Skepticism is warranted here (as is the reminder that lack of evidence isn't definitive evidence against), but I think the specific takeaway is interesting:
social media use does not predict mental health problems in youth
Which could indicate any number of things:
- Social media use by itself doesn't predict mental health problems because kids without mental health problems also use social media.
- Social media use by itself doesn't predict mental health problems because there are benefits to certain kids that offset the equivalent problems they would have in its absence (e.g., the closeted gay kid in a rural town would be depressed without supportive online communities).
- Social media by itself doesn't predict mental health problems because the type of social media platform is more important than the binary of using/not using.
- Social media by itself doesn't predict mental health problems because it exacerbates problems without necessarily causing new ones outright.
- Social media by itself doesn't predict mental health problems because kids who don't use it are (sadly) more socially isolated and suffer as a result.
And maybe none of those are true! But I'm curious to see if there's something unexpected going on.
All good skeptical points, and unfortunately, there isn't a single good study on social media use and teens (that also doesn't completely ignore parents/environments).
So we'll never know for the time being! Unfortunate to those who wanted a definitive answer (or to confirm/deny past beliefs).
Why is skepticism warranted? It's not an extraordinary claim
by any stretch. The claim that social media does harm your mental health is the one that needs strong evidence supporting it. This reads like copium, you've set your priors all the way to "it's obviously true you can't convince me otherwise." Which then of course everything refuting it has to be literally air-tight, there's no way you hold that standard for other things.
I think the reasonable read for someone who's priors are set to believe it's true would be, "Interesting, I guess the effect size isn't as pronounced and obvious as I'd previously assumed."
> We uncovered significant factual errors, including inaccuracies in effect sizes, sample sizes, and study inclusion/exclusion criteria, which were used to conclude that the impact of social media use on mental health is indistinguishable from zero.
Yes, that's academic discourse for you. Why do you assume this critique is more authoritative than the paper? Would you dismiss the critique if it was the other direction?
Neither is more authoritative, but if we lay aside science to rely on our common sense, then we'll get to "we don't really know, but my guts say me that X is true", aren't we? If we look at the scientific consensus once again, we'll see that there is no scientific consensus. So the whole situation boils down to "we don't really know".
I agree! Which is why I'm so surprised that folks feel so strongly one way or another about it when there's been so little consensus. To me the jury is very much still out on this one.
(1) This study is specifically NOT making the claim "social media is definitely fine and good for kids," so really more like skepticism at anyone trying to draw a conclusion of "...and therefore we should let Instagram off the hook :)"
and
(2) There is a reasonable case to be made that a lot of adults say that social media makes them miserable, and therefore that probably extends to kids too, if not even more so.
Like, for example, stuff about teen suicides that are linked to various happenings on social media: it's true that those happen. It's also true that teen suicide rates are higher now than they were a few decades ago. It's not definitively true that they happen in higher numbers than they would've without social media (e.g., teen bullying just has a new outlet), but it's also fair to suspect that there might possibly maybe be a connection, even an indirect one.
No single study is definitive, including this one!
This is a very long way of saying "I already believe it's true from anecdotal evidence and so will viscously critique anything that doesn't agree with my position."
This paper can be wrong, but you're clearly not open to even the possibility that it's not.
The comment you're replying to is shorter than my original comment where I spitballed five different hypothetical scenarios to explain why the the paper's conclusion could be true?
I think there's a solid chance it's true. I also think it's interesting that there's a discrepancy between studies like this and public perception of social media (i.e., that it's bad for kids). So I enjoy trying to feel out that discrepancy and what might be causing it.
Which is why I said it reads like copium. It seems like you have an unwavering position that social media is bad for people's emotional states and mental health. And when presented some new evidence that challenges this belief your immediate response was to come up with a bunch of ways your core belief could still hold given the new evidence.
That to me isn't coming at it with an open mind or with curiosity. Is it not interesting that there's maybe a different larger effect that explains people's observations?
The idea that there's maybe a different larger effect is precisely what's interesting to me! Maybe I failed to communicate that effectively. (I'm feeling a little under the weather today, which never helps.) But I'll also point back to the final line of my first comment:
And maybe none of those are true! But I'm curious to see if there's something unexpected going on.
> This reads like copium, you've set your priors all the way to "it's obviously true you can't convince me otherwise." Which then of course everything refuting it has to be literally air-tight, there's no way you hold that standard for other things.
This phenomenon is part of the reason I'm skeptical of most any study, because I doubt the researchers don't have the same problem.
As a layperson who doesn't understand psychology but is interested in science and peace, I felt that Ferguson's article (this HN post) was much less directed at a person (as opposed to the person's work or theories put forward) and more professional, versus the linked blog post -- so I tend to believe the former.
Even a simple sentence like, "Ferguson did both of these things and his findings thus do not “undermine” our causal claims; he failed to accurately test our causal claims," comes across as scathing compared to the paper.
