Opinion | Social Media Makes Teens Unhappy. It's Time to Stop the Algorithm. - The New ... - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...algorithms-kids-discovery.html
social media teens children algorithm culture policy US
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As our children’s free time and imaginations become more and more tightly fused to the social media they consume, we need to understand that unregulated access to the internet comes at a cost. Something similar is happening for adults, too. With the advent of A.I., a spiritual loss awaits us as we outsource countless human rituals — exploration and trial and error — to machines. But it isn’t too late to change this story.
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There are numerous problems with children and adolescents using social media, from mental health deterioration to dangerous and age-inappropriate content
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the high schoolers with whom I met alerted me to an even more insidious result of minors’ growing addiction to social media: the death of exploration, trial and error and discovery. Algorithmic recommendations now do the work of discovering and pursuing interests, finding community and learning about the world
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Kids today are, simply put, not learning how to be curious, critical adults — and they don’t seem to know what they’ve lost.
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These high school students had become reliant, maybe even dependent, on social media companies’ algorithms.
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Their dependence on technology sounds familiar to most of us. So many of us can barely remember when we didn’t have Amazon to fall back on when we needed a last-minute gift or when we waited by the radio for our favorite songs to play. Today, information, entertainment and connection are delivered to us on a conveyor belt, with less effort and exploration required of us than ever before.
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What the kids I spoke to did not know is that these algorithms have been designed in a way that inevitably makes — and keeps — users unhappy.
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A report by the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate found that users could be served content related to suicide less than three minutes after downloading TikTok. Five minutes after that, they could come across a community promoting eating disorder content. Instagram is awash with soft-core pornography, offering a gateway to hard-core material on other sites (which are often equally lax about age verification). And all over social media are highly curated and filtered fake lives, breeding a sense of envy and inadequacy inside the developing brains of teenagers.
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Social media companies know that content that generates negative feelings holds our attention longer than that which makes us feel good.
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If you are a teenager feeling bad about yourself, your social media feed will typically keep delivering you videos and pictures that are likely to exacerbate negative feelings.
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It is not a coincidence that teenage rates of sadness and suicide increased just as algorithmically driven social media content took over children’s and adolescents’ lives.
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The role that social media has played in the declining mental health of teens also gives us a preview of what is coming for adults, with the quickening deployment of artificial intelligence and machine learning in our own lives. The psychological impact of the coming transition of thousands of everyday basic human tasks to machines will make the effect of social media look like child’s play.