If you're posting as well, or at least commenting on stuff and having discussions with people you know (even if you just know them online), I think that's fine. Like forums, or being in group chats with friends on Facebook, or sharing photos you take with a specific community.
It's when you're only consuming (like scrolling TikTok or Instagram), or when your comments are written for the algorithm rather than for actual discussion (like on Reddit, or even Hackernews to an extent), that social media is an issue.
If you found a community on Facebook, you’d likely have found it regardless without it.
Jonathan Haidt talks about how once social media usage became ubiquitous among teenagers around 2015 mental health problems began to skyrocket. And a big part of this was the algorithm serving up content designed to make people feel bad, but another part around feelings of being bullied turned out to largely be kids seeing their friends hanging out with each other without inviting them and this provoking feelings of alienation. That’s inevitable, I felt bad when I found out about parties or hang-outs I didn’t get invited to at that age as well. But I didn’t even know about 90% of them, and those I did I heard about through passing references rather than a stream of pictures and albums about how much fun everyone was having without me.
I think some level of a sense of isolation is inevitable under those circumstances, though I’m not sure that by itself would rise to the level of banning it outright. At least not before trying other interventions like addressing Meta’s “19 strikes before banning you for CSAM” rule. Kids are just the canaries in the coal mine here. Whatever these services are doing that is cooking developing brains is still turning up the heat on adult brains too, we can’t try to pretend we can be psychologically healthy engaging with something that we know is spiking depression and anxiety in our kids.
The culture of interacting just changed as more people got online and more tools became available to expand access to things. You used to just be able to have an unsecured comment section where anyone could come to your website and directly modify the page’s HTML and most of the time nothing would happen. You ought to have sanitized your inputs but there just wasn’t this background miasma that was going to flood your comment section full of spam, scans, and injecting malware into the page if you left an open text-entry box on the internet. Once it hit a certain scale and there was a certain amount of money in it then a lot of mess came with them.
Then we got the one-two punch of social media apps on phones, and everywhere we saw these get adopted, we saw depression and anxiety increase en masse.
My own theory is that if you have to pick one thing it's the phone, because screen time/attention skyrockets when you get one of those, and they can have you freaking out about whatever clickbait they're feeding you pretty much 24/7. When I grew up there was just a computer in the den and when I wasn't in the den, whatever I'd viewed on it was out of sight, mostly out of mind.
Ads mean that you want to keep the user on your platform as long as possible. They are incentivized to make it addictive at the most fundamental level. A company selling movies doesn't care how often you watch the movies you buy, they just want to convince you to buy them. A company that makes money for each minute you spend watching a movie would put out very different products.
Analytics mean they can precisely see the effect of any given change to figure out what makes the product more addictive.
Personalization means they can tailor your experience to be addictive to you, personally, rather than just generally addictive to people.
And scale means they can afford to pay enormous amounts of money to a lot of smart people and have them work full time on the problem of making the product more addictive.
I don't know what you do about it.
That is not true. Distorted body perception, anorexia etc. due to omnipresent photoshopped models in magazines and poster ads where a thing decades ago.
Things escalated with social media, but there were issues long before that.
The escalation, the ubiquitousness, is the problem.
It's like the difference to your health between having a can of coke week and drinking a 2 L bottle of coke every day.
Hey you spent 500ms looking at this pretty girl dancing, how about some ass now?
I get straight up PORN ads on Facebook too. Twitter at some point showed me porn as well, even if I had specifically curated it to show JavaScript content.
Before then I used to use lunarstorm. Was that the sane period of social media? Maybe, my memory is fuzzy: it's been a while.
The algorithms create the engagement, the engagement lures in the ads, not the other way around, at least that's what I think right now.
Well, there's at least a few reasons this is different than the current situation.
1) It's expensive to make a TV show, it's free to do a fortnite dance or eat a tide pod and post it to several websites. The amount of low-effort, low-quality, probably-harmful content on TikTok or whatever is exponentially more than low-effort, low-quality, probably-harmful TV shows/ads.
2) The availability is on completely different scales. TVs are (basically) fixed in a specific place. Phones are, for most people, within arms reach 24/7.
3) What can be shown on TV is significantly more regulated in most parts of the world, and control mechanisms by governments are more robust (pull a broadcast license, etc.). It's harder to take a website (or TikTok, whatever) offline than it is to pull a harmful show/advert off of HGTV or whatever your favorite channel is.
4) TV is not specifically tailored to the viewer to produce the most amount of happy chemical.
And in fairness, dosage is the difference between a painkiller an a heroin addiction.
So why are we surprised that when we put a TV in the kids' hands things got even worse? Meta testified on the stand recently that they're not a social media company anymore, they're now all about video. Tiktok is the new TV. Every app wants to Tiktokify. The money from TV, just pushing an endless stream of video to someone, is very good.
We were able to go back to one TV in the house (at least I was), and even avoid a big chunk of the ads when watching TV (by paying for Netflix/etc) and even radio (Spotify/etc).
Except we now we put a garbage TV in every hand.
It's a terrible idea because it's a tiny screen; because it's not a shared experience, but an isolating one; because it's been proven that it's bad for eyesight/myopia. But most of all, it's terrible because the content is crap.
Spending hours watching a never ending sequence of low effort 2min videos that need to deliver on the first 30s (or they're skipped) is not the way to make anyone smarter/saner.
Australians are very aware that it destroys people’s brains.
I would argue that it did, we just did a poor job of measuring it.
Anecdotally, during my childhood I moved from a place that had very little TV advertising to a place with a normal amount and it had a noticeable impact.
Same shit, new generation.
Complaining about ads is kinda like complaining about homeless people. You are just servicing your own annoyance without actually engaging in critical thought. It is selfish behavior.
Also, what's an 'ad' is an extreme spectrum nowadays with free stuff given out in exchange for a post, people trying to act like paid influencers to fake it until they make it, paid influencers, and listicle affiliate link slop.
But you can’t solve that issue with policy. It’s a cultural issue. People are not willing to pay for the content they consume (with money).
Not to mention you would collapse the US economy (I’m not sure if you’re US based, just speaking from my perspective), and likely others, if you applied a blanket ban on ad-supported media.
Alright Australian lawmakers, you heard the man, chop chop!
I remember when social media was sane 15+ years ago. The problem is the business model, not socializing. It's crazy to ban it when being a teen is the beginning of socializing!