I argue it's relatively scathing, because Haidt's wording is much more dramatic, negative, and more aimed at a person than Ferguson's wording is. By "facts" I assume you mean claims, no?
I'm not sure how tone would be irrelevant; similar to what a sibling commenter said, tone conveys quite a bit of information. It seems unwise or "dumb" to ignore that, because we're still humans talking to each other, even if it's bits over a wire, and we're working together in good faith to learn and solve problems, aren't we?
Humans commonly engage in deceptive rhetoric, and tone is one of the methods they use. Often, the individual may not even be doing it with substantial intention.
Wordplay is another, and there is plenty of it in this HN thread.
That's an interesting point, doesn't this depend on the expertise of the audience? I'm not a psych expert, so if I'm unwilling to go back to school to interpret both sides "perfectly" then I'd be unsuccessful judging both sides on their factual/scientific merit. I only have other tools to choose from, ie. my personal experience, reading skills, being a (hopefully good) judge of character, etc.
The scientific argument originates from a human, and science has well demonstrated that human perception is untrustworthy (this thread offers plenty of evidence, but that tends to be categorized as "just X", so the ubiquitousness of the problem can never be realized...aka: there "is no evidence" that what I say is true).
Science uses a watered down but more ~practical form of epistemology, for example equating the knowledge of scientists with all of reality (There is no evidence [that I know of]). Some disciplines (military) use special language to circumvent this problem, at least sometimes.
There is what is true, and then there is the human experience of it, and scientists like most other humans mix the two up regularly. Doing otherwise is "pedantic", and is strongly culturally discouraged.
What they said on "If Books Could Kill" is an extremely thorough trouncing of Haidt's narrative and the methodologies of the researches he utilized in that book.
The summary is this:
The uptick is adequately explained by changes to mandatory reporting requirements for screening questions of mental health for teenagers from Obamacare and increased access to healthcare for those teenagers.
So mental illness rose steeply in girls and not so much in boys since 2012, and more in liberals than conservatives, since 2012 and this is adequately explained by increased reporting requirements?
Refutes is a strong word. This is an ongoing debate and it’s not clear to me Haidt is on the right side of it. The Studies Show did a great episode on this, but unfortunately it’s paywalled. However, the show notes are public and link to the relevant back and forth if folks want to make up their own minds. https://www.thestudiesshowpod.com/p/paid-only-episode-12-jon...
I'm not sure if anyone is ever going to "refute" much in this tussle
or that this can really be called a "debate", But there's an ugliness
to it and the casualty is science.
I'm not old enough to remember doctors appearing in TV adverts
claiming the health benefits of smoking. But I do remember those 1980s
green-washing campaigns from Shell and Esso (Exxon) showing animals
frolicking through the wonderful planet oil and gas were creating. I
also remember all the plastic recycling campaigns that turned out to
be rotten hoax.
Let's face it science gets used and tossed aside these days. Seeing
research papers that flat-out contradict each other every week is
tiring. All I want to say is that this utterly devalues science to see
such disingenuous conflict, and to know that at least one side is
making stuff up. It's going the same way as political debate and is an
embarrassment to everyone who participates and believes in science.
Obviously there is emotion on all sides. And there is surely a
humongous pot of money on one side. But I think where this is
heading... it's classic Sirkov style full-spectrum disinformation,
funding both sides and designed to undermine the very belief in
scientific research itself.
It benefits the anti-rationalists and nihilists who can say, "you know
what.. fuck science, I'm just going to assert what I like based on my
emotion alone!" That tends to favour the might-is-right crowd and the
shrill angry mob.
Meta analyses look across published studies and essentially do statistics on these. The claim of the paper is that the studies that show adverse effects are explainable by fluke, and presumably are outnumbered by studies that don't show adverse effects.
Anecdata isn't useful, but each of three children in our family experienced "externally observable" and self-reported improvements to their "mental health" each and every time they were banned from devices they used for "social media time", with immediate regressions/worsening once the bans were over.
You could say maybe they needed better friends, and I wouldn't argue that, but that's three very different teenagers with the same overall "response".
Again, anecdotal, but as a father of teenage children, there is 0% doubt in my mind that large amounts of social media consumption is detrimental to their development, wellbeing, and academic performance
> Note that Ferguson had to calculate effect sizes for depression and anxiety in order to determine the composite effect size for those studies that contained these outcomes, but he did not include these results in his paper. When requested to provide the effect sizes he calculated for depression and anxiety, Ferguson replied that he is unable to do so. Furthermore, Ferguson even declined to reveal which aspects of well-being he selected for his calculation of each composite effect size (see Part 2 for details).
So the author's meta review has a black box model which provides effect sizes for each study (in an attempt to even out studies which measure different aspects of mental health), and refuses to detail how it works. That alone makes the whole study suspect, and the above link details obvious calculation errors, too.
