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Social media is a powerful influence on our lives and our culture, driving decisions from what we eat for lunch to where we go on vacation. Now, a new study from Georgia Tech's School of Economics is the first to tie high levels of social media exposure to increased visitors to the U.S. National Parks and the increased crowding and ecological damage they bring with them.

"There's been a general idea that social media exposure matters for visitation, but this research shows that it matters to a very strong degree," said Casey Wichman, an associate professor of economics and the author of the study, published in April in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "It's one of the main drivers of the huge increase in visitation to national parks."

However, he says, the overall picture is much more nuanced than its often portrayed in media accounts.

Wichman found that parks with high social media exposure saw a 16 to 22% increase in visitors compared to locations that received less attention on social media. The growth began in 2013 when Instagram and Twitter started to gain popularity.

While well-known parks such as Yosemite, Grand Canyon, and Yellowstone saw big jumps tied to social media exposure, smaller, less well-known properties also saw significant jumps. For example, the number of travelers to Lake Clark National Park and Preserve in Alaska increased by more than 180%.

Parks in the Southeast saw little change on average because a decrease at parks in Florida and the Carolinas offset an increase at Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the nations most visited national park. The biggest increases on a percentage basis occurred in the Western U.S., particularly in Alaska, the Rocky Mountain region, and Utah.

"It seems like there may be some reshuffling of where people go because there are a lot of parks that don't see increases in visitation despite being pretty cool, interesting parks in similar areas," Wichman said. But people end up seeing the parks with higher exposure online and are more likely to get pushed into visiting them."

Wichman used five measurements to create an index of social media exposure: Instagram followers, Instagram mentions, Twitter followers, Twitter mentions, and the total number of likes and retweets on Twitter. Then, he ranked the parks based on the average of these five metrics, with a lower rank indicating greater social media exposure.

"Social media serves as advertising for parks in a way that's targeted to an individual's network," Wichman said. "However, not all exposure increases visits it has to be good exposure."

Wichman also looked at the type of posts and their effects, finding that tweets with photos or videos drove increased visits in the year after they were posted, while tweets with negative sentiment decreased visits over the following year.

The increase in visitation due to social media is a double-edged sword, Wichman says. More visitors can result in overcrowding, frustrating traffic jams, and difficulty accessing campsites or other amenities. More traffic also means more pollution. But tourists also pay entrance fees and buy things at gift shops, restaurants and other concessions revenue that can help support park operations, wildlife conservation efforts, and local economies. And, those pretty pictures of nature can also get people excited about going outside, which has its own benefits for travelers, Wichman said.

"If you look at news articles, social media is largely pitched as driving overcrowding and being a negative thing. But it's not clear to me that that's the case, he said. Yes, we spend a lot of time on our phones, especially younger demographics, but this also suggests that social media can actually get us outside more. I don't know if it's good or bad, but it's much more nuanced than many sensationalist stories have made it out to be."

Wichmans paper, Social Media Influences National Parks Visitation, was published in April 2024 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It is available athttps://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2310417121

More here:
Social Media Driving Force Behind Increased Visits to National Parks | News Center - Georgia Tech News Center

Four of the largest school boards in Canada are suing the companies behind popular social media apps Instagram and Facebook, Snapchat and TikTok. According to the Ontario boards, students are experiencing an attention, learning and mental health crisis because of prolific and compulsive use of social media products.

The school boards are collectively seeking over $4 billion in damages. Boards say theyre facing financial strain due to providing increased mental health supports for students as well as diverting resources to monitor social media related to threats or harassment.

Some observers have suggested it should be the responsibility of parents and teachers to control childrens social media use. But the problem is that for too long we have been trying to individualize solutions to a collective problem.

How social media negatively impacts kids mental health has been meticulously outlined in a new book by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt of New York University, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing and Epidemic of Mental Illness. In the book, Haidt discusses four ways social media is harming children:

Social deprivation, whereby the time children spend on social media has displaced opportunities to form more authentic personal connections;

Sleep deprivation, as social media use has been tied to reduced sleep duration and poorer sleep quality;

Attention fragmentation, as students are continually bombarded by messages and notifications, compromising their ability to focus.

Finally, addiction: tech companies are intentionally designing their social media apps in ways that exploit the vulnerabilities of children.

