Note: Episodes listed below are ordered based on how likely they are to match your search request.
"Right. And let me just point out the strongest way to prove a causal link between social media and depression and teenage girls. We decide research that studies depressed teenage girls who use social media. That's right. But you're not."
"Why has social media been so bad for youth mental health? A lot of people, they talk about comparing young people's bodies and lives to each other. Certainly teenage girls do that a lot, but boys don't tend to, so that doesn't totally explain it. And the second is, why, in the last eight years, have we done nothing about it? In fact, we've given devices and social media to younger and younger kids."
"One third of teenagers describe their social media usage as almost constant in a new Pew research survey, and I want to talk about it in today's edition of Toby's trends, where I, a sprightly Gen Z, educate my grizzled millennial co hosts about a recent trend I've had my eye on. So obviously the youths are obsessed with social media. But this pub survey dug into which platforms take up most of their attention. And one platform absolutely dominates it's YouTube. 93% of teens aged 13 to 17 say they use YouTube, which is actually slightly down from the 95% who said they used it last year."
"The scientific research looking at the links between the use of smartphones and social media to mental health problems in teenagers doesn't have any conclusive answers yet. But that doesn't diminish the experience and concerns of parents like Claire, who we heard from at the start of the podcast. Next. Well, speak to a psychologist who thinks that people are looking at this problem from the wrong perspective. Instead of bickering over whether social media causes issues in teenagers, he wants to know why it is that some teenagers do perfectly well online, while others struggle to cope."
"They went for Instagram and Pinterest and Tumblr, and the boys went for video games and YouTube. They tend to be more addicted to those, too. The girls instantly got depressed. The depression epidemic, it begins in 2012, 2013. In 2010, very few kids had a smartphone."
"But first, most teens are on social media, but some are ready for a break. Nearly 40% of teens say they spend too much time on their smartphones, and more than 25% say they spend too much time on social media, according to Pew Research Center. A nonprofit called Half the Story, founded by digital wellness advocate Larissa May, is working with teens to help them develop healthier habits around their social media use and advocate for big tech policy changes. Joining me now with more is WSJ reporter Georgia Wells. Georgia how do students interact with the nonprofit?"
"Young adolescents, right. Pre adolescent young adolescents. You tend to see social media to be more a signal for cognitive distress for young women and girls and the video games to actually be the bigger culprit for young men and boys, right. There is a bit of a difference here, because with the social media impact, the content of what's happening matters in this picture, right? So what I'm seeing, the engagement I'm having, how this impacts my social life, this is part of the mental distress with video games."
"It's all gas, no breaks, I'm there as a support system for that. Unless we're on vacation. Yeah, but then I think it depends on the individual. I think you have to look and see. How is your particular teenager managing social media?"
"But for some reason, we're surprised by the skyrocketing numbers of teens with all kinds of things like eating disorders, gender confusion, anxiety, violent behavior, when social media has been prompting these topics to our teens. Well, for over a decade. But in Florida, there's a new law, and it's going to try to stop kids from getting on social media. Can it work? Well, let me explain."
"So, Jonathan, let's say that we accept your premise that social media and smartphones are the primary culprit in these dramatic increases in teen mental health problems. And I should say, I largely do buy that argument. It's what I've sort of wrestled with over the years. But I think that is the simplest and cleanest explanation. Let's talk about what to do about it."
"It's just turning into ads and hate and negativity, and it's bad. If I had a teen or a tween, I would not let them on social media. I don't see the benefits. Whatever they gain, the contact, the social contact that they're going to have with people in their age group, it doesn't outweigh the negatives that come through social media. Do you remember the other day I was talking about the woman, Angela Chow, with the Tesla?"
"And then I think there's no way around that. We also need to look at technology. You can't get around the fact also that the slide in youth well being coincides with the coming up of social media and how people use social media. So that can have positives and negatives. But if people use it passively, people who are young and vulnerable and what they use in terms of social media and for how long."
"And then there's so many direct harms to girls. There's much more relational aggression, bullying, which is worse in 7th grade, 7th and 8th grade girls share emotions more than boys do. So if a girl is depressed, it actually makes her friends depressed. Whereas if a boy is depressed, it doesn't spread as much in his network. So for all these reasons, it's just insane that middle school kids are on social media."
"Educators in Canada are worried that social media is disrupting their and impacting the mental health of students. The center for Addiction and Mental Health found that 91% of students in grades seven to twelve use social media daily, and about one third of them use it 5 hours or more. Now, four school boards in Ontario are suing the companies behind these social media platforms. And this comes after dozens of uS states and school districts have done the same thing. Philip Mai is a senior researcher and co director of the social media lab at Toronto Metropolitan University."
"So in any 30 day period, almost half the planet loses a friend over politics on Facebook, gets taken by a crypto scheme on WhatsApp, or learns how to induce postmeal vomiting on Instagram. The negative effects of social media are well documented, and I've written about them before. The most concerning problem is what these platforms do to our children. When the mobile phone put Facebook and Instagram into every teen's hands, 24/7 loneliness and suicide data began a steady march upward. In a survey of 1024 young people, almost half, quote, have become withdrawn, started exercising excessively, stopped socializing completely, or self harmed because they are regularly bullied or trolled online about their physical appearance."
"I'm ready to say that the downside of social media for kids twelve and under way outweighs the upside. Sure they can find a recipe, sure they can find friendship, sure they can post interesting things and find joy in all of that. But one of the things that's being asked of us is to kind of get longitudinal data to establish the direct connection between kids using social media and all of this, increased anxiety and depression and polarization and suicidal ideation and all the rest of it, and by the way, decreased exercise and sedentary activity, all that. What they mean by longitudinal data is we have to wait one or two more generations while these kids brains are being melted. So I have seen enough."
"Causal inferences are very difficult in social science, but there's evidence that suggests social media use is part of the reason we're seeing very alarming rises in teen depression. So some stem workers can think, oh, I'm doing interesting things analytically. These are exciting problems to solve. I'm working with smart people. They can get really jazzed about that."
"I think that I never imagined that. Social media was going to play such. A huge role in my life. When I was younger, in my teen years, I kind of stayed away from social media. I went, I think I like quit."
"Think social media is terrible for young girls, but I would say it's probably worse if you don't have a family. To ground you and you're putting more. Of your self worth into these platforms and you're depending on strangers online for that emotional validation that you're not getting from both parents. Same with things like, I'm sure there. Are some Gen Z who are terrified."
"Now, we know that teen girls in general have the worst mental health of any demographic, but it turns out teen boys from liberal families do worse than teen girls from conservative families. Well, teen boys aren't on social media more. Not from liberal families. Not more than teen girls from any family. We know that social media use among teens is overwhelmingly female."