difficult to draw lines between a lot of negative behavior. As kids are figuring out their emotions, they act on them in many unconstructive ways. It seems to me the core elements of the worst bullying tend to have to do with (1) it being persistent; (2) targeted on those with less status or power; (3) the victim feels isolated. Again, this isn’t researched, but I did put some thought into it.
    - 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
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jsmith45 3y ago
How are they defining social media use in their analysis? Because I'm not sure "estimated time on social media" is really the best way to measure things. The specific social media services used, and how they are used. Some services can be pretty bad if used in some common ways, but much better if used in a more carefully curated fashion. Spending endless hours are a sensibly curated subset of reddit could easily be a whole less bad for ones mental health than just a few hours a week on some other services, especially if the user has not (or cannot) carefully curated their feeds on those other services.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
golemotron 3y ago
> This recent article suggests other factors might be more important to adolescent mental health. The algorithm you are implying is: find the most important factor and concentrate on it to the exclusion of others. Not a good way to go with serious problems.

908B64B197 3y ago

> Time spent on social media among the least influential factors in adolescent mental health But it's the one that's easy to assign blame to: it's the evil (sometimes foreign) big tech companies fault. Increasingly poor economics prospects, environmental crisis and over-competitive society are much tougher issues to crack, and perhaps, in the case of housing for instance, certain demographics would prefer to blame the "evil screens" rather than their own generation's behavior over the years...

orhmeh09 3y ago
although I believe the big tech companies are doing their very best to capture attention at all costs, it is a good question to ask why people are in a position to spend so much time on social media and are doing so in place of other activities. For example, the lack of public spaces where one can spend time without spending money, relatively recent parenting practices and legal obstacles to having unsupervised time outdoors, etc.
- barbazoo 3y ago
  I can see it in myself and I suspect others feel similarly. And I suspect kids feel it even more strongly but that's just an assumption of mine. The way "big tech companies are doing their very best to capture attention at all costs" is by designing their apps such that it's physically addicting. Once you're addicted it's hard to do the other things you mentioned because they don't release the same chemicals in your brain.
  - westurner 3y ago
    Would it be abusive or advisable to adapt edtech offerings in light of social media and slot machines' UX user experience findings? While they should never appease students, can't infotech and edtech learn how to keep their attention, too? Perhaps prompt engineering can help to create engaging educational content with substantive progress metrics? "Build a game in JS (like game category XYZ) to teach quantum entropy to beginners" And then what prompt additions could help to social media-ify the game? How should social media reinforce human communication behaviors with or without the stated age of the user? Should there be a "D- because that's harassment" panda video to reinforce? Which presidential role models' communication styles should AI emulate? I find it sad to consider that the most impactful thing to do to improve children's lives would be to ban them from social media due to their age; though, for the record, e.g. Facebook did originally require a .edu email address at an approving institution. Hopefully, Khanmigo and similar AI edtech offerings will be more engaging than preferentially reviewing unacceptable abuse online; but kids and people still need to learn to interact respectfully online in order to succeed.
Night_Thastus 3y ago
I don't believe it's the tech companies fault necessarily - but social media definitely plays a big role in my view. It is extremely easy to get sucked into groups that perpetuate racial/sexist-related hate, self-loathing and suicide, unhealthy self image/comparison to others, endless doom-saying and bad news, etc. Those can have a huge impact on someone when they're young. (Frankly, they have a huge impact on everyone else, too)
- 908B64B197 3y ago
  > unhealthy self image/comparison to others Is it such a bad thing that they compare themselves to their peers? 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 their peers' perfectly healthy bodies that, quite simply, won't match what they see in the mirror. The solution? Ban mirrors. [0] https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/childhood.html https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/childhood.html [1] 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...
  - Night_Thastus 3y ago
    Of course obesity is a massive problem in the US. That's undeniable. There is, of course, the opposite side of this where some people become anorexic which is well-documented. (Less common, of course, but still important) But there are other issues of self image too, like wealth and success, beauty, etc. Spending all day seeing nothing but seemingly "perfect" individuals with "perfect" lives (even if a lot of it is fabricated) can do a lot of harm, in my view.
whats_a_quasar 3y ago
"Increasingly poor economic prospects" isn't true. The world is far wealthier and youth have far better economic prospects than they did in previous generations, when the world was poor and the rate of teen depression/suicide was low. The two main arguments on mental health "it's the phones" and "the world actually sucks and the kids are right to be depressed." But in the actual data doomerism doesn't correlate with the crisis. Phone usage and decline in face-to-face interaction does. Two sources: - "No, teen suicide isn't because the world is objectively worse": https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/02/teen-suicide-depression-girls-social-media.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/02/teen-suicide-depress... - "Don't be a doomer": https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/dont-be-a-doomer?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=web https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/dont-be-a-doomer?utm_source=su...
- WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
  >Increasingly poor economic prospects" isn't true. We've gone from the celebrated one-income households in the 1950s to increasingly fewer jobs than people to fill them (beginning ~1972) to 3-4 typical incomes necessary to support a household in my (formerly affordable) state. Our long trend certainly seems to fit within a description of Increasingly Poor Economic Prospects
  - throwaway2037 3y ago
    3-4 typical incomes necessary to support a household This makes no sense. It sounds like you are talking about California. No, it doesn't take 3-4 incomes to live a middle class life in California. Yes, it takes two.
    - WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
      California has huge differences in living expenses so saying it takes # of typical incomes to survive would only be sensical in certain places. I live in FL. A bit over a generation ago, we could survive on one typical income but it was tight. It is now tight with 3 typical incomes and a home expense in the low-mid range.

