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A comment on Smartphones and social media are destroying children’s mental health. Parent comment

Re:Smartphones and social media are destroying children’s me... by comfypotato on Friday March 10, 2023 @05:30PM (#35102146)
Cigarettes are so very bad for you that I don’t think this will ever be the case. I remember working on the administration side of cancer treatments, and half of all of the insurance codes were variants of lung cancer from smoking. There’s a point at which you smoke so much that it’s more likely than anything else to kill you.

Your point is valid that today’s smart-phone-social-media is as young as cigarettes were in the 1920’s, but the general problems have been around forever. Young folks comparing themselves to Instagram models is very analogous to air-brushed magazine models in the early 2000’s to cite a recent example. They’ve just been magnified. Smoking introduced a new problem.

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Re:Smartphones and social media are destroying children’s me... by 908B64B197 on Friday March 10, 2023 @06:50PM (#35103027)
It's pretty bad to compare social media to smoking, or call it "the new smoking" because... teen tobacco usage is far from a solved problem. Teens today vape and it will have long term consequences both for them and society at large.

Honestly the panic around "screens" remind me of the moral panics around Dungeons and Dragon back in the 80s [0] and video games in the 90s and 00s. The media hysteria did try to blame many acts of violence on DOOM.

Some researchers have now spent 30 years trying to prove a link between violence and video games, without any success. To put things in perspective, during the same time period neural networks were completely abandoned by AI researchers, before coming back and giving us the deep learning revolution and the leaps in self-driving and language models.

> Young folks comparing themselves to Instagram models is very analogous to air-brushed magazine models in the early 2000’s to cite a recent example.

In 2018 "obesity prevalence was [...] 21.2% among 12- to 19-year-olds." [1] according to the CDC. That's one out of 5 being obese, not just overweight. And it has more than tripled since the 70's [2]. I have to wonder if it's related. A lot of teenagers are bombarded with images of perfectly healthy bodies that, quite simply, won't match what they see in the mirror. The solution? Ban mirrors.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/18/us/when-dungeons-dragons-...

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/childhood.html

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/obesity_child_15_16/obe...

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Re:Smartphones and social media are destroying children’s me... by comfypotato on Friday March 10, 2023 @07:19PM (#35103340)
Teen nicotine use is still common, but tobacco is on its way out thankfully. While vape has its own problems, and may have others that emerge over time, they’re nothing compared to tobacco. And this is the point I was trying to make. Tobacco is a lot worse than social media.
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