“Our children are just guinea pigs”: Connecting social networks and children’s mental health

CINCINNATI (WKRC) – When kids and teens log into their social networks, they enter a world full of influencers, algorithms and ad targeting.

Smartphones take our children to a place that isn’t always pretty. Now, a young Tri-State woman and her mother argue it amplifies mental health issues for young minds.

Local 12 spoke to a teenager who almost died. She is now suing Meta as she blames the social media giant for bringing her to this point. Each pencil stroke is like a letter of the alphabet for CeCe Neltner.

I just let it go as I draw, Neltner said.

This is their preferred language when things are too difficult to say out loud.

A lot of my art is very emotional, has a lot of anger or sadness, Neltner said.

His art became a lifeline when ED became the center of his world. ED is the skeleton around him in some of his sketches. It’s the name he gave it as an eating disorder. It’s an obsession that began at age 12 when she began counting calories throughout the day, a dangerous hobby that landed her in the hospital with heart failure.

Want a thigh gap, want to see bones, want to see collarbones, cheeks. It’s never enough, no matter how thin you get. So heart failure was almost like a reward for making it this far, Neltner said.

Art is a safe space for Neltner, but the space that fueled his downward spiral into a calorie deficit obsession was Instagram.

The doctors told me I was overweight and my family life was becoming very difficult, Neltner said. all you know So, I said, okay, this phone, I can use it to control my life. I can use it to control myself. So I said, hey, why don’t I just get thinner?

Instagram searches for healthy recipes and exercise tips resulted in the hashtag thinspo. This led to accounts obsessed with thigh gaps. It was an endless source of eating disorder content. It made it difficult for Neltner’s mother to monitor her son’s online activity.

Do I think that was the only reason my daughter was sick for so long? No, there are many factors that came into play. But do I think it kept her sick? Absolutely, said Candace Wuest, Neltner’s mother.

Matthew Bergman founded the Social Media Victims Law Center and is taking Neltner’s case to court. The case calls out Meta for putting profits before human life. He said Instagram is excessively dangerous, linking it to suicide attempts, anxiety and mental and physical harm.

This is the only industry in the country that does not have a duty of reasonable care, not perfect care, but reasonable care, Bergman said. This is a true case of Davis and Goliath. A case against some of the richest companies in the world. They [Meta] you can hire the best lawyers you can find. Long-running cases involving parents or victims of social media are thrown out of court before they even begin.

Bergman said Meta should leave children out of marketing algorithms. Local 12 contacted Meta eight separate times, but the company has not responded.

In January, Meta told Congress that it had spent $20 billion on safety and security for children since 2016. And that starting in 2024, Instagram will automatically put teens on the most restrictive control settings, which makes it difficult to research suicides, eating disorders and nudity. But harder doesn’t mean impossible.

Now, Instagram has a warning if you type something like thinspo. It asks if you need help or if you want to continue the search.

Still, the US surgeon general points to 20 different studies that show a significant relationship between teenagers using social media and eating disorders.

We can’t put the genie back in the bottle, can we? For many years, the level of suicide among young people was constant, until 2007. Since then they have increased. [And in] 2007, [Thats when we got the] iPhone and Facebook, said the psychologist and clinical director of addictions at the Lindner Center of Hope.

The Center for Countering Digital Hate created fake TikTok accounts posing as 13-year-old girls. They said that within a couple of minutes, the accounts were fed with self-harming content. Smartphone social platforms and the age of influencers haven’t even been around for two decades, leaving unknowns about how this may affect children in the long term.

This is marketing 101, but on steroids. It works in advertising and now it works on social media platforms. He’s trying to get your attention, not necessarily put good quality information in front of you. It’s just putting things in front of you that are designed to get and hold your attention. Until there’s more research, our kids are just guinea pigs, said Jeffrey Blevins, social media expert and UC professor.

This is not to say that all social networks are bad. Businesses are built on them and like-minded people connect despite being thousands of miles apart. People like Neltner can share their art around the country and the world.

So Local 12 asked Neltner how she manages these two truths: that social media can be toxic, but sharing her art can also be helpful.

I do not know. It’s like building a dam with tissue paper. You build this dam, but the water will still come through, you know? It’s getting out of hand, Neltner said.

You can manipulate the algorithms to work to your advantage if you want to limit content that you believe is harmful to you. Here’s how you do it:

1. Press the icon on the bottom right which takes you to your profile.
2. Then, at the top right, press the three-line menu.
3. In the What You See category, there is an option for content preferences. Here you can manipulate real accounts that you are not interested in. You can add hashtags you don’t want so affiliate content won’t appear on your channel. For sensitive content, you can say you want more, less, or standard. And for political content, you can limit it to people you don’t know. Finally, you can snooze Instagram suggested posts for 30 days at a time.