Social Media Only Hurts Dems Mental Health: Why?

Join Malcolm and Simone as they delve into a comprehensive analysis of multiple studies that reveal striking differences in how social media use affects the mental health of liberals and conservatives. Learn through detailed graphs and data how liberal social media culture correlates with higher rates of depression and anxiety, while conservative content seems to have a more neutral or even positive impact. Explore the intricate relationship between personality traits, ideological orientation, and social media interactions, and uncover the factors contributing to the growing mental health disparities in contemporary society.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello, Simone. Today is gonna be an interesting day because we are going to go over so many graphs today.

I don't even think we're gonna get to them all. Ooh, the first and most critical of the graphs is one I am going to put on screen here, and it opens up a, a both an explanatory mystery, I guess is what I'd call it. And so what you can see in this first chart is liberal and conservative depression index scores by social media, use category where red is conservative and blue is liberal, and the higher the bar goes, the worse their depression is.

And what you see in this chart is that if you are a progressive. The more liberal you are, the more using social media depresses you. But if you are a conservative, that is not the case. In fact, using social media frequently appears to increase your mental health when you're at the. High levels of use. [00:01:00] Now what's really fascinating, and I marginally you're still better off not using it at all, but marginally it increases mm-hmm.

Compared to using it some versus using it an absolute ton. Mm-hmm. At least once a day specifically here. And then I would point out here that and, and actually the, the conservatives who use social media at least once a day have significantly better mental health than the liberals who use it only once or twice a month.

Oh, goodness. That is how bad it is for liberals. Just the littlest bit. I mean, have you

Simone Collins: been

Malcolm Collins: on

Simone Collins: Blue Sky though? It's, it is depressing.

Like that's a big thing that I see on Blue Sky that I don't see on Twitter. Like I tweet about the, the asteroid that was gonna hit us, but then didn't hit us. And I get normal responses on Blue Sky. I tweet about that, and a bunch of the responses are finally someone to cure the plague of humans upon this earth.

Malcolm Collins: Here's where it gets really bad. Liberals and conservatives have almost exactly the same rates of depression and bad mental health. And we'll see this as we go to other charts when they don't use social media at all.[00:02:00]

Okay. Which implies that, and will, you know, it's broadly known, liberals have way more mental health problems than conservatives right now. Right? If you look at white liberal women, for example, over 50% are dealing with a major mental health issue. Mm-hmm. But what this appears to be saying is this is not like an innate thing about liberals.

It's not and this article will argue the opposite, but like the evidence shows otherwise, it's not like, oh if you are more likely to get depressed, then you're more likely to become a liberal. Mm. It's something about engaging with liberal culture itself

Simone Collins: makes you sad,

Malcolm Collins: is what makes you sad.

Simone Collins: Oh, my.

Oh no.

Malcolm Collins: And what's interesting is we're going to be able to break out the exact parts of liberal culture that do this. The amount that it's not being religious, the amounts that it's woke him, the amount that it's DEI stuff the amount that it's fear of, of like being attacked or something like that.

And we often talk about the urban [00:03:00] monoculture as something of a mimetic virus, which you know, the iterations of it that are better at spreading, spread better. And it appears to, as a mimetic virus, first sort of lower your mental immune system by destroying your mental health before it begins to eat away at your brain.

Mm-hmm. And we're going to see this in the data on this piece specifically. What she ends up finding out is first the mental health declines. Then a person starts identifying as a liberal, not first do they identify as a liberal, then the mental health declines.

Simone Collins: Oh, really? Yes, I would've guessed the opposite.

That's really interesting. Okay,

Malcolm Collins: so I, I would've guessed the opposite as well, but what it appears is happening here is that the mental health decline is sort of an erosion of self-identity, self-pride, like self affirmation ability that is required before people start, like rotely accepting woke ideas.

Simone Collins: Oh, yeah. Like, I guess it's a lot easier to accept. [00:04:00] Super progressive ideology when you have an external locus of control, for example, plus a lot of self hatred.

Malcolm Collins: Yes. Oh

Simone Collins: no.

Malcolm Collins: Wow. Okay. Wow. So, so it, it builds the self-hatred first. And, and I think that that's really fascinating. And we can also see from this other graph that it's specifically interacting with liberal culture that makes you mentally unhealthy.

And that interacting with conservative culture frequently actually appears to make people a little bit more healthy mentally speaking. That makes sense. This isn't surprising to me at all, actually. Mm-hmm. If you look at a lot of the types of conservative culture that, that progressives complain about, and it's like a meme thing where they're like, how do you know your son is a conservative?

Well, he exercises and he takes care of his appearance and he, and he takes personal

Simone Collins: responsibility for his actions. He's not looking at

Malcolm Collins: porn as much, you know? It's like, okay, but I can see why maybe these things are correlating to higher mental health rates. Okay. I

Simone Collins: oh no,

Malcolm Collins: but anyway. Let's get into this.

So now we're gonna [00:05:00] go to the second figure I sent you. Okay. And these are all from a study, mental health trends and the great awakening.

Simone Collins: Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Okay. So we're starting right now with figure 27. I'm skipping around, I'm not showing the figures in order. I'm showing them to sort of painted narrative here.

Simone Collins: The effects of frequent social media use on internalizing symptoms by ideology. Yes.

Malcolm Collins: It, it illustrates the average score differences on seven item anxiety index and a 20 item depression index between self-identified liberals and conservatives. Uhhuh. These individuals reported using social media for over two hours at a time, uhhuh at least several times a week, 36% of the sample compared to those who rarely do 46% of this sample among liberals, those who use social media more frequently score.

0.33 standard deviation higher on the anxiety index and 0.22 standard deviations higher on the depression index compared with those who report never using social media for two hours at a time, or minimal use. Mm-hmm. In contrast, these differences among conservatives are negligible, 0.05 standard deviations and [00:06:00] 0.04 standard deviations respectively.

And this is a different study than the above study. So multiple studies are finding this.

Simone Collins: