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The Dangerous Experiment on Teen Girls
少女的危险测试
Social media gets blamed for many of America’s ills, including the polarization of our politics and the erosion of truth itself. But proving that harms have occurred to all of society is hard. Far easier to show is the damage to a specific class of people: adolescent girls, whose rates of depression, anxiety, and self-injury surged in the early 2010s, as social-media platforms proliferated and expanded.
人们指责社交媒体造成了美国的许多弊病，包括政治的两极分化和真相本身的侵蚀。但要证明这个危害已经在整个社会上发生了是很困难的。更容易证明的是对特定人群的伤害：青春期女孩，随着社交媒体平台的激增和扩大，她们的抑郁症、焦虑症以及自残的数量在2010年代初激增。
Much more than for boys, adolescence typically heightens girls’ self-consciousness about their changing body and amplifies insecurities about where they fit in their social network. Social media—particularly Instagram, which displaces other forms of interaction among teens, puts the size of their friend group on public display, and subjects their physical appearance to the hard metrics of likes and comment counts—takes the worst parts of middle school and glossy women’s magazines and intensifies them.
与男孩相比，青春期通常会加剧女孩对其不断变化的身体的自我意识，并放大她们在社交网络中所处位置的不安全感。社交媒体——尤其是Instagram——取代了青少年之间的其他形式的互动，将他们的朋友圈的规模公开展示，并将他们的外貌纳入“点赞”和评论数的硬指标中——把中学和光鲜的女性杂志中最糟糕的部分放大。
One major question, though, is how much proof parents, regulators, and legislators need before intervening to protect vulnerable young people. If Americans do nothing until researchers can show beyond a reasonable doubt that Instagram and its owner, Facebook (which now calls itself Meta), are hurting teen girls, these platforms might never be held accountable and the harm could continue indefinitely. The preponderance of the evidence now available is disturbing enough to warrant action.
不过，一个重要的问题是，父母、监管机构和立法者需要多少证据才能干预保护脆弱的年轻人。如果美国人什么都不做，除非研究人员能够排除合理的怀疑，证明Instagram及其所有者Facebook（现在自称Meta）正在伤害少女，这些平台可能永远不会被追究责任，伤害可能无限期地持续下去。现在已有的大量证据足以让人不安，需要采取行动。
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