Scientists uncover startling impacts of excessive YouTube on loneliness and mental health
By GRIFFITH UNIVERSITY
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The investigation was led by Dr. Luke
Balcombe and Emeritus Professor Diego De Leo from Griffith University’s School of Applied
Psychology and AISRAP. They aimed to comprehensively explore both the
beneficial and detrimental effects of the world’s most popular streaming
platform on individuals’ mental health.
They found the most negatively affected
individuals were those under 29 years of age, or who regularly watched content
about other people’s lives.
Lead author Dr Luke Balcombe said the
development of parasocial relationships between content creators and followers
could be cause for concern, however, some neutral or positive instances of
creators developing closer relationships with their followers also occurred.
“These online ‘relationships’ can fill a gap for people who, for example, have social anxiety, however, it can exacerbate their issues when they don’t engage in face-to-face interactions, which are especially important in developmental years,” he said.
“We recommend individuals limit their time on
YouTube and seek out other forms of social interaction to combat loneliness and
promote positive mental health.”
Dr. Balcombe said the amount of time spent on
YouTube was often a concern for parents, who struggled to monitor their
children’s use of the platform for educational or other purposes.
For the purpose of the study, over two hours
per day of YouTube consumption was classed as high-frequency use and over five
hours a day as saturated use.
The study also determined more needed to be
done to prevent suicide-related content from being recommended to users based
on algorithms for suggested viewing.
While ideally, people shouldn’t be able to
search for these topics and be exposed to methods, the YouTube algorithm does
push recommendations or suggestions based on previous searches, which can send
users further down a disturbing ‘rabbit hole’.
Users can report this type of content, but
sometimes it may not be reported, or it could be there for a few days or weeks,
and with the sheer volume of content passing through, it’s almost impossible
for YouTube’s algorithms to stop all of it.
If a piece of content is flagged as possibly
containing suicide or self-harm topics, YouTube then provides a warning and
asks the user if they want to play the video.
“With vulnerable children and adolescents who
engage in high-frequency use, there could be value in monitoring and
intervention through artificial intelligence,” Dr. Balcombe said.
“We’ve explored human–computer interaction issues
and proposed a concept for an independent-of-YouTube algorithmic recommendation
system that will steer users toward verified positive mental health content or
promotions.
“YouTube is increasingly used for mental
health purposes, mainly for information seeking or sharing and many digital
mental health approaches are being tried with varying levels of merit, but with
over 10,000 mental health apps currently available, it can be really
overwhelming knowing which ones to use, or even which ones to recommend from a
practitioner point of view.
“There is a gap for verified mental health or
suicide tools based on a mix of AI-based machine
learning, risk modeling, and suitably qualified human
decisions, but by getting mental health and suicide experts together to verify
information from AI, digital mental health interventions could be a very
promising solution to support increasing unmet mental health needs.”
Reference: “The Impact of YouTube on
Loneliness and Mental Health” by Luke Balcombe and Diego De Leo, 20 April
2023, Informatics.
DOI: 10.3390/informatics10020039