A group of 33 states including California, New York, Arizona and Indiana are suing Meta Platforms Inc. for harming young people’s mental health and contributing the youth mental health crisis by knowingly designing features on Instagram and Facebook that addict children to the platforms.
  • tygerprints@kbin.social
    523·
    8 months ago

    What really irks the living s#it outta me is not so much that states are blindly suing social media sites just to get on the bandwagon of pretending they’re doing something to help kids – it’s that nobody, not one of those people in any of those states, NO ONE - has asked kids if they feel like they’re being harmed by social media. Outraged puritanical parental groups are making ridiculous assumptions right and left about what kids are seeing, and worse, assuming they know what kids are feeling as a result. They are wrong on this in almost every way. Any kid will tell you, they see worse stuff than this in other places than online almost every day of their lives. It’s popular to make social media the villain - but how can you just ignore input from the very people you’re pretending to be protecting.

    • wmassingham@lemmy.worldEnglish
      15·
      8 months ago

      Literally in the article:

      One internal study cited 13.5% of teen girls saying Instagram makes thoughts of suicide worse and 17% of teen girls saying it makes eating disorders worse.

    • atomWood@lemm.eeEnglish
      152·
      8 months ago

      You don’t usually have to ask someone if they’re being harmed by a person/substance/thing to see the negative effects it is having on their lives.

      Socially media is already known to have negative impacts on adults. This means it WILL also have a negative impact on children and youth. Seeing as children and youth are even more susceptible to negative influences, due to their body and brain still developing, we need to protect them from what we can.

      Even if kids are seeing worse things in their every day lives, that doesn’t make it okay to subject them to other less worse things.

      • tygerprints@kbin.social
        37·
        8 months ago

        What I see actually happening is, some adults have negative impacts from social media but mostly because they give their addictions free reign and look up pretty disturbing stuff online. And they’re projecting that onto other people’s kids. But kids aren’t using social media the same way adults are. And actually there are no studies at all showing that socially media is known to have negative impacts on youth at all. What really helps a kid’s brain to develop is having guidelines and helpful adult models to follow. I’m not saying kids SHOULD be exposed to bad things on purpose, only that kids aren’t made out of gossamer and unicorn farts and will fall apart mentally if they see anything negative or uncomfortable or have to face uncomfortable truths about the world. In fact, denying that such truths exist does more harm to kids than almost anything else. It’s not protecting kids to push their heads into the sand about the real world we live in.

    • radix@lemmy.worldEnglish
      103·
      8 months ago

      Doing something “for the children” is more important, apparently, than doing anything useful.

      It’s not popular to “defend” social media these days, but plenty of studies have found that an adolescent’s online life is basically a reflection of their offline life. i.e. the social media effect is being overstated due to factors largely beyond the platform’s control. But if people don’t want to hear that from some rando online commenter, maybe they’ll listen to real scientists:

      The largest independent scientific study ever conducted investigating the spread of Facebook across the globe found no evidence that the social media platform’s worldwide penetration is linked to widespread psychological harm.

      https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/news/no-evidence-linking-facebook-adoption-and-negative-well-being-oxford-study/

      Within-person changes in self- and other oriented social media behavior were unrelated to within-person changes in symptoms of depression or anxiety two years later, and vice versa.

      https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0747563223002108?via%3Dihub

      Eight-in-ten teens say that what they see on social media makes them feel more connected to what’s going on in their friends’ lives, while 71% say it makes them feel like they have a place where they can show their creative side. And 67% say these platforms make them feel as if they have people who can support them through tough times.

      https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2022/11/16/connection-creativity-and-drama-teen-life-on-social-media-in-2022/

      Using social media is not inherently beneficial or harmful to young people. Adolescents’ lives online both reflect and impact their offline lives. In most cases, the effects of social media are dependent on adolescents’ own personal and psychological characteristics and social circumstances—intersecting with the specific content, features, or functions that are afforded within many social media platforms. In other words, the effects of social media likely depend on what teens can do and see online, teens’ preexisting strengths or vulnerabilities, and the contexts in which they grow up.

      https://www.apa.org/topics/social-media-internet/health-advisory-adolescent-social-media-use

      The most recent and rigorous large-scale preregistered studies report small associations between the amount of daily digital technology usage and adolescents’ well-being that do not offer a way of distinguishing cause from effect and, as estimated, are unlikely to be of clinical or practical significance.

      https://acamh.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jcpp.13190

      Edit: The excess data collection is a separate issue, and one that really does need to be dealt with.

      • tygerprints@kbin.social
        33·
        8 months ago

        Thank you for making this information available! It totally confirms what I’m saying. It’s more important to appear that people are “doing something to protect kids” than actually doing something to protect kids like becoming part of their lives and asking them what they really feel and how theyr’e doing. I do not believe social media is any more evil than any other outlet or influence in their lives.

        • sleepy555@lemmy.worldEnglish
          4·
          8 months ago

          They did the same exact thing with vapes. It was never about the children - they were just a convenient talking point. Data shows teen usage has dropped significantly, but they’re still pushing that narrative because most people aren’t aware. Same thing with the black market THC vapes - some agencies are STILL making the claim that it was from regular vapes. Our government is fucking sleazy and they don’t give a shit about the truth or the people.

    • smarms@kbin.social
      1·
      8 months ago

      While I get your point, and I totally agree with it, there are some actual dangers that must be recognized, and they are dangers to which everyone is exposed somehow, but that could probably affect children more. These are the privacy problems (the article is about Meta collecting children data probably without them caring about it) considering that a child could not know how to properly use the internet (again, it is not so obvious given the fact that there are probably more internet illiterates among the boomers and older population in general), and cyberbullism. Younger people could act less consciously, they are young anyway. But that has nothing to do with the dangerous content that our children should never see with their pure and innocent eyes. I mean, explicit and harsh contents on the internet do exist, and while it’s probably not desirable to voluntarily expose children to these contents, what disturbs me the most is the puritane posture that the adults take in relation to the Children, as you say. Yes, they are not really understanding the children, nor helping them