In recent years, many young people spend increasing amounts of time using social media . Do you think this is a positive or negative development?

The pervasive rise of social media engagement has fundamentally altered modern behaviour. This essay will first outline two psychological drivers behind this trend before arguing that, on balance, it constitutes a negative development. The principal cause lies in platform architecture designed to exploit reward-based learning. Algorithms on apps like Instagram and TikTok systematically deliver variable-ratio […]