Over the last few years, it has become accepted knowledge that the internet — mainly social media and, lately, AI tools — was damaging the mental health of kids and increasing the suicide rate amon…
As with all other issues the top 25% keep doing better and better while the bottom 25% keeps spiraling down. If you can pull some kind of average that looks good then you can make ”positive” news out of anything.
Of course it is, and “time will tell” is all well and good; in a world where governments are rushing to introduce age verification laws and other authoritarian anti-Internet policies, we don’t have a lot of time before they irreversibly damage everything good and beautiful about the world. :(
It may be that using phones all the time is keeping kids from bullying each other as much thus lowering teen suicide rates. However at the same time it may also be true that their excessive screen time is frying their brains. One metric getting better doesn’t prove that all the bad metrics are not real.
Maybe. In the throes of a moral panic I think we need to be careful about our intuition though. We are being inundated with “common sense” narratives about the harms of social media, which undermines our ability to think clearly.
That’s not to say you’re wrong but I would challenge you to find evidence for this position, since that’s the only way to be sure we’re not just suffering from group-think here.
Interesting. Is the narrative around kids and social media nothing but a moral panic? Only time will tell…
As with all other issues the top 25% keep doing better and better while the bottom 25% keeps spiraling down. If you can pull some kind of average that looks good then you can make ”positive” news out of anything.
What’s the evidence for this?
Me.
Of course it is, and “time will tell” is all well and good; in a world where governments are rushing to introduce age verification laws and other authoritarian anti-Internet policies, we don’t have a lot of time before they irreversibly damage everything good and beautiful about the world. :(
The good Internet has been dead for at least a decade already.
It may be that using phones all the time is keeping kids from bullying each other as much thus lowering teen suicide rates. However at the same time it may also be true that their excessive screen time is frying their brains. One metric getting better doesn’t prove that all the bad metrics are not real.
or you know, their future is just shit
Maybe. In the throes of a moral panic I think we need to be careful about our intuition though. We are being inundated with “common sense” narratives about the harms of social media, which undermines our ability to think clearly.
That’s not to say you’re wrong but I would challenge you to find evidence for this position, since that’s the only way to be sure we’re not just suffering from group-think here.
lemmy users were not in this study