130 North Bellefield Ave., 538/539 Conference Room

Abstract: There is growing consensus that social media has created a mental health crisis among youth, with severe consequences to their emotional well-being, social functioning, and physical health. This crisis disproportionately affects girls and young women, widening gender gaps and hindering progress towards gender equality. However, the pathways of social media harm are not well understood. In this talk I present evidence for a potential mechanism, exploring it in the context of eating disorders, an often-fatal mental health condition that includes anorexia, bulimia and binge eating disorder. The rise in eating disorders has been linked to the proliferation of idealized body images on social media; however, the link between social media and eating disorders is more complex. I show how technological affordances of social media can create a “harm spiral” that traps people in toxic echo chambers that promote eating disorders. Specifically, social media makes harmful content easy to discover and its group dynamics encourage people to stay engaged, which exposes them to more harmful content that is deleterious to mental health. To address the youth mental health crisis, we urgently need to understand how social media harms mental health, and who is vulnerable to its detrimental effects.

Bio: Kristina Lerman is a Principal Scientist at the University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute and holds a joint appointment as a Research Professor in the USC Computer Science Department. Trained as a physicist, she now applies network analysis and machine learning to problems in computational social science, including crowdsourcing, social network and social media analysis. Her work on modeling and understanding cognitive biases in social networks has been covered by the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and MIT Tech Review. She is a fellow of the AAAI.

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