A social enterprise providing education and information to protect and enhance the mental health of young people
Instagram recently announced posts promoting diet products and cosmetic procedures will no longer be visible to users under the age of 18. While the initiative is being led by Instagram, the policy will also be in place on Facebook. Under the policy, posts that feature an incentive to buy a product, such as a discount [...]
Facebook and Instagram are releasing a new tool to limit how much time people spend on their apps. The announcement follows concerns that excessive social media use can have a negative impact on mental health. Users will now be able to check how much time they've spent scrolling, set a reminder for when they've reach [...]
There is research that demonstrates that most everything you do on a screen is correlated with unhappiness, Jean Twenge told me when I first asked her whether we're raising digital monsters. Twenge, a professor of psychology and the author of the book, iGen, also noted the exact opposite to be true. Most everything you do off [...]
Fake Instagram accounts, often referred to as “finstas” or “spam accounts”, have become the norm for many teens – but their reasoning for creating these is not as sinister as you think. I’ve spoken with 50 Australian families – including 118 children aged 1-18 – about technology use, and am currently conducting a follow-up qualitative [...]
The year 2012 was the moment our kids lost their childhood. Recent research out of the United States reveals a sharp decrease in wellbeing among adolescents from 2012 onwards — the year when smartphone ownership became commonplace among teens. Using survey data from 1.1 million young people, the researchers found that adolescents who spent more time on [...]
Want to feel better about yourself? Stop following people on social media who make you feel insecure, fat or ugly - it’s probably a very long list. In this age of filters and fakery, there are too many perfect people with perfect lives. Even Selena Gomez, said to be the most followed Instagrammer on the [...]
Kate Winslet has zero time for Instagram. In an interview with UK Vogue, the Oscar-winning actor offered her thoughts on ageing gracefully, and her beauty routine, (spoiler: she's very low maintenance). But the 42-year-old didn't glaze over how young women have been negatively implicated by social media. "Just today a close friend, a younger actress who is well-known, [...]
I never realised just how damaging our obsession with smartphones and our switched-on lifestyle was, nor how addictive screen time was, until I put my teenagers on an extended digital detox. The results were swift and shocking, raising the question of just what is happening to the selfie generation and whether we have more to fear [...]
Earlier this week, Harvard University revealed that it had rescinded admissions offers to at least 10 students who shared offensive images within what they thought was a private Facebook group chat. The students posted memes and images that mocked minority groups, child abuse, sexual assault and the Holocaust, among other things. It is easy for [...]
Four of the five most popular forms of social media harm young people’s mental health, with Instagram the most damaging, according to research by two health organisations. Instagram has the most negative impact on young people’s mental wellbeing, a survey of almost 1,500 14- to 24-year-olds found, and the health groups accused it of deepening [...]
