Surgeon General Jerome Adams has warned of the “profound risk of harm” that social media can pose to children, highlighting the lack of research into its effects. Adams has called for more research into the potential harms of social media use, particularly among young people. He noted that while social media can be a powerful tool for connecting people, it can also have a negative impact on mental health and well-being. Adams urged parents to be aware of the potential risks and to monitor their children’s online activity.
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It does for everyone. Like a decade ago I’d wake up on the weekend and be like who am I gonna call to go hang out with. Now, I pick up my phone and do the same thing over and over. It’s lame. I feel like us millennials are the last generation that got to see what the world was like ahead of this new age. Like.. I had to ride my bike to friends houses if I was bored. No interwebs or TV.. it was me in a room with a boombox. You had to go entertain yourself and like interact with people. Even the shy kids had to.
Now if you’re a shy kid you can go under the radar and not interact with anyone. And that’s no good.. lots of people are going to get taken advantage of cause they learned no real life lessons
As like responsibly handling machinery, as like being responsible for wearing welding goggles when looking at intense UV lights. Being able to filter information requires a bit of skepticism and life experience… not that being an adult ensures such a thing. Maybe better that phones get treated like machinery and not toys.
I grew up with the beginning of the internet. And I’ll say something I noticed is the constant jealousy of how good others have it. Like people getting a surgeons salary to play video games, or people making a living going on vacation all year and only have to take like 2 pics of themselves and a ten second video for each stop since they are “influencers”.
I feel like this has a bigger part of why people are more commonly depressed now than others realize. I blame the internet
We can’t get pandora back in her box, sadly. Social media is a cancer for people of all ages. If I was king of the world, it would require 18+ verification to use. Theres nothing beneficial for children on there.
The first line, “There’s not enough evidence to determine whether social media is safe enough for children” isn’t exactly in keeping with the headline.
It does not help when the kids’ parents are just as glued, of not worse. Watching parents stare at their phones while their babies and toddlers are trying so hard to engage with them is the saddest thing. Before they’ve ever had a chance to think otherwise, kids are growing up with social media/device addiction as normalized.
I really don’t know how we’re going to keep this shit out of kids’ hands. This one feels a lot worse than cigarettes and alcohol because it’s already ubiquitous in our culture.
Just anecdotally holy fuck does it.
My kids are banned from it. I have worked in IT for 2 decades now, saw how it was when I worked in a K-12 and when my kids got old enough just said nope, absolutely not happening, we will work with you to allow you to have some things, but you are not getting unrestricted access.
My oldest hates it, and gets teased about it a bit at elementary school but we flat out told her just blame us, say we are super strict and leave it at that.
But the difference between her, and her classmates is actually noticeable to the teachers. Her teacher flat out told my wife its absolutely hell dealing with her classmates who have such unrestricted access because shes constantly dealing with fights and drama from over the weekend on kids minecraft servers or in Instagram or something, while my daughter knows none of it, is never involved in the drama, and is able to focus on school. Like outright sending kids to the principles because they get into these media fights and then take it into the classroom as a real fight… at 10-11 years old!.
We recently lightened up on zoom usage, letting her talk with a group of her close friends, but shes not allow to close the door, is limited to a hour at most, and we have to be able to hear her at all times… but still its insane, and whats worse is SCHOOLS have basically caused this by handing out free computers with very little restrictions on them sometimes, and no ways for parents to restrict them more beyond taking the chromebooks and tablets away.
They act like these social media sites don’t have an age requirement to get on these websites.
Though to be honest minors probably shouldn’t be on social media. That said how the hell do you even enforce that?
There’s also research showing it has less of an impact than people think and it depends on the services being used. Is just watching a video on YouTube harmful? Is a text based discussion forum harmful?
This is part of a plan to make most of the internet inaccessible to minors, preventing them from having independent interests or hobbies, disadvantaging poorer kids from access to free information and entertainment, and also swinging the culture of the US back towards the right.
The internet has irreversibly converged all other forms of media and communication and disrupted social gathering spaces. So if the internet is mostly off limits to teens and there’s strict age appropriateness rules, then that’s a degree of censorship that has never existed before in history.
Teens in the past didn’t have the internet because it didn’t exist but nobody stopped them from doing activities or hanging out in person in spaces that weren’t specifically just for kids, or from buying offline physical copies of books, or watching movies or listening to music unless it was formally labeled as obscene, etc. But in the future 18 year olds will occupy a space the same as 8 year olds and be unable to mentally grow. That’s just weird and it’s harmful I think.
While social media can be toxic and should be limited in use by minors minors, I think the surgeon general could have made remarks that denying women healthcare and carrying a rapist’s baby has a heavy bearing on girls’ mental health. Prob more than social medial…
So all this in addition to being an attack vector for foreign state actors to easily manipulate the US electorate, sway elections, and thereby US foreign policy. Why are we still debating this? Ban it all. We all lived perfectly fine before social media, we can do it again.
I wish the government would stop regulating peoples’ life choices and start regulating corporations and themselves.