News JVTech Youth mental health versus social media toxicity: this country chooses sides
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TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat or even Facebook and Instagram, social networks are omnipresent in our daily lives and can sometimes cause drama for the youngest. Suicides, suicide attempts or visits to the emergency room, this country says STOP!
Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat in the sights of this country!
Does social media have a negative influence? It is difficult to give a definitive answer to this question, but it is clear that platforms like Snapchat, TikTok and Instagram have dramatically changed our daily lives. Although most users make positive use of it, extreme behaviors and the problems resulting from them are often highlighted. The writer Umberto Eco understood this and explained:
Social networks have given the right to speak to legions of imbeciles who before only spoke at the bar and did no harm to the community. They were silenced immediately. Today, they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner.
However, in this article we will not discuss the negative aspects of using these platformsbut rather their consequences and impacts on mental health. Public school officials in Seattle, US, have filed a lawsuit against big tech players, accusing them of negatively impacting the mental health of youngsters. The new year 2023 has just begun and it could already be the beginning of problems for Meta, Alphabet (parent company of Google), or ByteDance (parent company of TikTok).
In a recent communicatedpublic school officials in Seattle (Washington, United States) therefore explain that they want “hold social media companies accountable for harm they have caused to the social, emotional and mental health of their students”. To give some context to this complaint, it should be noted that in the state of Washington (in 2022), almost 50% of adolescents spend an average of between one and three hours a day on social networks and 30% spend an average of more than three hours a day in front of Tiktok, Instagram and company.
But that’s not all, since this same press release also stipulates that the Tech giants are partly responsible for “the increase in suicides, suicide attempts and emergency room visits” among the youngest in the state and the country. In reality, Seattle public school officials accuse these multinationals and their social networks of exploiting “the psychology and neurophysiology of their users to spend more and more time on their platforms, creating a mental health crisis among young Americans. »
Despite the efforts of tech giants to help teens and their families by offering various tools, the school district believes they need to do more to protect their users. Swipe in the water or real impact? Answer in the next weeks/months.