Haidt documents how internal documents revealed by former Facebook employee and whistleblower Frances Haugen show an employee presentation about why teens and young adults choose Instagram (owned by Facebook):

Teens decisions and behaviour are mainly driven by emotion, the intrigue of novelty and reward. While these all seem positive, they make teens very vulnerable at the elevated levels they operate on. Especially in the absence of a mature frontal cortex to help impose limits on the indulgence of these.

In Haidts analysis, its no mystery why we are seeing such sharp declines in youth mental health.

Read more: Excessive social media use during the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated adolescent mental health challenges

According to the 2021 Ontario Student Drug Use and Health Survey, the proportion of students reporting poor or fair mental health and the proportion of students experiencing serious psychological distress have both more than doubled since 2013.

As claimed by the Canadian school boards, it has largely fallen on schools to address these issues. To their credit, schools have tried to provide students with access to psychologists, social workers, youth workers and mental health specialists, but there is only so much they can do given their resource constraints.

According to data from the Annual Ontario School Survey, 95 per cent of schools report needing additional resources to support the mental health and well-being of students.

Boards allege the conduct of social media companies has been negligent and they are unfairly bearing the brunt of the learning and mental health epidemic caused by their apps.

Phones and social media use are also clearly having a detrimental impact on student learning: The most recent results of the OECDs PISA study show that math, reading and science scores have been plummeting over the last decade in Canada and other developed countries, due in large part to technology used for leisure rather than instruction, such as mobile phones.

This corresponds with a 2023 study led by researchers from the University of Michigan that tracked the phone use of 200 children (ages 11 to 17) over the course of a week.

It found that during the school day, the devices were used for educational purposes less than two per cent of the time. Rather, the most common uses of phones during school hours were social media (32 per cent), YouTube (26 per cent) and gaming (17 per cent).

Ontario Premier Doug Ford has expressed surprise at the lawsuit, stating: We banned cellphones in the classroom, so I dont know what the kids are using.

However, the reality is that Ontarios ban has been mostly symbolic. The reason for this is twofold. First is the way the ban was constructed: it allowed an exception for when the phones were being used for educational purposes.

Second, many students are unable or unwilling to comply with restrictions on their use something hardly surprising since social media apps are designed to be as addictive as possible. That means it has been left up to individual teachers to enforce restrictions in their classrooms, and resistant students arent provided with clear and consistent expectations. Meanwhile, some parents say their children need their devices.

While some say its up to individual children to fight these temptations, individual parents to better monitor their kids and individual teachers to get control of their classrooms, we must remember that the companies behind popular social media platforms are among the wealthiest on the planet. They use their enormous resources to render attempts at individual willpower futile.

Read more: 'Never-ending pressure': Mothers need support managing kids' technology use

Change may come from the courts or through the court of public opinion. Apart from whether companies are legally held responsible, reversing the harms being inflicted on our children by social media is going to require collective action among educators, parents and policymakers.

See the original post here:
School board social media lawsuits: For too long we've sought individual solutions to a collective problem - The Conversation Indonesia

Donald Trumps social media platform, Truth Social, went public on Tuesday March 26. Shares in parent company Trump Media & Technology Group surged 15% after its first day of trading on the Nasdaq stock exchange, adding US$1.1 billion (876 million) to the companys value.

Trump wrote I LOVE TRUTH SOCIAL on the platform, echoing the sentiment of I just like the stock from the GameStop share rally that occurred in January 2021. For those who do not remember the GameStop case, shares in the Texan computer games retail chain experienced an unprecedented surge in prices following the activity of retail investors on the social media platform, Reddit.

Millions of investors from Reddits WallStreetBets community pushed GameStop shares from US$20 to US$480 during the January short squeeze, in which they drove some hedge funds into heavy losses after forcing them to liquidate massive bets against the stock. The power of small, amateur investors to outplay Wall Street giants was celebrated all over the internet, and even inspired the 2023 film Dumb Money.

It appears that the Trump Media stock is yet another example of a so-called meme stock, whose popularity is driven by social media activities and memes posted on various platforms, such as Truth Social.

