Peak social media: The debate over young users’ mental health
FT News Briefing
Forhecz Topher
4.4 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 22 July 2023
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
There’s a growing feeling that social media is bad for us: bad for society and bad for our wellbeing. That trend has culminated in a new wave of legislation in the United States aiming to address social media’s impact on young people’s mental health. But in this episode, Elaine Moore, deputy editor of the FT’s Lex column, looks at some of the unanswered questions over whether social media really causes us harm, and what legislation will mean for the future of the social media business model. Are we in the throws of a technological panic?
In this episode, the third in a series on social media, Elaine speaks to Emma Lembke, co-founder of youth advocacy group Log Off; Katie Paul, director at the Tech Transparency Project; Amy Orben, head of the Digital Mental Health Group at the University of Cambridge; and FT tech reporter Hannah Murphy.
Since the publication of Katie Paul’s investigation into the trade of looted Middle Eastern antiquities on Facebook, Meta has changed its policy on the sale of historical artefacts.
Presented by Elaine Moore. Produced by Edwin Lane and Josh Gabert-Doyon, Executive producer is Manuela Saragosa. Sound design by Breen Turner and Samantha Giovinco. Original music by Metaphor Music. The FT’s head of audio is Cheryl Brumley.
We're keen to hear more from our listeners about this show and want to know what you'd like to hear more of, so we're running a survey which you can find at ft.com/techtonicsurvey. It takes about 10 minutes to complete and you will be in with a chance to win a pair of Bose QuietComfort earbuds.
Read a transcript of this episode on FT.com
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | The FT News Briefing is supported by Equinole, the UK's energy partner. Learn more at equinole.co.uk. |
| 0:11.6 | So the kind of the first sign of it was the fact that I felt myself consistently being |
| 0:18.2 | anxious when I would post. I would delete posts if they didn't get enough likes or if I became |
| 0:23.8 | anxious thinking, what is everyone going to say if I post twice in one day? That's Emma Lemke. |
| 0:29.5 | She's 20 years old and a university student in the US. But she was talking to me about what |
| 0:34.8 | happened to her when she was growing up in Alabama. At 12, she got her first social media |
| 0:40.3 | account on Instagram. By the time she was 13, she was struggling. Do you know what your screen time |
| 0:46.7 | would have been like at that point, say when you were 13 and 14? My screen time would have been |
| 0:52.4 | upwards of definitely five or six hours, like scrolling mindlessly through social media accounts, |
| 0:58.0 | but I would probably ballpark it towards 8 to 9, 9 to 10 depending on the day. At certain points, |
| 1:05.2 | it was very obsessive. It felt like I was living to document on Instagram or Snapchat. It really |
| 1:11.6 | was all encompassing. Gradually, Emma started to worry that this near constant checking of social |
| 1:18.2 | media was becoming a problem. I was following a very rigid structure on posting and then kind of |
| 1:24.5 | creating my online persona that began to really allow me to quantify my worth and really attach |
| 1:31.5 | my worth to my likes, my comments, my followers. I began to get really anxious and depressed. Emma |
| 1:38.4 | wasn't just worried about the amount of time she was spending on social media. She was also worried |
| 1:43.3 | about what she was seeing. As I began to spend more time on these apps, even though I was feeling |
| 1:48.8 | more anxious and depressed, I was being fed workout videos, which would then lead to the next workout |
| 1:54.4 | video, which would then lead to dieting videos, more pro-anorexic content that was being streamed my |
| 2:00.6 | way that I felt down the line, severely impacted my development of my sense of self-esteem, |
| 2:09.1 | but also led to disorder eating patterns. Now, anxiety and depression in teenagers existed |
| 2:16.4 | before social media. But what struck Emma was the way in which the algorithms on these platforms |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Forhecz Topher, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Forhecz Topher and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.