A group of 33 states including California, New York, Arizona and Indiana are suing Meta Platforms Inc. for harming young people’s mental health and contributing the youth mental health crisis by knowingly designing features on Instagram and Facebook that addict children to the platforms.
You don’t usually have to ask someone if they’re being harmed by a person/substance/thing to see the negative effects it is having on their lives.
Socially media is already known to have negative impacts on adults. This means it WILL also have a negative impact on children and youth. Seeing as children and youth are even more susceptible to negative influences, due to their body and brain still developing, we need to protect them from what we can.
Even if kids are seeing worse things in their every day lives, that doesn’t make it okay to subject them to other less worse things.
What I see actually happening is, some adults have negative impacts from social media but mostly because they give their addictions free reign and look up pretty disturbing stuff online. And they’re projecting that onto other people’s kids. But kids aren’t using social media the same way adults are. And actually there are no studies at all showing that socially media is known to have negative impacts on youth at all. What really helps a kid’s brain to develop is having guidelines and helpful adult models to follow. I’m not saying kids SHOULD be exposed to bad things on purpose, only that kids aren’t made out of gossamer and unicorn farts and will fall apart mentally if they see anything negative or uncomfortable or have to face uncomfortable truths about the world. In fact, denying that such truths exist does more harm to kids than almost anything else. It’s not protecting kids to push their heads into the sand about the real world we live in.