However, while similarities with GameStop are apparent, the Trump Media movement looks unlikely to be as successful. On Monday April 1, less than a week after it began trading, shares of Trump Media fell by more than 20%.

The social media hype around GameStop originated from within a community of retail investors that took a David v Goliath mentality. The firm behind Truth Social has tried to cultivate a similar sentiment of small guys resisting Big Tech censorship.

Devin Nunes, the CEO of Trump Media, stated: As a public company, we will passionately pursue our vision to build a movement to reclaim the internet from big tech censors.

However, Trump Media stocks are directly linked to the exceptionally famous persona of Donald Trump, who owns 58% of the shares. Thus, parallels could be drawn with PR campaigns that have been launched for crypto assets, such as NFTs (non-fungible tokens), where celebrities are often used to attract investors to the projects.

Read more: From GameStop to crypto: how to protect yourself from meme stock mania

The Trump media stock is undoubtedly appealing to his loyal supporters, who appear to have fuelled the surge in price. But meme stocks may attract a broader range of investors due to the social media hype.

That is why it is important to understand that investing in any meme stock or meme coin is a risky endeavour. Surges in price that cannot be explained by any company fundamentals are called asset price bubbles. Speculative bubbles are quite common in financial and cryptocurrency markets and offer opportunities to generate abnormal returns in a short period of time.

However, they can be risky for investors as they have a tendency to burst. Participating in such speculative behaviour is typically considered irrational since it is extremely hard to justify the growth of the price.

More importantly, it is nearly impossible to predict exactly when the bubble will burst. Retail investors should be cautious and definitely should not make decisions based solely on social media announcements regarding public figures.

The share price of Trump Media has now dipped to almost pre-surge levels. For many retail investors, it is fair to assume that it is yet again too late to get abnormal returns on this surge. This is because the price of a meme stock tends to simply fluctuate after the initial surge.

Trump Media stock plummets within a week of going public

Only the long-term growth potential of an asset should be assessed to generate somewhat stable returns in the future. However, the long-term stock performance is rarely assessed when it comes to meme stocks, as investors in these stocks tend to have a very short investment horizon.

Following the cryptocurrency market crash in 2022, many retail investors lost their savings as the bubble burst. Many of the collapsed crypto assets were meme coins that had been promoted by celebrities. Dogecoin, for example, was promoted by Elon Musk.

Celebrities have immense power to influence the public. But when it comes to financial decisions, the ethical implications of those campaigns are often not considered.

At the time of writing, there is yet another bullish trend in cryptocurrency prices, particularly in Bitcoin. Yet there is still no clarity in regulation or consumer protection, and there has been no regulatory response to concerns about the environmental impacts of Bitcoin mining.

Some experts who invest in cryptocurrency and have direct financial benefit from surges in prices would, of course, argue that the rally is not a bubble and prices will keep growing. However, it might be unethical to expose consumers to unjustified risks.

According to some studies, awareness of the green critiques associated with cryptocurrency markets is growing. But recent research that I conducted with my colleagues shows that retail investors generally do not care. Understanding that crypto is unsustainable and somewhat unethical does not decrease the odds of investing in crypto assets among retail investors.

The movement in Trump Medias share price will have been backed by Trump supporters. But it will also have attracted some investors who simply wanted to partake in this share rally, even if they do not share Trumps political views. The desire to make money quickly is one of the main driving factors of meme stock investments, and social media campaigns are great fuel for this sentiment.

Excerpt from:
Truth Social: why Donald Trump's social media 'meme stock' surged and fell by over US$1 billion within a week - The Conversation Indonesia

Things could be going better for X, the social network formerly known as Twitter. Elon Musk's platform is facing a further decline in user interest. In fact, according to an American study, X lost 30% of its users between 2023 and 2024.

Internet users no longer seem to have as much interest in using X, the social platform formerly known as Twitter, according to the latest Edison Research "Infinite Dial" report on digital media usage, conducted in January 2024 among 1,086 Americans aged 12 and over.

Indeed, the platform is experiencing a decline in usage. According to the report, 19% of Americans surveyed said they currently use the social network X (formerly Twitter) in 2024, compared with 27% in 2023. This is a significant drop, since according to Edison Research, this would translate into an estimated loss of 22 million users. The report counts 77 million users of the platform in 2023, compared to 55 million in 2024.

