[closeparen]

The rising teen suicide proves everyone’s favorite social critique. Declining church attendance. Declining corporeal punishment. The academic rat race. Climate change.

Whatever I don’t like about the world is why the kids are killing themselves. Having had friends struggle with this when I was a teenager, I find it incredibly disrespectful and in poor taste to leverage their suffering in this lazy and offhand way as an argument for your political opinions.

[GhettoComputers]

What is my lazy, poor taste or political opinion? You are attacking my post with no evidence or counter points, a emotional response that isn't based on anything other than hearsay, the first section is a strawman, and the second is how your sample bias should dismiss any other experiences. Is it not hypocritical to dismiss the effect of social media on suicide, such as by cyber bullying?

My experience with social media has been negative, and I have lost friend due to suicide and depression, which is why I am pointing it out. Are you suggesting that it has no effect on mental heath or is proven to be beneficial? I would love to be proven wrong if you have information on it. https://www.newswise.com/articles/10-year-study-shows-elevat...

>Through annual surveys from 2009 to 2019, researchers tracked the media use patterns and mental health of 500 teens as part of the Flourishing Families Project. They found that while social media use had little effect on boys' suicidality risk, for girls there was a tipping point. Girls who used social media for at least two to three hours per day at the beginning of the study--when they were about 13 years old--and then greatly increased their use over time were at a higher clinical risk for suicide as emerging adults. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3477910/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_and_suicide

[closeparen]

Social media is one of dozens of social changes in the last N years. You can line any one of them up next to any bad outcome. This is not generally being done from a place of epistemic humility or interest in establishing causation. It’s just “thing I already don’t like lines up with bad outcome, see how right I am not to like it!”

If that’s not what you’re doing, I don’t mean it as an attack on you. I just think we’re systematically abusing miserable kids as confirmation of our priors (about all kinds of things, social media is just one). We owe them curiosity about how to actually help.

[GhettoComputers]

Thank you for the clarification. It is a multi dimensional problem, and I have found very negative effects from social media for myself and people around me.

I do not think that social media is overall good for mental health, it has been shown to be harmful in statistics especially for women and also there is no shortage of n=1 articles on benefits of quitting it. I think it is a serious issue when the teenage suicide rates are higher in the US (pre corona) when it is a wealthy country. If you can clarify, what is the problem you have with my post? I am posting it not only from personal experience but also with data to substantiate my claims.

[cmoscoso]

What other social changes have taken place in the last years?

[tomlin]

A lot of data counters what you're trying to put out here. I wish it weren't true, but if you would like, I can point you to studies where you can see how teen suicide in girls and the launch of Instagram, then Snapchat, then TikTok - as well, final thoughts and letters by a large amount of these young girls vary from saying that social media WAS the reason for their suicide, to saying that actions made by others (via social media) were a factor in others. I do sincerely think social media is a force for harm for everyone - as it raises division among people at rates that are hard to build responses to. Psychologists also largely agree that the effects of social media are causing a new kind of concern outside of what we've so far dealt with.

I do sort of think you might have an agenda here, for at this point you are suggesting that the thoughts and feelings of the girls who committed suicide should hold almost no weight. Maybe you're not saying that outright, but if you haven't looked into the lives of these girls before suggesting their plight is "just another generational grievance", well, yeah, we are fucked.

[kapp_in_life]

And plenty of people's experiences with social media have been positive.

Think of the LGBT teen in a small town in the midwest who can find a social group to discuss their. Hobby groups, pick up sports groups, etc.

Teens who were already finding 2-3 hours "and then greatly increased their use" a day for doomscrolling between school and homework probably would feel the same if they spent it watching TV.

[GhettoComputers]

Can you prove these statements with any data? There are of course benefits to online networking, but the US population of LGBT is 5.6% (of all ages) with most concentrated in urban areas so you are pointing out a small age bracket of a specific type of social engagement in a small population as a counter with the assumption it is beneficial, and the hobbies you describe are not social media engagement, they are online meetings that go offline, which is not the usual trajectory of users online. These sound like extreme outliers unless you'd like to prove me wrong.

[Karawebnetwork]

I moderate four LGBTQIA+ communities and support spaces on Facebook, totaling over 395k members. I cover both my local scene and international communities.

