Does social media negatively impact teen mental health? | ABC News | YouTubeToText
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we're in the middle of a youth Mental
Health crisis in America this is the
defining Public Health Challenge of our
time and I'm very concerned that social
media has become an important
contributor to the pain and struggles
the question that everyone wants to
answer is does social media negatively
impact mental health we have to remember
that social media is not one thing it's
depending on who you're talking to what
content you're seeing what functions
you're interacting with the like button
for instance
the impact social media platforms like
Facebook Instagram and Tick Tock have on
the public notably teens is unquestioned
but what's still at play is how much of
that impact is negative we saw a big
decrease in Teen Mental Health increase
in depression
which was pretty well time locked to
when social media got really big and
when it became super engaging
that year or two as puberty is just
beginning is the second most important
time for adolescent brain development
reorganization for our entire lives and
there's a lot of growth and a lot of
changes that are happening at the
precise time that we're actually handing
them a device that we know makes their
brain react and unexpected and dramatic
ways two things that happen to occur at
the same time are not causally related
to one another so we can see some
mechanistic pieces and some signs but we
can't make causal statements as scientists
scientists
in a recent CDC study from 2011 to 2021
when social media use was booming the
percentage of teen girls who reported
persistent feelings of sadness or
hopelessness increased by nearly 60 percent
percent
it's hard to do an experiment that fully
captures the effect of Facebook and all
of the network effects where you know me
being on Facebook affects my friends
it's just really hard to study if we
don't want to wait until we have the
most conclusive proof that demonstrates
with causality what the harms will be
because the time that it takes for
science to do that kind of work will
lose an entire generation or two
despite that sentiment a study released
last month from the University of Oxford
found no evidence linking individual
Facebook data to a negative well-being
that study however was specifically for
Facebook not Instagram where the
unfortunately the state of data sharing
in 2023 is worse than it was in 2022 and
2021 companies have largely sort of uh
in Mass
closed databases that are or and apis
that were used by academics to
understand what sort of behavior was
like on the platforms API or application
programming interface allows third
parties to communicate with its product
in the past year Reddit has started
charging for API integration and X
formerly known as Twitter has largely
shut down its access very few platforms
are more open today than they have been
in the past I would pass legislation to
make data access a lot easier and more
robust so that we can get answers in
real time to have the evidence that they
need in order to do their work sort of effectively
effectively
will ever know whether social media was
net good or that bad I think it was
probably not good to be honest and I
think we have pretty strong evidence
that even if it might have been that
good for most people on average it seems
to have been bad for teenagers
particularly teenagers say from you know
age 10 to 14.
this is a time when we're saying as a
community we have to pay attention we
have to do something different
immediately and this is an urgent
scenario right now
reach for common meta which owns
Facebook and Instagram Google which owns
YouTube and Tick Tock all stress the
importance of Teen Mental Health and
highlighted the measures each platform
is taking to restrict content and
Safeguard teen well-being [Music]
hi everyone George Stephanopoulos here
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