New Yorker’s ‘Social Media Is Killing Kids’ Article Waits 71 Paragraphs To Admit Evidence Doesn’t Support The Premise
New Yorker’s ‘Social Media Is Killing Kids’ Article Waits 71 Paragraphs To Admit Evidence Doesn’t Support The Premise
6 Comments
[deleted]
The author of this article, Mike Masnick, is on the board of Bluesky, a social media platform: https://techcrunch.com/2024/08/06/bluesky-adds-techdirt-founder-mike-masnick-to-its-board/
SEO has ruined the ability to create a readable, trustworthy article. Publishers don’t care if you like the article or what your impression of them is; they just want traffic, and in a perfect world, ad clicks. So they boost their rank by creating an article that’s 99% filler. The search engine algorithms love it, but it’s utterly useless to people.
Content isn’t written for people. It’s written for bots. And increasingly, it’s written by bots.
Negativity sells more advertising clicks that posting the truth, especially when the truth doesn’t match what people want it to be. The literature on the subject is mixed, with no clear evidence.
I think it’s right though. Kids are going through a mental health crisis, which leads to suicides, which means that by extension the external validation that comes from social media, which hampers the development of internal validation is causing a rift in the development of identity which will cause depression, anxiety and more need for social media validation to fill the hole.
it’s a vicious cycle, and the earlier the addiction starts the harder it is to get rid of.
But the premise of the article (The New Yorker one, not the TechDirt one) is not that social media is killing kids. It’s that social media has been blamed for killing kids, and after presenting the perspective of several parents of kids who killed themselves, the article provides the counter to that perspective. Ultimately, it makes the point that social media is not harmful to kids in general, but seeing the wrong sort of content can push certain kids over the edge.
I guess that structure is a problem if you think people are going to stop reading three paragraphs in, but this is *The New Yorker*. They’re not primarily going for clicks — this is a publication people pay money for, because they read the articles, the whole articles.
I agree that the title is a bit baity (it’s “Has Social Media Fueled a Teen-Suicide Crisis?” while in the print edition, it was simply “Doom Scrolling”).