The effect of deactivating Facebook and Instagram on users' emotional state

50 years from now, we are going to be looking back at Social Media and Smartphone addiction like we currently look at smoking. “How insane were we to have allowed it and allowed it to be promoted?” our grandchildren will rightly ask!

tbf, I think pre-AI social media will barely receive a paragraph in a 2075 history book.

No it will. Because it's the beginning of all that happened after it.

Maybe the record of history itself will change. When it’s all LLM’s feeding into each other then how long until every whackadoo conspiracy theory becomes a historical fact?

Hope you are right but I think it's different. Smoking has very visible side effects fairly soon though- types of cancer, photos of rotten lungs and throat everywhere on cigarette packs etc.

Social media only seems to have psychological side effects which aren't as openly visible to our eyes.

No. It is like alcohol: perfectly fine in reasonable doses, but harmful to people that get addicted.

“Perfectly fine” is a bit of a stretch. No amount of alcohol is good for health. WHO now say even small amounts increase risk of cancer and liver disease.

I'd argue that small amounts of alcohol facilitate relaxation and socialization, which probably saves a lot more lives from preventing homicide and suicide than it costs in cancer and liver disease.

After socialization comes drunk driving which alone kills a quarter million people annually.

Your attitude is exactly what the parent comment is describing. You have the benefit of decades of scientific research and government mandates that didn't exist for previous generations. Modern cigarettes date to the late 1800's but the link between smoking and cancer wasn't established until the 1950's. It took over a decade after that for the first warning labels to appear on packs, and the photo type you're describing didn't exist until the 2000's.

It seems obvious to you because it has been made obvious to you. It wasn't the same for people in the first half of the 1900's. The parent comment is making the same point: it's not obvious to most people today, but in fifty years from now, people will look at the research, the decline in the birth rate, the increase of anxiety, and effects we can't imagine today and go "social media has very visible side effects fairly soon, how did they not know?"

It's deeply fascinating to many europeans living in cities that one would need to drive to go to a bar.

My closest bar is 100 meters away. If I'm willing to walk 20 minutes, the radius can probably hit around 100 different ones.

I’m European and live in a city. There are still plenty of drunk driving fatalities here.

This is nonsense. Drinking in moderation is beneficial or at worst harmless. Every two years the "science" changes. Anyone that pays too much attention to what it says is a fool.

Can you provide more details on the health benefits of ethanol?

That's why I specified a small amount, there's a strong inverted U curve for alcohol for sure.

Having to share a world with people who take way to seriously the long tail of things that will kill you so little you need massive sample sizes and meta studies to quantify the effect is a hell of a lot worse for my health than ~2 light beers per week and a steak a month.

It does an okay job as a hand sanitizer.

Here the legal limit is approximately 2 440ml cans or a draft of beer.

If you are drinking more than that across an evening I would argue it's a bit more than socialising. Maybe where you are from people are heavy drinkers and are not responsible enough to not slow down a fee hours before you know you will be driving but I feel like the quarter a million annually is quite overrepresented by heavy drinkers.

I want to believe you, yet I believe that socials will be even more ingrained in everyday life.