Is social media causing the youth mental health crisis? With Professor Candice Odgers

Okay, cool.

So, um, given that we've said that a lot of people find what you said challenging, um, and I think there's two reasons why people find it challenging first, because the dominant narrative has been so dominant.

Um, and like, it's just, it's just taken as granted, but also because, you know, most of our listeners work in schools, um, and.

This, you know, what we're suggesting now just seems to be completely at odds with our sort of day-to-day lived experience.

You know, and Amy will speak to this better than I can, but as a pastoral lead, like in a school, a huge number of social issues between students are driven, not just driven, but made worse by access to social media and instant messaging.

We have obviously horrific individual anecdotes like the tragic case of Molly Russell.

So her Meta account recommended content to her that featured suicide and self-harm.

And she eventually took her own life.

We also have, you know, these are like iconic talismanic cases here.

You know, Brianna Gay was a 16-year-old trans girl.

She was murdered by her classmates and they used Snapchat to lure her out.

Any school password, you know, even beyond those sort of big catastrophic cases, any school password will tell you the absolute horrors when they ask students for their browsing history, because they'll do that.

They'll just say, can I have your phone, please? Can I look through your browsing history? And it's just the stuff they'll see is just appalling.

Violent imagery, explicit content, extreme bullying, harassment.

And I guess the question is, like, how can this stuff not have an effect on young people? yeah

so there are absolutely cases of offline harm and so i'll give you so a couple of things i want to say first one i'm not in any way minimizing the types of harms the responsibility of tech companies and i have been a huge proponent of the molly rose foundation of their leadership in this area and i've been especially impressed by how outspoken they have been in terms of focusing the regulation on the pieces of the tech that has, you know, kind of a possibility of having a positive impact on young people, right? So they don't want the superficial change.

They want the actual real change on the design features and I commend them.

And nobody should be fed those types of images or content, regardless of their age.

There are many vulnerable people across the age distribution, across the world.

I mean, just safety for design for everyone.

And that's first and foremost, absolutely.

The second thing is that, you know, having worked in with in I also when I worked in the courthouses of Vancouver, I started working with sexually exploited youth at that time.

And one of the biggest things you find is that offline risk predicts all kinds of things.

And so I'm going to get to your example in the school.

So in the ERIS study that is in the UK, it's a sample of 2000 students.