What do psychologists say about the impact of social media on children?

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00:00Would you just be able to start by introducing yourself and telling me a

00:03little bit about what you do? I'm Dr. Ellie Hansen, I'm a clinical

00:06psychologist and researcher with a particular focus on online harms and

00:11abuse and I do a variety of things including working with schools, working

00:16with the PSHE Association who support schools in the delivery of their

00:21relationships and sex education and wider PSHE. Perfect, now you've probably seen

00:27in the news quite a bit lately there's been a lot of talk about the impacts of

00:31social media and sort of too much screen time on young people and I was

00:36wondering what are some of the I guess potential negatives of you know spending

00:40too much time online, too much on social media for young people, so those impacts

00:43that you will see in your line of work? It's a great question and I think to

00:47answer it we have to start with what exactly social media is, what's driving

00:53it so we need to talk about what's called the engagement based algorithms. I

00:58think that's a bit of a misnomer because engagement sounds maybe quite a positive

01:03thing you know engagement is maybe like what I find interesting and what engages

01:08me but actually these algorithms are designed to keep people online for as long

01:14as possible using whatever means they can and what we find is that they are doing

01:21that through triggering these emotions within us such as maybe shock and

01:28horror, anger and outrage, sexual arousal, sometimes a feeling of kind of

01:34superiority and entitlement so some quite kind of base instincts which are not

01:40necessarily aligned with our intentions, what we want to be doing, what we want to

01:45be learning about and our deepest values and so and also these algorithms are

01:51highly addictive so we find that we're doing things online on social media that

01:56we're kind of hooked into but we don't really want to be doing this and it may be

02:01leading us away from being our best selves. The social media platforms are shaping

02:08people towards their corporate profit and often away from their own best interest in

02:14the process and so that then leads to a whole set of harms where young people are

02:19being bombarded by content that might be for example making them suspicious about

02:25so for boys being suspicious of girls and women or some kind of very sexual

02:30objectifying content, content that makes them feel bad about themselves that might be

02:35encouraging self-harm or eating disorders or makes them kind of focus on their

02:39appearance. It's often kind of like finding and hooking into their insecurities and

02:44then really amplifying those and that's why we are seeing all of these harms that

02:51then follow for young people.