Maybe coming at this from the standpoint of psychological health is the wrong approach. It is understood that the product social media companies are selling is not the interaction of users -- it is the personal data those users create while interacting. The users are being farmed for their data. They are livestock. Our reasons for our even cursory protections of livestock are largely moral ones. We don't like the idea of animals living in poor conditions. I think we, similarly, don't like the idea of our children being milked for data. Regardless of provable harm.
“No evidence of X” is a more impressive claim when X is itself an extraordinary claim - but in this case, I believe “not X” to be the extraordinary claim.
Based on my own observations, and on my experience of being a child and of raising one, and on what other parents tell me, and on what other teens tell me in their own words, and on what we know about how addiction works and how teen brains work… I consider the burden of proof to be on those who think social media is not correlated with teen mental health problems - and there is no evidence for this.
Have there been studies on “time on phones” or “time on devices” rather than social media specifically? Be interested to know of anything solid. My gut says this is where the issue lies rather than with social media specifically, but I’d be interested in any evidence for / against.
While, as an academic, I actually don't see glaring flaws in the paper. (For context, the author previously wrote about videogames not increasing violence. "Not correlated" might be his general approach)
As a normal human though; when overwhelming daily evidence disagrees with scientific findings, usually its a flaw or VERY deep misunderstanding of the science.
And even if you could find a significant number of kids without phones, they're likely still interacting pretty closely with kids who have them. There's a theory that kids with phones and social media are missing key developmental stages that contribute to things like empathy, which would explain the increasing rates of narcissism we've been seeing. Kids without phones are subjected to to all the toxic second order effects. No way to escape it really.
I really don't see how it's not. I can easily track how my mood changes (for the worse) after I have fallen into a cycle of spending too much time on certain social media site. If you're even slightly self-aware you can do this.
Interesting how most comments are bending over backwards to argue against the findings and support the moral panic narrative (“social media is making kids commit suicide at dramatically higher rates”). It seems a majority of people really want this to be true. That’s what makes me most skeptical that it is.
I’m fully open to the idea that social media is uniquely harmful to humans. But the burden of proof should be on the side claiming unique harm, not the other way around.
I hate big tech and social network-effects monopolies as much as the next guy. But history would suggest those shouting “this time is different” tend to be wrong when it comes to what the kids are doing these days.
I called 100% BS on the last one (video games desensitise children to violence), "but this time it's different" ;)
Moral panics are usually baseless, but this doesn't fit the usual mould. This is rather coming from the other direction, where parents and teachers are observing children change for the worse in real time. They also observe how they get better when internet devices are taken away (usually as punishment for poor behaviour).
The only two demographics that are hard bent on denying these effects are sub-groups of childless young adults, and parents who don't parent ("I have work to do, here's an iPad").
I think it's super interesting that the "violent videos games" moral panic is basically non-existent as a mainstream narrative these days.
Yet, both time spent playing videos games per young male and school shootings have risen dramatically over the last two decades.
So you would think that particular moral panic would be at its peak, given how much moral panickers claim to care about "the data" (basically correlation = causation fallacies, but still).
Which basically suggests these are just memetic hysterias that run their course. Once all the eyeballs and ad dollars have been squeezed out of the narrative, the narrative dies. Nobody actually cares about looking too closely at the supposed "data" or whether said correlation is actually true. I'd bet a large sum of money this is where the smartphones/social media/etc. panics will end up as well.
In my country we screen people at age 12 and if your testscores are bad your dreams are over.
Walking around in a society were some people live in 3 million euro mansions and others in ghettos. Kids aren't stupid I'm amazed suicide rates aren't higher.
The Surgeon General's report [0] cited 3 studies showing 1) that limiting social media to 30 minutes per day among college students for 3 weeks significantly reduced loneliness and depression [1], 2) deactivating Facebook before the 2018 midterm elections increased subjective wellbeing and polarization,[2] and 3) that 10,904 14 year olds in the UK Millennium Cohort Study experienced an increase in depressive symptoms in association with greater daily social media use, with a stronger association for girls than boys (depressive symptoms in adolescents using social media for 3 to <5 h versus 1-3 hours daily were elevated 21% in boys and 26% in girls; with 5 or more hours of use versus 1-3 hours of use daily, depressive symptom scores were elevated 35% in boys and 50% in girls) [3].
Fully 57% of high school aged girls--(more than half!)--experienced feelings of persistent sadness or hopelessness in 2021, up from 36% in 2011 [4]. Over the same timeframe, average time spent using social media each day among teens doubled from about 1.5 hours to more than 3 hours [5].
I am not waiting for a randomized controlled study. There are serious harmful effects of the environment our kids are growing up in today, and part of that is a growth in social media. Let us not forget that Mark Zuckerberg, "personally and repeatedly thwarted initiatives meant to improve the well-being of teens on Facebook and Instagram...[overruling] Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri and President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg, who had asked Zuckerberg to do more to protect the more than 30 million teens who use Instagram in the United States." [6] Not enough evidence? In the words of Bob Dylan, "you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows."
