I think there's a non-trivial probability that concern over social media is a moral panic, and it's being used as a scapegoat for larger social forces. I wonder if much of what it does is surface our neuroses and issues into public, and thus here we are only shooting the messenger.

This may prove out if after 5yr+ of it being banned or limited, nothing changes in the youth (et al.) -- that would be my prediction.

I think there are deeper long term trends causing psychological problems in the west: move away from physical to cognitive labour; increasing community isolation and lack of social institutions; various failures of the state; lack of meaningful wage growth in key brackets, and failure of the "aspiration engine" to create opportunities; lack of time for parenting, moving to dual working-parent households; helicopter parenting caused by breakdown of social trust; lack of infrastructure and provision of environments where children can be known safe in public. etc. etc.

The major forces here are: move to a services economy; dual parent working households; lack of social services in state provision; state infrastructure moving away from providing for the young to paying for the old. This means much of how children grow up in the world is unphysical, disconnected, time-poor, risk adverse, overly demanding, etc.

You are probably at least 30 years old and you have forgotten how disruptive social media is for young people. We are not talking about a degradation of a high trust society here.

With social media, we are talking about kids doing the bare minimum on homework in order to get back on social media faster. We are talking about large swaths of the population preferring to be entertained by social media then to engage in activities that would promote their success. We are talking about the same symptoms as addiction manifesting in kids because they are exposed to too much social media.

Your litmus test for generational effect is also flawed. Let's assume an inverse test as a mental exercise, where we introduce social media to a young population previously unexposed. Kids who are able to reject the pull of social media will replace the ones who cannot, the numbers will shuffle. After such a test is concluded, you will tell yourself you're right because on a macro-economic scale everything looks the same, but to an individual prone to social media overuse, his or her life will be different (likely worse).

That said, the issues you bring up are more important, and no one seems willing to tackle them. Perhaps a middle ground here is that the problems you listed are masking the problem of social media overuse, but that social media overuse is still a problem. It is not an innocent messenger.

> lack of time for parenting

The average father in present day spends more time with their kids weekly than the average mother did in 1960.

> helicopter parenting caused by breakdown of social trust

This one is more likely I think. Kids aren't able to just run around anymore.

> lack of infrastructure and provision of environments where children can be known safe in public

Kids can not safely ride their bikes a few miles across town. Fewer sidewalks, bigger cars. Distracted drivers. Its a death sentence.

There is closed or moderated social media, and there is open and unmoderated social media. Twitter is the latter and it’s… really bad.

> if after 5yr+ of it being banned or limited

We gave social media 20 years to impact the world, why give it only 5 for a rollback? It feels like long term effects would take much longer to surface.

>dual parent working households; lack of social services in state provision;

These two feel interrelated :)

> I think there's a non-trivial probability that concern over social media is a moral panic, and it's being used as a scapegoat for larger social forces.

Do you know if there are countries where the causes you laid out are not the case? (given demographics, I'm not sure if there are too many strict counter examples)

This can be proven. Simply measure a population of typical social media users for relative measures of neuroticism. Then have an experiment population of healthy military leaders and police officers that have low social media use. The assumption is that the second population would score dramatically lower in neuroticism than the population average.

That establishes a of divergent populations baseline. The change their, such as deny, social media access or content. Measure the change to those two populations.

Assumed facts:

* social media access dramatically increases prevalence of anxiety and a state of dependency/addition. When true, removal of social media triggers addiction withdrawal that displays as emotional health illnesses.

* Populations that do not frequently make use of social media are not at risk of withdrawal.

* persons in high risk professions are typically conditioned into states of substantially lower neuroticism that population averages are not exposed to

> This may prove out if after 5yr+ of it being banned or limited, nothing changes in the youth (et al.) -- that would be my prediction.

You're speculation here could be a counterargument to Jonathan Haidt's meta studies on the effects of social media on teenage girls, if you can supplement your speculation with a better explanation for the increase in major depressive episodes in the time range he cites than the correlation with Instagram use.

For this article, however, all the participants are aged 18-30. Using it as a jumping off point to paint all concern over social media as a "moral panic" is reductive and unhelpful.

Teens and social media rethoric in my country right now is very close to the "video games cause violence" type of argument.

They always fixate on external things instead of strictly looking at it as internal economic and social shortcomings.

There was a short time, between 2012/2013-2020 when the "kids were alright", though a bit worse in school than previous generations.