While X may be floundering, this is not the case for all social networks starting with Facebook, which, despite its less than stellar reputation, remains the most widely used social media in the United States. Around two-thirds of Americans over the age of 12 (63%) report using the platform. This figure has remained stable over the past two years. Instagram comes second with 44%, followed by TikTok (35%). The X platform is in seventh place, behind Pinterest, LinkedIn and Snapchat.

At generational level, 12- to 34 year-olds largely favour Instagram, followed by TikTok and Facebook. The older generation is more drawn to Facebook, which is still very present in the daily lives of 35- to 54-year-olds and 55+-year-olds.

X, on the other hand, has a harder time finding a place in the lives of users, across all generations. The platform lags far behind among 12- to 34 year-olds and 55+-year-olds, and comes in fifth place among 35- to 54-year-olds.

Other studies have already reported a slowdown for social network X. Apptopia, for example, reported a 13% drop in daily active users since Elon Musk's takeover. Meanwhile, SimilarWeb revealed a 14% drop in the social network's web traffic.

According to the Edison Research report, 82% of the US population aged 12 and over or around 235 million people currently ever use social media in 2024. AFP Relaxnews

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Is social network X falling out of favour with Americans? - The Star Online

Thursday 04 April 2024 5:05 am

By: Matthew Lesh

Matthew Lesh is Director of Public Policy and Communications at the Institute of Economic Affairs

Social media is an easy target for societys woes, but there is little hard evidence for its link with bad mental health, writes Matthew Lesh

A new book has ignited debate on social media this week. It is perhaps appropriate that the book, The Anxious Generation, is itself about social media.

Author Jonathan Haidt, a high-profile social psychologist, argues that childhood development has been disturbed by replacing play and in-person socialising with screen time, driving a youth mental health crisis. This book will undoubtedly bolster the campaign from those aiming to ban social media use for under-16s. Theres just one big problem: the evidence does not support Haidts apocalyptic claims.

In a review of The Anxious Generation in Nature magazine, psychology professor Candice Odgers warns that assertions about social media driving an epidemic of mental illness are not supported by science. Odgers says that research consistently finds a mix of no, small and mixed associations. Many studies find correlation rather than proven causation. Its quite possible that young people who use social media in an unhealthy manner already have mental health problems.

Haidt has responded to this criticism by listing the number of studies linking youth mental health issues with social media. But this is hardly exemplary of the scientific method. Science is not a democratic process, with whoever publishes the most papers winning the argument. Rather, its necessary to weigh the strength of each individual paper.

One such study that sought to review the reviews (that is, analyse metastudies in the field) found that the claimed links between social media and mental health are weak or inconsistent. One such review, from Amy Orben of the University of Cambridge, found links in both directions and claimed negative associations are at best very small. One study, for example, found that wearing glasses negatively impacted youth mental health more than screen time.

If the internet has a big negative impact, we expect to see worsening mental health globally. But thats not the case. The most reliable statistic to assess is teen suicide, as it addresses variations in self-reporting of mental health issues across time and place. On this front, there has been a clear increase in teen suicide over the last decade in the United States, but elsewhere, including the United Kingdom, teen suicide rates remain low or stable.

But even when you look at self-reported survey findings, the impact of social media is still far from clear. Matti Vuorre and Professor Andrew K Przybylski of Oxford University examined life satisfaction and internet uptake among 2m people in 168 countries over two decades. Looking at this broader data set and cross-national measures, unlike many narrower studies that claim negative effects, they find minor and inconsistent shifts in global mental health.

Its important not to oversimplify in this debate. Social media and screen time may have been harmful for some children. For many, however, technology is used to connect with friends and family, explore new ideas and build communities. One study by Andrew K Przybylski and Netta Weinstein, which analysed social media among English adolescents, found that moderate use may be good for mental health, while high levels had a measurable, small negative impact.

Technology is a tool that enriches our lives when used properly. The challenge for parents and schools is to ensure teens understand the risks and encourage positive behaviour. Broad generalisations and unrealistic knee-jerk bans will achieve little and could do much harm to healthy childhood development.

Read more here:
Let's be honest, social media isn't driving a teen mental health crisis - City A.M.