Since the full text is only available behind a paywall it's difficult to make any substantive comment except that there sure is a lot of grant money available to study this topic. The lack of any conclusive or strong evidence given the multiplicity of the same studies over and over suggests if there is an effect it is weak at best. Also notable is that most studies pre-2019 on childrens mental health were fairly positive and most post 2019 negative. I can think of a lot of things that changed in 2019 but use of "social media" is not one of them.
Ok, now let's see the study that shows it is beneficial to teen mental health.
I quit it and my mental health improved. Many others in a controlled study found the same effect.
Alcott and colleagues (2020) randomly assigned 2743 adults to either deactivate their Facebook accounts for one month or not. This study also found that deactivation significantly improved subjective well-being and that “80% of the treatment group agreed that deactivation was good for them.” The treatment group was also more likely to report using Facebook less and having uninstalled the app from their phones post-experiment.
Finally, this strikes me as the same playbook that big tobacco used in the 90s. "Doubt is our product," Michaels quotes a cigarette executive as saying, "since it is the best means of competing with the 'body of fact' that exists in the minds of the general public.
Do teens even use social media? I am under the impression that they are all about what is effectively cable TV. That is what the hip-and-with it services provide, and what the boomer social media platforms are more and more clamouring to become.
Social media is for old people still trying to re-live what the internet was like 20 years ago. And, I expect, that is the tree you actually want to bark up. Does parental social media use impact their children negatively? That answer to that is probably yes.
Teens are using social media that adults usually use it less on average. Instagram and TikTok are the prominent examples. They will use less of "x" and facebook because for them is where old people hang out.
Instagram, being quite old at this point, still has some vestiges of social media to keep the older people who started using it decades ago happy, but it too is moving towards the cable TV model as much as it can.
You have an old mental view about social media that teens would disagree with you. They will do communicate and engage in trends on tiktok. They don't engage in text as much as we did.
Some teenagers trying to become the next TV star is not the same as them using social media. Social media is not defined by text, but it is defined by community. TikTok, and increasingly Instagram (and even, more and more, Facebook), has no real semblance of community. These services would rather show you a beautiful stranger that has no relevance to your life than foster a neighbourhood, just like cable TV always has. Social media is from a bygone area and, let's face it, is mostly dead at this point, only marginally propped up by some old people still trying to live in the past.
I understand how it can be confusing, though. Many services that were built to foster community originally, and given the social media moniker at that time, are transitioning (if not fully transitioned already) into being cable TV providers to try and remain relevant with the slow death of social media, so it can be easy to forget that times are a changing and still think of them as being social media even when they are no longer. Indeed, people tend to be quite susceptible to getting an idea in their head and then holding onto that idea forevermore, not looking again to see if anything has changed.
So, where is the equivalent of cancer-in-animals experiments for social media?
Also, if putative negative effects from social media exposure were as strong and unambiguous as lung cancer in smokers, we wouldn't be having this discussion.
> Also, if putative negative effects from social media exposure were as strong and unambiguous as lung cancer in smokers, we wouldn't be having this discussion.
This is not necessarily true. Lung cancer was rare before cigarettes. Research had already revealed cigarettes to cause lung cancer in the 1940s and 1950s. Even so, in 1960, only 1/3 of doctors believed that cigarettes caused cancer. This was largely due to the tobacco industry's denialist propaganda. Even as late as 1972, the tobacco industry was putting out propaganda that was having a noticeable effect on teens and young adults. So, even with the "strong and unambiguous" negative effects of cigarettes, it still took 25+ years for most of the US population to accept that cigarettes are bad.
That was the tail end of tobacco's supremacy, but look back to where it started. When explorers found it being cultivated and used medicinally in the New World, it soon became one of the largest cash crops here.
Tobacco was exported to the rest of the world, became a hot commodity for vast plantations, creating a huge labor market (which was filled with enslaved people), and built wealth for many Americans.
Tobacco shaped the Americas as we know them today, and our history would be completely different if it weren't for that industry. And bringing up lung cancer, and expanded diagnoses, and expanded detection, is miniscule in the scope of things, because everyone knew it was a psychoactive drug, everyone knew that smoke makes you cough and clogs everything with gunk, but it had been worth its weight in gold. (Not to mention its gradual adulteration and dilution into something unrecognizable from 500 years ago.)
There's another term of art: "social communication", which encompasses radio, television, and Internet modes such as email and instant message. So we can discuss 'social media' as a specific phenomenon, or we can discuss its niche in the longer history of social communications. It is a morally neutral thing for humans to communicate with one another, but, if the medium is the m[ae]ssage, then the mode of communication will shape how it's composed, sent, received and absorbed.