Maybe 'social media bad' is just the new 'video games bad' or 'watching TV bad', but the sheer scale and intrusiveness is completely different imo.

I couldn't carry my gaming PC with me as a Team Fortress 2 addicted kid, my Gameboy was too basic to keep me compulsively glued to its screen for 8 hours, it couldn't constantly send me notifications, it didn't have some hyperoptimized billion dollar algorithm meticulously designed to exploit human psychology.

There were friction and physical boundaries, now there aren't. That's a problem.

Just ask most primary school teachers how their students are doing.

Here's my take: the bigger picture is one of "lessening humanity" - and it's death by a million paper cuts. Social media is one of the bigger cuts, but it's an awful lot of other things as well.

Being on screens all the time - especially when out and about (and whether it's social media or maps, it doesn't really matter) - means less casual conversation, less "hello, how you doing", less banter, less touch points with real people. It means toddlers look up out of their prams and can't meet their parents' eyes, it means you don't smile at strangers, or exchange a common glance about something trivial. It means kids don't get to sit in pubs with their parents and have to "do adult conversation". It means if you're in a situation as a teen and you're uncomfortable, you just reach for your phone instead of reaching out to the next awkward teen, who might just end up being your lifetime friend.

And then beyond that there are infinitely many takes-away-the-humanity cuts. Even something like this: once upon in our country you could buy a parking ticket for a space in a car park, then what typically happened when you got back to your car with time to spare is you then pulled up next to someone and offered them your ticket for free. This shit doesn't happen now - spaces are tied to number plates (because: profit), and so another little touchpoint with other humans is eroded.

Getting hold of many of the companies you use is becoming harder, through profit motives / AI chat / whatever - high street banks disappear, and immediately there's a whole source of contact that disappears.

We got a deal on our post-wedding train journey 25 years ago because we did it face to face with a guy in the station, and when we got chatting about the occasion and he discovered it was our wedding, he upped our ticket to 1st class. No such luck now, when you order all your tickets online, and the customer support is outsourced to somewhere a thousand miles away.

Real people are for the most part lovely people, and their motives are 95% aligned with each other - love your family, help people, be generous, be kind - but the more time we spend slipping behind digital facades, being taken away from human contact through these many papercuts, the worse things are likely to get. IMO.

> lack of time for parenting

> helicopter parenting

There is a contradiction here which commonly underlies 'problems in modern parenting' discussions and creates a "dammed if you do, damned if you don't" situation. It is always possible to criticize any parent for being uninvolved or too involved.

I've often wondered why 'soccer mom' became a negative term as though 'supporting your child in healthy outdoor recreational activities' was considered a bad thing. I know it implied a log of other behaviors, but still was anchored in the idea that there is a microscopic line between an involved parent and an over-involved parent.

Then we still assured that two working parents brings neglect - despite the pride many Gen Xers take in being a 'latch key kid' and being sent out until the street lights went dark.

There's no winning, which is perhaps the point.

I think it's pretty simple:

1. Ads are mind cancer.

2. The better a platform is at delivering ads, the worse it is for your mental well-being.

Point (2) is not just because of the ads themselves, but also all the incentives created by ad-monetized platforms. So much slop, misinformation, clickbait, and ragebait is caused by people fighting for attention to get that sweet, sweet ad revenue.

There's a reason "peak TV" happened after TV shows were freed from the need to bend their structure around several ad breaks. This stuff is not just a "monetization strategy", it infects the surrounding (non-ad) media and fundamentally changes it for the worse.

Edit: One last point - ad delivery requires taking control away from the viewer/user. A platform that's good at delivering ads is necessarily one that makes it hard to block/skip/remove the ads because most users would if they could. This same mentality of control then informs the rest of the design. So you have endless A/B tests you can't opt out of and "I'll enable it later" dialog boxes instead of allowing the user to control their experience.

There's hard research to support the idea that it is not a moral panic and that there are serious long-term effects for both individuals and societies. That can be true at the same time as the "think of the children" people weaponize that rhetoric for their own ends, as well as the long term trends you point to. I don't think it serves anyone to turn your argument FOR those points down into an argument that these "moral panic" concerns are probably made up.

It literally came to light in court filings that Meta has specific prompt guidelines for how AI bots on its networks should go about having sexual encounters with minors, with documentation for cases as young as 8 years old.

The same billionaire who pushes this shit is in league with the most-documented child sex trafficker in the history of the world. Where there's smoke, there's fire. There is absolutely no reason to give the social media companies benefit of the doubt.

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