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Yes, Social Media Really Is a Cause of the Epidemic of Teenage Mental Illness
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this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2024
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The other aspect to this is that even if social media is bad it is mostly because people are terrible to each other via social media. They are judgemental, demanding, lack empathy,... Those things were already a problem with social interactions before social media, just not this visible and a bit easier to avoid. And the same is true about companies being exploitative via social media (the ones that run it and the tracking/advertising aspect and companies just acting as regular users on there), that problem wasn't created by social media, it just became more visible.
The way I like to think about it is that social media has acted as a magnifying lens for many aspects of social interaction, for both positive and negative. The positives include greater sharing of knowledge, better lines of communication with relatives, easier capacity to organise and protest… but the negatives include what you’ve described: bigotry and social division, commercialisation, and exploitation of the dopamine-reward system for profit gain among many others. It’s brought together some amazing people but has rewarded some abhorrent behaviour. Social media has both intensified and distorted our social interactions.
I think if anything could be attributed to social media itself it is probably that whole dopamine aspect but the fact that it is emphasized in the design is of course again due to exploitation.