No ‘Likes’ for this: A US study is another deeply worrying pointer to the many negative effects of social media usage https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/toi-editorials/no-likes-for-this-a-us-study-is-another-deeply-worrying-pointer-to-the-many-negative-effects-of-social-media-usage/ September 22, 2022

The forthcoming paper in the American Economic Review, based on biannual mental health surveys done across US campuses of 4.3 lakh respondents in that period, correlated to the introduction of Facebook in each campus. It found a 9% increase in depression and 12% increase in anxiety disorders over the pre-FB period mean, which researchers said was due to Facebook increasing the ability of students to do unfavourable social comparisons. More worryingly, it noted a 23% increase in students reporting academic impairment as a result of mental health decline...

India also tells a similar story. There were 43,000 victims of suicide in the sub-30 age group in 1991, which rose marginally to 45,000 in 2006, but then saw a near 50% rise to 67,000 in 2021. This is the time social media usage spread rapidly.

There’s much worse. Last year, a leak revealed Facebook had kept secret for two years internal research suggesting its Instagram app made body image issues worse for teenage girls. While Indian authorities take great pains to criminalise addictions of many kinds, social media in many ways is a worse menace. Facebook’s poor track record in filtering out hate content and fake news, Twitter’s seeming helplessness in face of fake content and fake accounts, all social media employing scandalously few content checkers