jacobn 3y ago

Jonathan Haidt has an interesting response to this (and related) criticisms: https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/why-some-researchers-think-im-wrong https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/why-some-researchers-th...

Brusco_RF 3y ago

An interesting nuance, but I don't think this should be used to dismiss the mental health effects of social media. Social media affects virtually ALL adolescents, while those other factors listed only affect some. Only a subset of adolescents lack family support or are bullied. The third factor, dissatisfaction with schoolwork, would be extremely hard to discern as a cause or effect of depression

whats_a_quasar 3y ago
Yeah, to add on to this, the article seems to imply a logical leap from - "social media isn't as bad as bullying or having an unstable home" to - "social policy ought to focus on the home and school rather than social media" But I don't think that follows at all. I don't think anyone disagrees that bullying is bad and stable homes are good. And I think that's always been a goal of child social policy. Social isolation caused by technology might have a weaker effect size, but it affects everyone, including adolescents in stable homes who aren't being bullied. It would be great if we had a lever to pull to get rid of bullying, but in the meantime if the goal is to increase child well-being we ought to act on social media.
- xpe 3y ago
  I have no particular expertise on bullying but I am confident there are levers (I.e. policies, interventions, support mechanisms) to reduce many kinds of bullying, much of the time. Different types would need to be dealt with in different ways: physical, emotional, and online. Of course, it is complicated. Bullying arguably is a manifestation of deeper, psychological and social issues. Some forms of bullying are very difficult to find, much less prevent. Unfortunately, many of these kid / young adult practices persist well into adulthood. Personally, I sometimes find it quite difficult to draw lines between a lot of negative behavior. As kids are figuring out their emotions, they act on them in many unconstructive ways. It seems to me the core elements of the worst bullying tend to have to do with (1) it being persistent; (2) targeted on those with less status or power; (3) the victim feels isolated. Again, this isn’t researched, but I did put some thought into it.
  - 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

jsmith45 3y ago

How are they defining social media use in their analysis? Because I'm not sure "estimated time on social media" is really the best way to measure things. The specific social media services used, and how they are used. Some services can be pretty bad if used in some common ways, but much better if used in a more carefully curated fashion. Spending endless hours are a sensibly curated subset of reddit could easily be a whole less bad for ones mental health than just a few hours a week on some other services, especially if the user has not (or cannot) carefully curated their feeds on those other services.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

golemotron 3y ago

> This recent article suggests other factors might be more important to adolescent mental health. The algorithm you are implying is: find the most important factor and concentrate on it to the exclusion of others. Not a good way to go with serious problems.