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When we consider how much time young people spend on social media, negative news content may have a bad impact. And those already psychologically vulnerable may be particularly susceptible to the ill effects of a constant stream of negative news. This is because stress responses are often accentuated in those already suffering from symptoms of anxiety, depression and other mental illnesses.
So, it is encouraging to see some technology companies proactively showing concern about their users' mental health. For example, Twitter is teaming up with the youth mental health organisation ReachOut to provide resources to help young people learn about the possible negative impacts of social media, so they won't be overly consumed by it and know how to cope if they are.
This is a good start – Twitter is making more information available. But it can do more, and Twitter shouldn't be the only one doing it.
Yes, I'm certain this is exactly what is needed. Much better idea than shutting your Twitter app.
Source: The Conversation
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 02 2017, @11:48PM
You might not be aware, but one american religious institution has a lot to do with what you see as unexplained.
The southern baptist convention was created as a white supremacist organization. They splintered from the Triennial Convention [sbcvoices.com] over one single issue: slavery.
It was only about 20 years ago that they finally officially acknowledged their racist heritage. [sbc.net] And that racism is still a strong undercurrent. [faithfullymagazine.com] You don't undo 150 years of white supremacy in just one generation. Especially when racism was still an official policy as recently as 2000 — The last time "religious liberty" was a popular phrase [thinkprogress.org] was in 1983 when Bob Jones University wanted to be exempt from Title IX requirements regarding first admitting blacks [drslewis.org] and then inter-racial dating. [christianitytoday.com]
That racism informs their views on welfare. Part of the protestant work ethic is not taking handouts and that can easily get perverted into prosperity gospel - where being poor is evidence of not being right with god. But that gets squishy when it comes to seeing people who are obviously in need. Racism affects the perception of who deserves welfare. So all those racist stereotypes about blacks being lazy feeds right into that prosperity gospel shit and while they are OK with people they know personally (because their friends are all good, god-fearing people, natch) or even themselves, getting welfare, they don't want all the undeserving (aka non-white) people to get free handouts (remember the "welfare queen" bogeyman?) Which is also why they are always freaked out that illegal immigrants are sucking on the teat of the state too, despite that not really being possible.
Related to that: many within the SBC saw the writing on the wall about racism during the 70s and decided they needed a new "enemy" to unify them. The settled on abortion. As recently as 1976 the SBC supported full abortion rights [sbc.net] based on scripture that said (among other things) that god doesn't put a soul into a person until they are "fully formed." [biblehub.com]
The SBC is by far the single largest protestant denomination in the US, with 200,000 churches and 15.5 million members (although membership has been declining for about a decade).
Trump got the highest share of the (white) evangelical vote ever measured [pewresearch.org] (although they only started measuring in 2004). That coincides with a truly massive reversal in how much evangelicals think character matters in a presidential candidate. [npr.org] They sold out their principles for racism.