It's surprising how many parents I know who are in denial about this. It must be because they themselves are constantly using social media and don't want to accept what it is doing to their own mental health.
I, Millennial, am seeing a huge decline in social media usage among my peers. It's reached the point where I didn't even bother to install any of the apps when I got a new phone last year, other than Facebook Messenger which we still use for planning activities.
The vast majority of my friends and "friends" on social media haven't posted anything for years. I think my last contribution was back in 2017.
I thought social media in general is boomer / gen X town nowadays.
Just to clarify, is the scope of social media being referred to here particular, typical apps (eg: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram), or any app/service that has interactive social and media elements (eg: Discord, Reddit)?
I really think we need to make a (large) difference between platforms focused on user interaction and discussion (Discord, Reddit, old school forums, ...) and platforms where the person behind the user is the focus and placed in front of the entire world to be judged (Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, ...).
The former is not focused on you as a person and you are judged by the discussion that you participate in, while the latter is focused on you as a person and you are judged by how interesting you are or can appear to be.
My peers are disappearing from the latter category (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, ...)
I don't think I know the user name of any of my friends on Reddit even, or who are active there, which is exactly the point - nobody cares about the connection to the real life person.
I agree about more specific definitions of what is being referred to in discussions under the umbrella term 'social media', particularly given those pushing for regulation.
A couple things that stand out in discussions about social media negative consequences are: service-led algorithms and UX which actively fuel addictive patterns, an emphasis on a single and often IRL identity (Zuckerberg famously saying there should only be a single user identity[1]) and audience reach which is far too broad for various content.
On Discord people often become familiar with other users via their pseudonymous handles, even sharing IRL details as they're comfortable. However a few things help with this: no leaderboard-style gamification of posts like there is with Twitter or Reddit, chat is inherently lower stakes and the scope is limited to that community not the wider internet.
Traditional forums are interesting since I know various who were addicted but in a user-led rather than service-led way (ie: they've been addicted through habit of non-gamified checking of content/participation). Even expressing having anxiety posting threads due to the expectations of peers. However the benefit is still an awareness that the primary audience is mostly an in-group of (mostly friendly) peers. Whereas on Twitter for example, a user may say something for a specific intended audience but someone in bad faith re-contextualizes it and initiates dogpiling—which is an inevitability of almost any community but for sites with such broad scope is extremely difficult to moderate.
Like you mentioned, on Reddit there is almost zero emphasis on the user, whether as an OP or commenter, so there's much less interpersonal community building but OTOH much easier distancing from self 'performance'/anxiety.
I'm not a parent and hardly use social media (well, except HN!), but I am still willing to deny this, because Haidt has never properly addressed the serious demolition of his work presented by Aaron Brown. Have we all forgotten how weak and FP prone social studies are?
To Haidt's credit he did at least try a rebuttal, which is better than most situations in modern academia where outside criticisms are just ignored entirely. But he lost that debate because his responses were bad, and in this article he doubles down on the bad arguments he made last time.
He attempts to suggest that the large number of studies he collected with Twenge means there must be something there. This argument fails because when Brown randomly spot checked some of his cited studies they were all of garbage quality. Often they had nothing to do with social media at all. Haidt's response was the same as in this article: they can't all be wrong! But yes, yes they can all be wrong and Brown has strongly shown that this is likely to be the case.
Then Haidt suggests that you can derive signal from a large pile of bad studies, because if the null hypothesis were true then you'd see random results. But you can't assume that due to publishing biases, spurious correlations and other problems. For example he says that if social media didn't affect mental health, then there'd be no gender signal. That doesn't make sense. It's possible for girls to have worse mental health, and spend more time on social media, and for social media to not be the cause.
After making spurious correlation/causation arguments and denying he's doing so, he moves on to an even worse problem making his entire theory is unfalsifiable:
> much of my book is about the collective action traps that entire communities of adolescents fall into when they move their social lives onto these platforms, such that it becomes costly to abstain. It is at that point that collective mental health declines most sharply, and the individuals who try to quit find that they are socially isolated. The skeptics do not consider the ways that these network or group-level effects may obscure individual-level effects, and may be much larger than the individual-level effects.
In other words you can't even attempt to establish causality by cutting out social media use and seeing if it affects depression, because he will just immediately change his claim to assert that it was the ambient social-media-ness of society causing the depression (a much harder hypothesis to prove), and thus individual interventions can't help. And because this hypothesis is so vague, he can always fall back to claiming that whatever group intervention size is tried it wasn't big enough.
His whole essay is full of problems like this. It's basically a Gish Gallop. Vast reams of unusable paper is presented, along with panicked assertions that it's unreasonable to request valid evidence or a testable hypothesis before making law, due to the nature of the (self declared) emergency: a classic circular argument of the sort that emerges way too often in public health spheres.
There's actually a better supported alternative line of work that shows a completely different and much stronger correlation related to political ideology. But of course Haidt would rather not discuss that, as it's not amenable to legislation.
The vast majority of my friends and "friends" on social media haven't posted anything for years. I think my last contribution was back in 2017.
I thought social media in general is boomer / gen X town nowadays.