[sweezyjeezy]

Is HN in complete denial about what is happening to the younger generations right now? My whole family are teachers, and they are all sounding the alarm. A majority of kids are basically unable to read books now. Not just children - young adults studying English literature at college...

Parents are up against some of the wealthiest companies on earth, and the fear of socially excluding their kids by limiting their usage. Systemic change is never going to come from parents on this one.

[hyperbolablabla]

Not to state the obvious but, isn't literacy an entry requirement for a college course?

[BDPW]

The problem seems to be that many students going to college can't seem to read any substantial texts anymore, while somehow getting themselves into college. It's pretty worrying imo. There's a bunch of articles about this as well: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-eli...

[sweezyjeezy]

It's their attention span. My SIL is an English professor and she stopped assigning long texts. The kids won't read it, will get an AI to summarize, and then give her poor reviews at the end for making them read.

[rahimnathwani]

Nope.

https://www.live5news.com/2025/02/28/former-high-school-hono...

  Nineteen-year-old Aleysha Ortiz says she graduated from high school with honors and earned a college scholarship, but she can’t read or write.

The problem is also discussed briefly in this recent paper: https://senate.ucsd.edu/media/740347/sawg-report-on-admissio...

[dgxyz]

HN is in denial about a lot of stuff. The tech bubble exists somewhere else to most people's reality.

A lot of my youngest's peers are pretty illiterate still at 13. They have trouble with more than a few minutes of concentration. They track reading age and the average is declining every year as they arrive at secondary school which is causing a big panic in UK education. I think some of this data is driving the legislation changes as well.

I'd have preferred the government to have targeted the social media and attention companies personally. Extremely high taxation would be a good start much as we do for cigarettes and alcohol. If the business is no longer viable at that point they can quite frankly fuck off.

The verification controls are possibly a bigger problem which has serious consequences for society going forwards. Things aren't too bad now but in the future, the information and data that is available makes the nazis and the stasi look like amateurs.

[heavyset_go]

Drawing a false equivalence between the internet and literal chemical poisons that aren't safe at any dose, cause severe physical addictions that take away choice to stop at best, and disable and kill millions of people every year at worst, like alcohol or cigarettes, is a little too on the nose.

At some point, you have to ask how much of the rhetoric is driven by hysteria and moral panic and how much of it is driven by what the actual evidence shows.

From the Guardian[1]:

> Social media time does not increase teenagers’ mental health problems – study

> Research finds no evidence heavier social media use or more gaming increases symptoms of anxiety or depression

> Screen time spent gaming or on social media does not cause mental health problems in teenagers, according to a large-scale study.

> With ministers in the UK considering whether to follow Australia’s example by banning social media use for under-16s, the findings challenge concerns that long periods spent gaming or scrolling TikTok or Instagram are driving an increase in teenagers’ depression, anxiety and other mental health conditions.

> Researchers at the University of Manchester followed 25,000 11- to 14-year-olds over three school years, tracking their self-reported social media habits, gaming frequency and emotional difficulties to find out whether technology use genuinely predicted later mental health difficulties.

From Nature[2]:

> Time spent on social media among the least influential factors in adolescent mental health

From the Atlantic[3] with citations in the article:

> The Panic Over Smartphones Doesn’t Help Teens, It may only make things worse.

> I am a developmental psychologist[4], and for the past 20 years, I have worked to identify how children develop mental illnesses. Since 2008, I have studied 10-to-15-year-olds using their mobile phones, with the goal of testing how a wide range of their daily experiences, including their digital-technology use, influences their mental health. My colleagues and I have repeatedly failed to find[5] compelling support for the claim that digital-technology use is a major contributor to adolescent depression and other mental-health symptoms.

> Many other researchers have found the same[6]. In fact, a recent[6] study and a review of research[7] on social media and depression concluded that social media is one of the least influential factors in predicting adolescents’ mental health. The most influential factors include a family history of mental disorder; early exposure to adversity, such as violence and discrimination; and school- and family-related stressors, among others. At the end of last year, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine released a report[8] concluding, “Available research that links social media to health shows small effects and weak associations, which may be influenced by a combination of good and bad experiences. Contrary to the current cultural narrative that social media is universally harmful to adolescents, the reality is more complicated.”

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/jan/14/social-media-t...

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s44220-023-00063-7

[3] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/05/candi...

[4] https://adaptlab.org/

[5] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31929951/

[6] https://www.nature.com/articles/s44220-023-00063-7#:~:text=G...

[7] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32734903/

[8] https://nap.nationalacademies.org/resource/27396/Highlights_...

[dgxyz]

Way to cherry pick citations. Have you considered writing a meta analysis for a journal and fail to disclose your interests and funding? That'd really top it off.

I can do the same if I want the other way. But it's not worth my time.

[heavyset_go]

You're going to drop a bombshell like "social media is as bad as alcohol and cigarettes, we need to ban it" and not provide any evidence?

There are a lot of strong feelings around social media, and I'm no fan, but I'm not going to walk head first into a moral panic, or participate in witch hunt, without knowing the facts.

In the end, ad hominem arguments don't affect the validity of evidence. I was hoping to have an interesting discussion, but I see that if you aren't politically correct on this topic, evidence will be outright dismissed and the messenger shot for delivering it.

[dgxyz]

I think you went off the rails a bit there. Also hyper focused on a small part of the comment rather than the general issue which is somewhat unfair.

The point was simply things which are costly to society should be taxed. I am not comparing each thing to each other.

[heavyset_go]

Sorry, I meant my original reply to be to this, not your post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47514116

[dzhiurgis]

It doesn't need a multiple research papers to figure out social media is a complete cesspool tho.