Meta analysis because scraping a bunch of studies about mental health is a robust way of understanding risk? This is really shameless and implies the writers have no connection with children who use social media.
it's painfuly obvious the opposite is true. either mental health problems is boxed in too narrow, or the title is misleading to what the actual findings are. for example ' following a methodology of xyz there is no direct scinetific evidence of abc'.
many people say their mental health improved a lot when quitting social media. less anxiety, self-image issues, lack of confidence etc.
also ots relatively obvious more social media time is less being mindful and attentive to ones surroundings, less time outside etc. absorbing and experiencing the real world.
many things untested in an experiment or research doesnt mean evidence is not there... it was just omitted due to a narrow scoped experiment trying to draw way to broad and general conclusions.
especially in social studies this has to stop. 'we polled 1k people and now draw a conclusion about a billion or more people'. no thanks.
The APA has lost it's credibility some time ago with it's political stances. It doesn't take a researcher to see a correlation between phone time and youth issues.
There is also a clear correlation between deaths from falling down stars and phone time. Perhaps we can infer that deaths have increased due to more people falling down stairs, and, from that, conclude that those who survive but bump their heads are more likely to encounter these mental health issues?
> The APA has lost it's credibility some time ago with it's political stances.
Ah, lost their credibility since 1960? Isn't there entire point of the APA "Council of Representatives" to issue policy statements on things like abortion, the rights of mentally ill, human trafficking and such?
I thought that was a big part of the entire purpose. What changed "some time ago"?
That sounds odd considering pretty clear statistics correlating teen girls suicide rates with the rise of Instagram. Can someone who understands the subject matter more than I do comment on this further?
Someone commented above, but Jonathan Haidt "the anxious generation" is a place to start for a deeper analysis on the issue. Here is part 1 of a 3 part series of posts of his. I can't speak to the correlations and study directly, but Haidt's work is probably what you're looking for. https://www.afterbabel.com/p/the-case-for-causality-part-1 (the commenter elsewhere linked part 3 which I believe directly refutes this meta analysis)
I mean, I think it also correlates with poor environmental and financial outlook on the future, more pressure to perform well in activities or academically, stricter rules around going outside and doing things on your own or friends without scrutiny, among other things.
> then it should be easy to author your own paper that proves whatever is "obviously true". Or maybe reality isn't so easy?
Yes, this is my point. It's very easy to publish papers which say anything, if you don't mind that the results are junk or fraudulent. This is why most science is un-replicable, and you should have low confidence in a randomly selected paper, especially if the results conflict with bayesian expectations.
It's actually very hard to perform and publish good science.
My own (anecdotal) experience tells me that increased social media use is directly proportional to increased bad feelings. Common sense tells me that increased bad feelings over time leads to bigger, worse bad feelings.
My experience agrees with you. At the very least, I had no idea how many of the people I grew up with were as stupid, shallow and bigoted as they are until I heard them announce their opinions on social media. I may not have hung out with many of them after high school, but at least I still sort of had some respect for them.
"The thing I have noticed is when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. There's something wrong with the way you are measuring it," - Jeff Bezos
I trust science completely, it's all we have. I don't trust the people doing the science.
In the same way that you can trust laws, but not most lawyers. Medicine, but not certain doctors. It's not the scientific method that's at fault, it's its abuse.
Not so sure about this; would need to read the whole paper. "No evidence" could just mean that causality could not be proved (admittedly very difficult to prove), which doesn't mean that there is indeed no causality. I'm not sure I'd trust this researcher any more than I'd trust any other single paper on the topic; and the preponderance of papers has shown there is a link though the details may be in dispute.
What is not in doubt is that there has been a sharp increase in teen mental health difficulties in recent years: look at this 30% increase from 2017 to 2021[0]. This also coincides with a significant increase in social media use among young people. Correlation is not causation, but there haven't been many other theories as to what might be driving this change.
Phone usage increase, sleep quality decrease, quality of life decrease for the worker class, increase in inequalities (gini coefficient increase) ... There is a lot of confounding factors here.
Plenty has already been written about how young people are caught in a Catch-22: being on social media sucks, but being off of social media has major social penalties. Given that this is already well known, this study seems intentionally, even maliciously, naive.
This is a really important point - we're stuck on social media, even if we hate. My career would suffer without it, and I like being able to support my family.
When you're that stuck with something, you kind of have to ignore the negative consequences. Does it matter how bad it is for my mental health? Or my kids mental health.
But this lets us go wild in our heads: "Maybe it's really bad, like tobacco bad! Or worse! Maybe we'll all be killed by apathy and a rouge AI trained on our social media feed!"
Yet you don't discuss the root cause of mental angst amongst today's children (of which I have three): rapacious capitalism. Our children know they're playing a game that was rigged for them to lose. But sure, blame social media. All social media did was hold up a mirror to reflect what we actually are.
Skepticism is warranted here (as is the reminder that lack of evidence isn't definitive evidence against), but I think the specific takeaway is interesting:
Which could indicate any number of things:- Social media use by itself doesn't predict mental health problems because kids without mental health problems also use social media.
