Social media bans for kids don't protect adults against harms, here's what you can do - Neowin

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Around the world, from Australia to the United Kingdom, governments are bringing in bans on social media for children. Critics of these bans say children are being used as a convenient excuse to bring more surveillance, but in this editorial I will take what governments are saying at face value.

They say that social media causes a whole range of mental health problems and allows bullies to continue bullying after school hours. As adults, social media doesn’t really open us to much bullying as most people have grown up by this point, but it is still causing mental health problems among this population due to the way people engage on these platforms - have you noticed how people post photos of themselves at parties or events, on vacation, with their new house or car, but hardly ever their latest demand letter to pay a credit card bill or some other bad news.

With lots of people doing this, it can feel like everyone else has a polished, near-perfect life, while yours is full of problems. In truth, everybody’s life has problems, but these don’t get broadcast online. In place of bullying, adults are more likely to face inferiority and loneliness issues with their use of social media and other online platforms. We already see it with seniors who might have trouble getting out of their houses, but there are plenty of younger people who sit in their bedrooms stuck online for too many hours, losing their ability to socialize.

I’m not going to advocate for a ban on social media for adults, because I think we are all old enough to make our own decisions, but I do have some other thoughts which I’ll get to below.

Social media has become quite adept over the last decade and a half at keeping users hooked on their platforms. Chief among these is Facebook, which allows you to scroll non-stop on a curated feed of posts that has been tailored to your interests, your Reels feed full of videos tailored to you, or click through Stories where you can see friends and family posting the best bits of their lives.

We've all seen polished vacation shots like this on social media.

Meta knows what will keep you hooked, and that’s the content it shows to you; however, frequent use of Facebook and people’s posting habits inevitably lead to “upward social comparison” where you just see the best parts of people’s lives.

According to a study from 2013, before Facebook had Stories and Reels, envy was rampant among Facebook users. In the paper, researchers studied German students with an average age of 24. It found that:

“This study uncovers a rampant nature of envy on SNSs. According to our findings, passive following triggers invidious emotions, with users mainly envying happiness of others, the way others spend their vacations; and socialize. The spread and ubiquitous presence of envy on SNSs (social network services) is shown to undermine users’ life satisfaction.”

If you doubt the results of that paper, here is another that cites many other studies in Table 1 of the results section, showing a consistent positive correlation between social media usage and envy, as well as other negative emotions. Essentially, Stories especially create a false image of your contacts’ lives, where they always seem to be having good luck, success, and good stuff - this illusion is created by the bad stuff that happens in their lives being omitted from social media.

Image via CNBC

A sizable chunk of the social-media-using population, reacting to various things, including Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, has moved to alternative platforms like Bluesky and Mastodon, which are better in terms of privacy, corporate overwatch, and data tracking. In some cases, the feeds are still in chronological order because they don’t care about keeping you addicted!

While better, these platforms still don’t fully solve the human problem. Even without complex algorithms that track your interactions to decide what to show in your feed, these platforms still use user-driven sorting and metrics such as likes. Chronological feeds can still reward performative posting too, so issues like validation (getting likes) still exist on these platforms and can lead to the same health issues as posed by Facebook.

Aside from the impact social media has on an individual level, it has also become tremendously harmful to the way we consume news. You will know them: people on the far-left and far-right have become increasingly distrustful of the “mainstream media”, which, despite its own biases, generally reports actual things that have happened. Contrast this to the “news” that people get from social media, which sends users down hyper-partisan rabbit holes that sometimes include completely made-up "news".

I have once been sent a video of UK Prime Minister Keir...