The three horsemen of social media: brain rot, anxiety and foreign interference

As outlets and organisations like the European Federation of Journalists, The Guardian, Dagens Nyheter, La Vanguardia and Ouest-France announce their departure from X (formerly Twitter), it seems a good time to reflect on our assumptions about social media and its impact on society as a whole. 

There is a widespread assumption, for example, that social media is the primary driver of mental health problems among young people. A recent article in The Conversation adds some much needed nuance. 

Roland Paulsen, a sociology professor in Lund University, draws on data from Sweden's Public Health Agency, as well as research from Norway and the UK, to show that "young people were becoming more anxious long before social media". The data leads Paulsen to conclude that current efforts across Europe to ban smartphones in schools will fail to have the desired impact on mental health. "While it’s good to draw attention to the rising rates of depression and anxiety", Paulsen writes, "there’s a risk of becoming fixated on simplistic explanations that reduce the issue to technical variables like 'screen time'. [...] Reducing the issue to isolated variables, where the solution might appear to be to introduce a new policy (like banning smartphones) follows a technocratic logic [...]. The risk with this approach is that society as a whole is excluded from the analysis."

On a similar front, for France Inter, Victor Dhollande reports that depression rates have risen sharply among young people in France since the first Covid lockdowns. "41% of students have depressive symptoms (compared with 26 percent before Covid). That's an increase of 15 points in just four years. Over the same period, suicidal thoughts among 18-24 year-olds have risen from 21% to 29%. Their anxieties are well known: economic difficulties, increasingly selective and therefore stressful education, unemployment. [...] Almost all of them cite the geopolitical context, with international conflicts and climate change making their future increasingly uncertain." The figures emerge from a forthcoming study by researchers at the University of Bordeaux and Inserm.

According to the head of a Parisian psychiatric hospital, the situation may well lead to "a sacrificed generation in just a few years" if the right solutions are not implemented. "The problem", Dhollande writes, "is that care facilities are overloaded. The situation is the same in hospitals, medical-psychological centres and private practices: too many patients, not enough doctors, not enough specialised facilities." 

Somewhat less dramatically, Harry Taylor in the The Guardian reports on another mental health problem blamed on social media: "brain rot". Every year, the publishers of the Oxford English Dictionary invite the public to vote on the "word of the year". In 2019 it was "climate emergency". In 2024 the word is "brain rot", which, according to the Oxford University Press, "gained new prominence in 2024 as a term used to capture concerns about the impact of consuming excessive amounts of low-quality online content, especially on social media".

Back in The Conversation, Filippo Menczer, Professor of Informatics and Computer Science at Indiana University, discusses the "foreign influence campaigns, or information operations" that tend to proliferate during election season, as well as the potential solutions that Menczer has developed with his colleagues in the Observatory on Social Media. While researchers can estimate the scale and describe the methods of such operations, Menczer acknowledges that "the consequences [...] are difficult to evaluate due to the challenges posed by collecting data and carrying out ethical experiments that would influence online communities. Therefore it is unclear, for example, whether online influence campaigns can sway election outcomes."

Given the heavy reliance on AI content generation tools by these operations, Menczer suggests that regulations to combat them should target "AI content dissemination via social media platforms rather than AI content generation". There are also practical steps that platforms can take, such as making it more difficult to set up fake accounts and automated posts. "These types of content moderation would protect, rather than censor, free speech in the modern public squares", Menzer writes. "The right of free speech is not a right of exposure, and since people’s attention is limited, influence operations can be, in effect, a form of censorship by making authentic voices and opinions less visible."

Finally, in the Dublin Inquirer, Shamim Malekmian investigates a suspiciously untraceable appeal for "digital canvassers" that appeared on X in the run-up to Ireland's general election. The investigation leads to a discussion of how EU regulations like the GDPR and DSA are designed to combat such un-transparent and unaccountable operations during election time.