- Social media use by itself doesn't predict mental health problems because there are benefits to certain kids that offset the equivalent problems they would have in its absence (e.g., the closeted gay kid in a rural town would be depressed without supportive online communities).
- Social media by itself doesn't predict mental health problems because the type of social media platform is more important than the binary of using/not using.
- Social media by itself doesn't predict mental health problems because it exacerbates problems without necessarily causing new ones outright.
- Social media by itself doesn't predict mental health problems because kids who don't use it are (sadly) more socially isolated and suffer as a result.
And maybe none of those are true! But I'm curious to see if there's something unexpected going on.
All good skeptical points, and unfortunately, there isn't a single good study on social media use and teens (that also doesn't completely ignore parents/environments).
So we'll never know for the time being! Unfortunate to those who wanted a definitive answer (or to confirm/deny past beliefs).
Why is skepticism warranted? It's not an extraordinary claim by any stretch. The claim that social media does harm your mental health is the one that needs strong evidence supporting it. This reads like copium, you've set your priors all the way to "it's obviously true you can't convince me otherwise." Which then of course everything refuting it has to be literally air-tight, there's no way you hold that standard for other things.
I think the reasonable read for someone who's priors are set to believe it's true would be, "Interesting, I guess the effect size isn't as pronounced and obvious as I'd previously assumed."
> We uncovered significant factual errors, including inaccuracies in effect sizes, sample sizes, and study inclusion/exclusion criteria, which were used to conclude that the impact of social media use on mental health is indistinguishable from zero.
https://www.afterbabel.com/p/fundamental-flaws-part-3
There were factual errors specific enough that the erroneous data could be used to support opposing conclusions?
Everything about this lit review (sorry, meta-analysis) gets weird in the conclusions. It's like reading anthro papers written before the 70s.
Yes, that's academic discourse for you. Why do you assume this critique is more authoritative than the paper? Would you dismiss the critique if it was the other direction?
Neither is more authoritative, but if we lay aside science to rely on our common sense, then we'll get to "we don't really know, but my guts say me that X is true", aren't we? If we look at the scientific consensus once again, we'll see that there is no scientific consensus. So the whole situation boils down to "we don't really know".
I agree! Which is why I'm so surprised that folks feel so strongly one way or another about it when there's been so little consensus. To me the jury is very much still out on this one.
Sounds like skepticism.
I think skepticism is warranted since
(1) This study is specifically NOT making the claim "social media is definitely fine and good for kids," so really more like skepticism at anyone trying to draw a conclusion of "...and therefore we should let Instagram off the hook :)"
and
(2) There is a reasonable case to be made that a lot of adults say that social media makes them miserable, and therefore that probably extends to kids too, if not even more so.
Like, for example, stuff about teen suicides that are linked to various happenings on social media: it's true that those happen. It's also true that teen suicide rates are higher now than they were a few decades ago. It's not definitively true that they happen in higher numbers than they would've without social media (e.g., teen bullying just has a new outlet), but it's also fair to suspect that there might possibly maybe be a connection, even an indirect one.
No single study is definitive, including this one!
This is a very long way of saying "I already believe it's true from anecdotal evidence and so will viscously critique anything that doesn't agree with my position."
This paper can be wrong, but you're clearly not open to even the possibility that it's not.
The comment you're replying to is shorter than my original comment where I spitballed five different hypothetical scenarios to explain why the the paper's conclusion could be true?
I think there's a solid chance it's true. I also think it's interesting that there's a discrepancy between studies like this and public perception of social media (i.e., that it's bad for kids). So I enjoy trying to feel out that discrepancy and what might be causing it.
Which is why I said it reads like copium. It seems like you have an unwavering position that social media is bad for people's emotional states and mental health. And when presented some new evidence that challenges this belief your immediate response was to come up with a bunch of ways your core belief could still hold given the new evidence.
That to me isn't coming at it with an open mind or with curiosity. Is it not interesting that there's maybe a different larger effect that explains people's observations?
The idea that there's maybe a different larger effect is precisely what's interesting to me! Maybe I failed to communicate that effectively. (I'm feeling a little under the weather today, which never helps.) But I'll also point back to the final line of my first comment:
>Which is why I said it reads like copium to me.
Fixed that for you. It reads like an open mind, or at the very least an attempt at one, to me. Keep on keeping on, OP.
> This...
See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_and_indirect_realism
> This reads like copium, you've set your priors all the way to "it's obviously true you can't convince me otherwise." Which then of course everything refuting it has to be literally air-tight, there's no way you hold that standard for other things.
This phenomenon is part of the reason I'm skeptical of most any study, because I doubt the researchers don't have the same problem.
Jonathan Haidt, who's been driving a lot of the work against social media for kids, directly refutes these findings in this post https://www.afterbabel.com/p/fundamental-flaws-part-3.
