Abstract
Social media is implicated today in an array of mental health concerns. While worries around social media have become mainstream, little is known about the specific cognitive mechanisms underlying the correlations seen in these studies, or why we find it so hard to stop engaging with these platforms when things obviously begin to deteriorate for us. New advances in computational neuroscience are now perfectly poised to shed light on this matter. In this paper we approach these concerns around social media and mental health issues, including the troubling rise in Snapchat surgeries, depression and addiction, through the lens of the Active Inference Framework (AIF).
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Acknowledgments
Mark Miller carried out this work with the support of Horizon 2020 European Union ERC Advanced Grant XSPECT - DLV-692739.
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White, B., Miller, M. (2021). Filtered States: Active Inference, Social Media and Mental Health. In: Kamp, M., et al. Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases. ECML PKDD 2021. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1524. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93736-2_54
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