You know what they are. Online forms of information or opinion sharing like YouTube, Facebook, X, Reddit, Discord... The biggest cause of conformity all around the world since the dawn of the Internet. However, it quickly turned into "slop" that became low-quality but in huge quantity to artificially boost viewership and "completed video" counts.
For instance, you kind of need to use some of them sometimes. Like email.
The fact that people are on social media reinforces THEIR belief that social media is more dangerous than it is (they only see the people who POST on social media complaining that it is bad - sampling bias). I think it is more of scapegoating for other issues like jobs or schools in society.
It's mainly the education system. Look, if summer holiday means more free time to use social media, yet depression rates are lower, isn't it a paradox if you say that social media causes more suffering than schools?
It has indeed attracted a lot of men and women to do this by posting cringe, attention-seeking pictures and videos at the cost of hiding their true nature, wasting their time that could have been used for better things. And it takes advantage of the fact that humans love to seek validation and connection, and a like button / chaotic comments section pretty much is the lowest form of that, mostly being meaningless. However, there are still some good people there, like ones that talk about philosophy or otherwise useful trivia, from my perspective.
Ideas get spread around, even illogical or dangerous ones. Famously, most TikTok trends are totally irrational and hinge on silliness, yet there are some who just blindly and mindlessly follow a popular person, even when popularity doesn’t mean trustworthiness (even Trump lies all the time). So please, try and analyze and you will very quickly discover social media ideas are too biased and non-neutral to be reliable. To me, it’s like a corrupted silly-idea spreading system.
Perhaps people can realize it's just an addiction machine. However, in reality, it is still a way to stay connected over long distances so, like with any tool with both good and bad, use it wisely. Rather they may be able to detach from the social pressures of the world.
Convenience, and children going out risking being reported as child neglect (even when developmentally capable). This is especially since "mandatory" child abuse reporting laws exist in some places, and you cannot even tell whether a child is being abused when he goes out on his own free will or through coercion!
Social media shorts/reels/infinite scroll decreased this a lot, and now most peoples’ ability to tolerate boredom is reduced. It's sad I cannot have a conversation with people on their phone; However, it's their freedom. Yet the loop of people spending more time on their phones self-perpetuates due to learned helplessness trying to seek other forms of communication - the methods used to attract people online will not last for long in real life.
It’s a valid way to pass time, and the fact that it takes up time is
just inherent in the platform’s interest to retain users and earn money (which goes for
every business). TikTok trends are usually toxic and annoying, but they
take up a very small portion of videos among the millions or billions.
So, it isn’t inherently bad; it’s just a place to express thoughts.
There are indeed many different types of social media; some are more
text-based and can be used to read others’ thoughts, like Reddit and
Quora, so I think applying a label of “BAD” to pretty much all social
platforms is just a false generalization of social media as a whole. In
fact, since all online communication is basically social media, as
such, in fact, removing it just causes more inconvenience and
loneliness.
This is where social media, which is de facto better than school gets blamed, as
school is seen as a
law of nature that restricts freedom social media does a better job than school at
entertaining, which is also valid learning!
But I think Wikipedia or AI models are better information sources too!
I don't think so. Rather, a reverse correlation is more likely. Blaming solely focused on social media ignores the root causes (most likely schooling). Television, video games, Dungeons & Dragons, comic books, radio, and even jazz music were blamed in the historical past. All of those were invalid. social media or/and AI being blamed for stress just shows how history is repeating itself. (And the media being more powerful than scientific studies showing little correlation)
Rather, adults, the ones writing them, hate to admit that hating school is valid!
Some very good evidence is that depression, anxiety, and suicide rates roughly double when school is in session. If social media were to be a bigger problem, wouldn't such rates increase (instead of decrease) in the summer?
A good source is here
Social media posts or videos about quitting social media. However, I don't think those 15-second "life hacks" even work, judging STILL by the state of the current world. And then people infer they really have a cooked attention span even if they can function - provided they are outside it.
Instagram selectively unconciously causing availability heuristic of the best moments of life, which is otherwise very messy (or staging?). There is also photo manipulation - to the point that with AI I don't know what's real anymore (luckily not all situations are like this). Text-based social medias might be better.
Social media is aimed at doomscrollers, so things not immediately attractive get attacked lol. This leaves people like programmers semi-lonely.
Rather, they are entirely likely to see posts if they doomscroll, so telling them not to doomscroll is futile
Haha... hard to advertise to people things that are suited to people who don't use social media, to people that are on social media. very funny
Non-social-media users may never be able to share their problems online, while social media users may share their problems and be instinctively associated with social media - most of the time spending too much time on social media would be one of their problems (a secondary problem resulting from the bigger problem that humans are forced to do less desirible things often.)
Watchtime (bad for really long videos), likes, viewers to judge whether it is worth displaying... metric must exist. Sadly many will lose and we won't know who. Sadly.