If you feel lonely and anxious, YouTube is not the solution to improve

Social media has always been talked about as a cause of depression and other mental health problems, but it has rarely been directly targeted at YouTube. Australian researchers point to the video platform as promoter of loneliness and anxiety, due to the so-called “parasocial relations”.

Luke Balcombe y Diego DeLeo, from the Australian Institute for Suicide Research and Prevention and the School of Applied Psychology at Griffith University, determined that users under 29 who regularly visit the portal suffer from the negative impact of their videos.

The study was published in the journal Informatics, under the title The impact of YouTube on loneliness and mental health.

Despite starting with the best of intentions, the relationships between users and content creators on YouTube they harm the former.

The researchers indicate that the greater the “interaction” with the video, encouraging a stay-at-home lifestyle as during the pandemic, real face-to-face interactions are diminished.

“The disconnection resulting from the increase in the use of social networks influences the lack of deep human relationships and social connections, especially in young people”, highlight Balcombe and De Leo.

YouTube as an authority, a bad decision

Another edge of the study is that platform users prefer to receive information from content creators rather than from experts. They rely “deeply” on videos for support with mental health issues.

There is a main proposal: the creation of Independent YouTube algorithms designed to detect bias and recommendation errors, as well as moderate interventions by recommending safe and appropriate mental health content.

“Of course, there are positive aspects to YouTube,” he says. Nadeem Sarwar, de SlashGear, “but let him take charge as an authority (in the issuance of reliable information) It’s not the best way forward.”