Without the online spaces, most members wouldn't have friends. The bulk of the work is managing the news feeds and the main task is to approve posts individually. So we see them all.

Many would otherwise be totally isolated. Teens in rural America are among the most affected by this isolation. Many users create threads describing their lack of support in their physical lives or thanking the online spaces for existing, stating that prior to their presence on the group, they had no support network.

While the population of LGBTQIA+ people is concentrated in urban areas, they are primarily adults who have the freedom to move around. Teens are stuck in their hometowns and can only move around after they reach adulthood and connect or build support networks online. As you said, the US population is around 5.6% but even states like Alabama still have 3.0%. This demographic is especially relevant in this topic as its suicide rates are higher that the country's average, with trans people (without support) having rates that go as high as 40 to 50%. Online spaces provide enough support to reduce that number significantly.

There is a meme that goes something like:

"Why are you on Facebook? It's for older people. - It's because your friends aren't queer."

The LGBTQIA+ internet is similar to what the internet was in the 90s. Close-knit communities where everyone knows each other, sub-communities, sub-cultures, and lots of blogs and personal sites.

I would even go so far as to say that comparing the average social network usage to LGBTQIA+ social network usage is the equivalent of comparing apples and oranges.

[GhettoComputers]

Thank you for your perspective. Do you think that the LGBTQIA+ community is best served in this method? For instance, art communities would have been a stand in for many before, and from my exposure it seems to have had very good effects for marginalized people who aren't mainstream due to interests, sexual orientation, or creativity and ideas that are normally dismissed. They seem to be the least polarized people I know of.

I have a question for my friend: he is bisexual so he has problems where he is invalidated by both hetero and non hetero communities, and feels very isolated and depressed, and I don't know enough to help, where do you suggest is the best place for him to get support or any resources for bisexual men?

My experience with tumblr was a very mixed bag for the non heterosexual communities such as the mixture of mental health as a focal point where some I knew got better and some got worst and self diagnosed themselves into deeper unhappiness.

[Karawebnetwork]

> Do you think that the LGBTQIA+ community is best served in this method?

Ideally, there would be dedicated spaces because the existing spaces are generally very hostile. For example, it is common for people to create fake profiles in order to get past the first layer of verification (looking at the profile and reading the required questions). Once in, they take pleasure in contacting members to push them to suicide. Online trolling with real dangers.

There is also the fact that the mission of the platform is generally not very compatible or at least the lack of attention to the LGBTQIA+ communities creates such negative experiences.

For example, Facebook's automatic moderation detects ordinary slurs but not targeted homophobic or transphobic slurs or "dogwhistles." This often results in a troll using something like "you'll never be a woman" or calling transgender people "the 41%" or "join the 41%" (in direct reference to suicide rates).

Understandably, users get frustrated and tell these users to go away using harsh words, and also report the troll to Facebook. What usually happens is that automatic moderation does not detect the troll, responding that the comments do not violate their terms of service. However, "griefers" often report legitimate users. The recent changes make this very easy, as something as innocent as writing "why is this man here?" in a space dedicated to lesbians will be flagged as hate speech against a gender identity. Thus, the troll gets away with it and the users are banned for 30 days by the platform. Often, a troll can manage to flag enough comments to have entire groups shut down by the automatic moderation tools.

This makes these spaces unsafe for supporting vulnerable people. For example, one public page that I have access to the admin panel has such a large ban list that I'm not able to get the exact number without the admin page crashing. By playing with the APIs, I was able to get a count of 25k bans before it also crashed and returned errors.

But as you said, alternative sites can be just as dangerous. Sites like Tumblr quickly become echo chambers and a race to the bottom. They've been very helpful in providing a space, but the lack of oversight makes them potentially dangerous.

To answer your question about your friend, bisexuals are often one of the least supported and understood demographic groups. This brings us back to my earlier point about echo chambers. It is common for subcommunities to gather around hate, and the LGBTQIA+ community is no exception. There are many spaces where otherwise queer people gather to denigrate bi identities, invalidating entire labels because they don't take the time to understand them properly. I would argue that there are also a number of people who do this to make themselves feel better. "Finally someone I punch down to". Even the queer articles and literature of the 70s were hostile to bi people.