As a layperson who doesn't understand psychology but is interested in science and peace, I felt that Ferguson's article (this HN post) was much less directed at a person (as opposed to the person's work or theories put forward) and more professional, versus the linked blog post -- so I tend to believe the former.
Even a simple sentence like, "Ferguson did both of these things and his findings thus do not “undermine” our causal claims; he failed to accurately test our causal claims," comes across as scathing compared to the paper.
Why is this "scathing"? He's literally just positing simple facts, which may or may not be true.
This tendency of people nowadays to focus on tone and other irrelevant characteristics of an argument (as it is made) is dumb.
I argue it's relatively scathing, because Haidt's wording is much more dramatic, negative, and more aimed at a person than Ferguson's wording is. By "facts" I assume you mean claims, no?
I'm not sure how tone would be irrelevant; similar to what a sibling commenter said, tone conveys quite a bit of information. It seems unwise or "dumb" to ignore that, because we're still humans talking to each other, even if it's bits over a wire, and we're working together in good faith to learn and solve problems, aren't we?
Humans commonly engage in deceptive rhetoric, and tone is one of the methods they use. Often, the individual may not even be doing it with substantial intention.
Wordplay is another, and there is plenty of it in this HN thread.
But surely someone reading what is purportedly a scientific argument should be interested entirely in the scientific argument, don't you think?
Boy that Einstein fellow's paper sure had a gruff tone I'm sticking with Newton!
That's an interesting point, doesn't this depend on the expertise of the audience? I'm not a psych expert, so if I'm unwilling to go back to school to interpret both sides "perfectly" then I'd be unsuccessful judging both sides on their factual/scientific merit. I only have other tools to choose from, ie. my personal experience, reading skills, being a (hopefully good) judge of character, etc.
The scientific argument originates from a human, and science has well demonstrated that human perception is untrustworthy (this thread offers plenty of evidence, but that tends to be categorized as "just X", so the ubiquitousness of the problem can never be realized...aka: there "is no evidence" that what I say is true).
Science uses a watered down but more ~practical form of epistemology, for example equating the knowledge of scientists with all of reality (There is no evidence [that I know of]). Some disciplines (military) use special language to circumvent this problem, at least sometimes.
There is what is true, and then there is the human experience of it, and scientists like most other humans mix the two up regularly. Doing otherwise is "pedantic", and is strongly culturally discouraged.
The If Books Could Kill podcast did a good episode about this topic and Haidt's book in particular: <https://www.buzzsprout.com/2040953/episodes/15546366-the-anx...>
What they said on "If Books Could Kill" is an extremely thorough trouncing of Haidt's narrative and the methodologies of the researches he utilized in that book.
The summary is this:
The uptick is adequately explained by changes to mandatory reporting requirements for screening questions of mental health for teenagers from Obamacare and increased access to healthcare for those teenagers.
So mental illness rose steeply in girls and not so much in boys since 2012, and more in liberals than conservatives, since 2012 and this is adequately explained by increased reporting requirements?
I'd also ask a similar question about the stark increase in suicide rates, not just mental health.
IMO, there was entirely too much snark in there. It felt like the goal they set out on was to dunk on Haidt, rather to act as impartially as possible.
Refutes is a strong word. This is an ongoing debate and it’s not clear to me Haidt is on the right side of it. The Studies Show did a great episode on this, but unfortunately it’s paywalled. However, the show notes are public and link to the relevant back and forth if folks want to make up their own minds. https://www.thestudiesshowpod.com/p/paid-only-episode-12-jon...
Edit: And here’s a link to their earlier free episode recorded before this new meta analysis: https://www.thestudiesshowpod.com/p/episode-25-is-it-the-pho...
By refute I mean the paper cited. The meta-analysis methodology used in the Ferguson paper is flawed, one of After Babel's contributors goes into more detail here, https://shoresofacademia.substack.com/p/perils-of-flawed-met....
Informally: it would seem that of course social media exacerbates the spread of any social contagion such as bulimia, anorexia, 'alpha'-ness, etc...
Maybe it also helps to immunize people to those same contagions as well: that seems less obvious that would happen, to me at least...
I'm not sure if anyone is ever going to "refute" much in this tussle or that this can really be called a "debate", But there's an ugliness to it and the casualty is science.
I'm not old enough to remember doctors appearing in TV adverts claiming the health benefits of smoking. But I do remember those 1980s green-washing campaigns from Shell and Esso (Exxon) showing animals frolicking through the wonderful planet oil and gas were creating. I also remember all the plastic recycling campaigns that turned out to be rotten hoax.
Let's face it science gets used and tossed aside these days. Seeing research papers that flat-out contradict each other every week is tiring. All I want to say is that this utterly devalues science to see such disingenuous conflict, and to know that at least one side is making stuff up. It's going the same way as political debate and is an embarrassment to everyone who participates and believes in science.
