Late last year Australia passed a ban for the use of social media of under-16s. In principle I think this is a really good idea.

Unfortunately they rushed it through without any thought as to how it would actually work in terms of age verification. It's now been 6 months, which means we're 6 months away from when it's supposed to come into effect, and we still don't have any idea how it's actually supposed to work. But the principle behind it: the idea that social media is actually really not healthy for our brains, especially at a young and vulnerable age, is a sound one. And there's only more and more research coming out to support that.

hmm, i do wonder which causes which. Depression makes you prone to addictions as you seek anything to give you the happy chemicals. But constant social media exposure is rather harmful when you just take it all in, and that can cause depression Especially if you don't block keywords for war coverages and politics.

i stand firm in my opinion that human brains are straight up not designed to take in a constant stream of bad news from around the world, which sucks because we are designed to focus on negatives for our survival. Memories of accidents and deaths take priority over nice memories so that we can avoid dangers better. from evolution's point of view you being happy is an afterthought, you just need to live long enough to fuck. and across history it worked! we never had to distinguish between dangers nearby and dangers so far away it literally does not matter for you, as all news were brought by foot or with an otherwise huge time delay - they were either nearby or already history, and only one or two at a time. well, never... until today, and our neuroplasticity doesn't seem to be enough to counter this, and evolution doesn't work fast enough to fix this

Could also be a vicious cycle where if you trip and fall once both will create a negative synergy where you try to drown your sorrows in addictive doomscrolling, which only makes you worse

I feel like it should be tacked on as a bell curve to older generations too lol. My grandmother and my parents are absolutely hopelessly addicted to Facebook reels, scrolling them nonstop throughout the day, just connecting those ads and wild algorithm messaging with those little dopamine hits.

I remember spending hours tinkering with Linux in my bedroom as a kid and being yelled at for being antisocial and not spending enough time off the computer.

How the turns have tabled

So they're shifting the blame to social media & not at our society ? Of course

I remember spending hours tinkering with Linux in my bedroom as a kid

I feel like the environment of subject-specific forums and IRC chat that Millennial geeks grew up with is very different from the centralised, generic, algorithm-driven social media that Gen Z grew up with, and non-geeky Millennials, Gen X, and Boomers adopted in the late aughts & '10s. That was really the best of what social media could do, with far fewer of the unhealthy downsides.

I'm a little disappointed that they looked at each of social media, phone use and video game use independently as part of the study and didn't seem to consider any covariance. If you're looking for which things are really associated, seems like it'd be helpful to see where they overlap.

centralised, generic, algorithm-driven social media

Which is always within your fingers. I spent my fair time in IRC and early web-era forums and whatever we had at the time but it was on a full blown desktop computer with CRT displays. It was tied to a location and when you were even on another room that thing didn't follow you, much less when you left home.

Oh gee I wonder why depressed kids are increasingly online where they are more free to express themselves, in a society where mental health problems are very stigmatized and confiding in someone that you want to kill yourself can get you imprisoned.

Also, related post on the general concept of internet addiction and gambling social media addiction.

txttletale:

pun-ishment888:

txttletale:

txttletale:

going to bat for the concept of internet addiction as someone under 80 is spectacularly funny

damn people are spending a lot of time on the combination newspaper/public square/vast searchable library of incomprehensible amounts of information/storefront/private communications/some people's actual job technology. presumably there is some nefarious Scary Pathological Aspect to this,

Imagine if you called gambling addiction "addiction to going outside" and doomed the discourse to constantly bounce between "ok SOME outside activities are bad, you need to have a good relationship with how you interact" and "theres nothing wrong with going outside dumbass"

"gambling addiction" is an invention of the gambling industry leveraged to pathologise the human misery inflicted on purpose as part of their business model and divert discussions of that misery and suffering away from regulatory and political interventions that could prevent that harm and towards biomedicalized management of those experiencing that (again--foreseeable, inevitable, industry-working-as-intended) harm

In the meantime: Parents: don’t give your children lighted rectangles to play with.