This is one of the many reasons I think there needs to be better LGBTQIA+ spaces. Moderation is important, but so is free speech. It is a fine line to walk. But one thing that's sure is that 90's style "free for all" internet can be very harmful for kids.

[tomlin]

I do think that communities and social media aren't necessarily the same. Communities have existed before social media. I grew up on CompuServe, which had a few LGBT groups as far back as 1997, and forums chat rooms have been around for as long as that. "Social media" in these terms, tends to be surrounding anonymous behavior and how people abuse anonymous behavior to hurt and even cause physical harm - which has similar effects in your communities. We can shun the daily posting, swipe-right, anonymous aspects of social media without removing communities - as proven by their existence prior to social media.

[_bfhp]

That "40 to 50%" trans statistic is incredibly worrying. Can you share where it's from so I can reference it in the future when these discussions come up?

[Karawebnetwork]

It sounds worrying, and it is. But it's important to make one distinction.

It's not "transgender people inherently have a 40% suicide rate". It's "transgender people are in situations where their suicide rates climb to as high as 40%".

It's also important to understand the difference between "suicide ideation" and "suicide attempts" which are two different numbers that are often mixed up.

- https://www.thetrevorproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/...

- https://issuu.com/trevorproject/docs/talking_about_suicide_a...

To answer your question, here is a source I am familiar with as a Canadian:

"Among trans Ontarians, 35.1 % [...] seriously considered [...] and 11.2 % attempted, suicide in the past year."

"Lower [...] transphobia [...] was associated with a 66 % reduction in ideation [...] and an additional 76 % reduction in attempts among those with ideation."

- https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s...

US numbers are higher: the National Transgender Discrimination Survey (NTDS) found that 41% of 6,450 transgender respondents said they had attempted suicide. I don't have the source other than a PDF saved on my local machine, but you should be able to find it easily enough.

It's also very important to look at the sample pool of such studies. I remember that one number that was widely used in debates was actually done on the transgender women population of a men's prison in south america. Of course the people there are miserable but the numbers won't be representative of the larger population. It stopped being used as much after people pointed out that fact.

[chiefalchemist]

I think the point is, there are plenty of signals that increase suicide rate. Without full and proper analysis (e.g., control group, etc.) tying social media to suicide rate is correlation.

And as presented, that comes off as opinion.

Note: I'm not taking sides. I'm only wanting to answer your question :) please don't shoot the messenger.

[GhettoComputers]

I can see that viewpoint. Data is imperfect but it isn’t a random correlation like cell phones associated with fungal infection. There is no shortage of self reported data, but cyber bullying attacks directly cause suicide attempts for instance. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6791504/

[chiefalchemist]

Um. Actually, cyber bullying (probably) correlates with suicide. That is, the suicide victim likely has other contributing causes. Maybe that depression? Maybe it's being abused as a child. Etc.

I am by no means belittling suicide (note: a close family member used that exit), nor am I belittling bullying. It's evit. But it's rare such things can be traced to a single trigger. Life is complicated. Sometimes we're too willing to oversimplify.

[GhettoComputers]

Yes there is enough media attention it may be overly skewed but it’s like coronavirus statistics, did they die of corona, oxygen deprivation, or inflammation? They said in the study that once that was taken out the stats are way less skewed to negative.

[mbesto]

Your overall point is valid, but this last comment is unnecessary.

> I find it incredibly disrespectful and in poor taste to leverage their suffering in this lazy and offhand way as an argument for your political opinions.

I find it odd that's one of the conclusions you drew from the parent's comment. You're making a baseless claim that the OP has a political agenda (I didn't get this sense at all) when they were clearly demonstrating that there is potential causation and providing insight/opinion to it. You make it sound like we can't even have discussions about suicide because "we're leveraging suffering". I don't think you meant to direct that at the parent but rather politicians, otherwise your comment is far more distasteful and not posted in good faith.

[908B64B197]

Remember the moral panics around Dungeons and Dragons? [0] Or the "Hyper Realistic violence of Doom"? [1]

Social Media is the next in line. In 20 years people will laugh at the articles and news report about it.

Something I wonder too is if suicides aren't just better reported today because there's less social stigma around mental health than in previous decades (for an extreme example, just look at the 1950's...).

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26328105

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mEP4cflrd4

[GhettoComputers]

Do you think we’ll also laugh about the coronavirus response?