The world wants to ban children from social media, but there will be grave consequences for us all
Taylor Lorenz
Presumably the lithium dosage has been corrected…..
The world wants to ban children from social media, but there will be grave consequences for us all
Taylor Lorenz
Presumably the lithium dosage has been corrected…..
“There is little evidence that social media is driving any type of widespread mental health crisis in children.”
What is driving it then?
Is there a widespread mental health crisis in children? Most of them seem more sane than the adults. It’s the adults who are letting their children loose, unsupervised, on social media.
What mental health crisis? The suicide rate is lower than it was in 1981. It fell from 1981 to 2017 and only rose because they changed the standard of proof from “beyond reasonable doubt” to “balance of probability”.
Everything else is things like surveys, and if you ask teenage kids if they’re depressed they’ll tell you they are. They want to wear black and listen to emo music.
This is just the classic New Thing is Evil thing. And everyone from luddites to feminist grifters jumping on it to get power around it. “Girls are seeing unrepresentative images of women on social media”. Right, and Madonna, Miss World, Page 3 didn’t exist?
If you want to generally make kids happier, let them leave school at 14. Go and get a job, something they like doing. Or getting knocked up at 16, giving girls purpose in life.
What kept me happy as a kid was staying in school as long as possible, as that’s where the computers were. I remember after A levels frantically printing all my stuff out before the rapidly approaching deadline of losing access to them.
Yeah, I was happier at school too, but I’d have been even happier if the lads who didn’t want to be there had left at 14.
It’s about doing what’s best for the individual, which the State is crap at.
Government.
And deranged lefty journalists
Incentives?
The grave consequences will at least be having to show ID to go online almost anywhere, and possibly the sort of two-tier internet that Iran had developed.
Exactly this. Internet freedoms are going to disappear in short order. A disaster for us. Never mind that this Guardianista tart is focussing on conservative forces (who we shouldn’t forget can also be statists), it’s the international left who are leading this “for the chiiildren” bullshit to force “age verification” i.e. identification tracking on us all.
Teenagers get almost all of the news they consume from social media. If you cut them off there will be a generation with no idea what is happening in the world.
https://thewashingtonstandard.com/after-literally-crying-about-online-bullying-wapo-reporter-doxes-bullies-woman-behind-libs-of-tiktok/
A vile hypocrite. I’m only surprised she doesn’t feature more in the guardian.
Bullying? The Mean Girls will always find a way. Girls inflict psychological harm on other girls. Boys tend to the physical. Neither need the internet to do it.
If you want to cut improve mental health in children, start with school. There is data from Australia, Connecticut and Los Angeles that shows higher suicide rates and more emergency psychiatric visits during term time.
https://acamh.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jcpp.70108
https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/freedom-to-learn/201806/childrens-teens-suicides-related-to-the-school-calendar
Internet bullying is shit because you can just block people. Girls can’t do that at school.
I agree with POS Lorenz, though I didn’t read her screed.
Parents are responsible for their kids, not social media platforms. And it’s not government’s job to tell them how to operate.
Social media is a lifeline, especially for marginalised youth such as LGBTQ+ teens.
Huh. And if you took the phones away, made them go out and play in the sunshine, how many would stop being LGBTQ+?
And there’s the problem. A carefully cultivated client demographic dissipates. Normies aren’t a lot of use to deranged lefties.
Back in the good old days of the 80’s, there were only two genders and Boy George, and if you said otherwise people would disagree with you via the medium of karate
But the kids we put through lockdown are different.
The “widespread mental health crisis in children” is how they explain why the newer generations seem to be coming in more to the right than previous gens.