I wasn’t aware that there is a media campaign to discredit this finding. Teen suicides exploded in growth YoY the moment smartphones became cheap enough around 2009.
Teen suicides first peaked in 1998 at 6.1 per 100,000. The numbers are noisy but it looks like it declines to a lower level of 3-4 in the 2005-2013 period (with an all time low of 3.1 in 2010 but still low at 3.6 at 2012), then starts to increase again to the 4-5 range, before covid gives it a giant spike to 6.5.
Teen suicides in the 90s were higher than the 21st century at between 5.0 and 6.1.
Social media and cellphones, if they are a factor, aren't dominant enough to be distinguished from the noise.
I've been calling social media companies "the tobacco companies of the mind" for quite a while.
The effects are most obvious with teens but I see this stuff as bad all around. Social media algorithms have really driven today's insane political polarization, and there's lots of examples of adults having their brains sucked out by social media rabbit holes.
It seems pretty obvious to me at this point that if you connect a bunch of people together and then artificially prioritize content to maximize engagement, the result is unbelievably toxic.
That's not the point. Social media algorithms amplify every form of madness and toxicity, because it draws people in and gets their attention. Crazy sorts of conspiracy theories, radical ideologies, cults, memetic mental illness, you name it... the more toxic it is the more it drives engagement.
This phenomenon isn't fundamentally new. Media has understood "if it bleeds it leads" for hundreds of years. What I think is new is how tight the optimization loop is, how personalized it is, and the way crowdsourcing the inputs leads to a firehose of content that isn't even attempting to be accurate or sane. It's a machine that automatically curates randomly sourced content for maximum inflammatory response and maximum addictiveness.
Here's another pile of examples unrelated to conspiracy theories:
Parent is drawing a parallel. We collectively agreed that the tobacco industry played a role in the consequences of tobacco addiction by marketing to minors.
The parallel being drawn here is that social media platforms, being presented with the consequences of their products ie: teen mental health declines with use, are complicit in those consequences at some point in the value chain, either by marketing, product design, accessibility, etc. If the assumptions hold, then the conclusions are sound and valid.
There's two ways to disagree with this. Either the assumptions are not valid, or the argument is not sound.
The 15-24 range looks like it had the biggest increase compared to other cohorts in 2013-2017, and looks like it's in the top 3 overall from 2011-2020, at least from eyeballing this chart.
MOELLER, Hans-Georg and D’AMBROSIO, Paul J., 2021. You and Your Profile: Identity After Authenticity. Columbia University Press. ISBN 978-0-231-19600-0:
> At the heart of all these issues, from suicides and duels to obsession with family life or professional achievement, is the impossible demand for a person’s inner psychology to become fully congruent with external social expectations. As with any other method of achieving identity, sincerity has as much potential to enrich as to oppress, especially when obsessively overidentifying with one’s roles so that any other aspects or potentials of selfhood seem false or wrong, or even evil.
MOELLER and D'AMBROSIO continue writing:
Regime of Sincerity
https://wiki.ralfbarkow.ch/view/regime-of-sincerity/view/fac...
> As empirical research suggests, both the prevalence of female over male suicide and the prevalence of rural over urban suicide can be related to a continued regime of sincerity in a preindustrialized setting where women, given their subordinated status, suffer even more from role pressures than men.
I intuitively just believed this "explosion in growth", but it looks like the reality is that they upticked a little bit since 2009. The suicide rate (and attempts) are still lower than they were in the 90s[0].
