Smartphones and social media are destroying children’s mental health

Re:Smartphones and social media are destroying children’s me... by barrysteve on Friday March 10, 2023 @11:44AM (#35096849)

It is worth pointing out that pre-2010, the internet and social media was a nice place to be. Even if myspace was kind of ugly, social media did not drive negative mental health outcomes until upvotes/downvotes and dark pattern engagements were applied to everyone.

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Re:Smartphones and social media are destroying children’s me... by rcarr on Friday March 10, 2023 @12:34PM (#35097848)

Disagree with this. Even myspace sowed a bit of discontent with it's "top friends" feature, with some people getting into arguments about being left out of the "top 8" or where they had been placed in the ordering.

When Facebook came around people had already cottoned on to trying to create their presence a bit better but then shit really hit the fan when Instagram came around and everyone started curating a completely fake presentation of what their life was like.

Before Instagram there were no influencers. There were a influential bloggers like Tim Ferris but 'influencer' and 'content creators' weren't job titles. To this day, I'm wary of anyone who isn't a photographer that says that Instagram is/was their favourite social media platform.

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Re:Smartphones and social media are destroying children’s me... by PuppyTailWags on Friday March 10, 2023 @11:48AM (#35096920)

I think we had different places. I remember the first teenager who was driven to suicide from social media way before 2010. Just googling showed me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_of_Megan_Meier who died in 2006 from cyberbullying.

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Re:Smartphones and social media are destroying children’s me... by newman8r on Friday March 10, 2023 @12:02PM (#35097225)

That's also around the time when smartphones started to see huge adoption. It became something you'd never be able to get away from.

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