Obviously there is emotion on all sides. And there is surely a humongous pot of money on one side. But I think where this is heading... it's classic Sirkov style full-spectrum disinformation, funding both sides and designed to undermine the very belief in scientific research itself.
It benefits the anti-rationalists and nihilists who can say, "you know what.. fuck science, I'm just going to assert what I like based on my emotion alone!" That tends to favour the might-is-right crowd and the shrill angry mob.
"I conducted a meta analysis of 46 studies and concluded that there is _no correlation with social media and teen mental health issues"
What about the studies that that _do_ show a correlation, of which there are more than one. Why were those discounted?
Meta analyses look across published studies and essentially do statistics on these. The claim of the paper is that the studies that show adverse effects are explainable by fluke, and presumably are outnumbered by studies that don't show adverse effects.
Anecdata isn't useful, but each of three children in our family experienced "externally observable" and self-reported improvements to their "mental health" each and every time they were banned from devices they used for "social media time", with immediate regressions/worsening once the bans were over.
You could say maybe they needed better friends, and I wouldn't argue that, but that's three very different teenagers with the same overall "response".
Again, anecdotal, but as a father of teenage children, there is 0% doubt in my mind that large amounts of social media consumption is detrimental to their development, wellbeing, and academic performance
Nothing says scientific method like "0% doubt in my mind the hypothesis is true."
Every parent already knows this. I wonder why they're trying to disprove it so badly?
Every parent also already knows that sugar causes hyperactivity.
Because big tech companies who own these social media platforms have exceptionally deep pockets?
Full title: There is no evidence that time spent on social media is correlated with adolescent mental health problems: Findings from a meta-analysis.
> Note that Ferguson had to calculate effect sizes for depression and anxiety in order to determine the composite effect size for those studies that contained these outcomes, but he did not include these results in his paper. When requested to provide the effect sizes he calculated for depression and anxiety, Ferguson replied that he is unable to do so. Furthermore, Ferguson even declined to reveal which aspects of well-being he selected for his calculation of each composite effect size (see Part 2 for details).
~ https://www.afterbabel.com/p/fundamental-flaws-part-3
So the author's meta review has a black box model which provides effect sizes for each study (in an attempt to even out studies which measure different aspects of mental health), and refuses to detail how it works. That alone makes the whole study suspect, and the above link details obvious calculation errors, too.
Given the propensity for moral panics, I'd bet there's a whole lot of nothing in this one too.
Maybe coming at this from the standpoint of psychological health is the wrong approach. It is understood that the product social media companies are selling is not the interaction of users -- it is the personal data those users create while interacting. The users are being farmed for their data. They are livestock. Our reasons for our even cursory protections of livestock are largely moral ones. We don't like the idea of animals living in poor conditions. I think we, similarly, don't like the idea of our children being milked for data. Regardless of provable harm.
“No evidence of X” is a more impressive claim when X is itself an extraordinary claim - but in this case, I believe “not X” to be the extraordinary claim.
Based on my own observations, and on my experience of being a child and of raising one, and on what other parents tell me, and on what other teens tell me in their own words, and on what we know about how addiction works and how teen brains work… I consider the burden of proof to be on those who think social media is not correlated with teen mental health problems - and there is no evidence for this.
Have there been studies on “time on phones” or “time on devices” rather than social media specifically? Be interested to know of anything solid. My gut says this is where the issue lies rather than with social media specifically, but I’d be interested in any evidence for / against.
While, as an academic, I actually don't see glaring flaws in the paper. (For context, the author previously wrote about videogames not increasing violence. "Not correlated" might be his general approach)
As a normal human though; when overwhelming daily evidence disagrees with scientific findings, usually its a flaw or VERY deep misunderstanding of the science.
Is a control group even possible in this day and age?
And even if you could find a significant number of kids without phones, they're likely still interacting pretty closely with kids who have them. There's a theory that kids with phones and social media are missing key developmental stages that contribute to things like empathy, which would explain the increasing rates of narcissism we've been seeing. Kids without phones are subjected to to all the toxic second order effects. No way to escape it really.
A cigarette company’s wet dream made real by social media companies.
And no physical products (no more marginal profits) nor pesky FDA approvals to go through either.
What a time to be alive! /s
I really don't see how it's not. I can easily track how my mood changes (for the worse) after I have fallen into a cycle of spending too much time on certain social media site. If you're even slightly self-aware you can do this.
Interesting how most comments are bending over backwards to argue against the findings and support the moral panic narrative (“social media is making kids commit suicide at dramatically higher rates”). It seems a majority of people really want this to be true. That’s what makes me most skeptical that it is.
I’m fully open to the idea that social media is uniquely harmful to humans. But the burden of proof should be on the side claiming unique harm, not the other way around.
I hate big tech and social network-effects monopolies as much as the next guy. But history would suggest those shouting “this time is different” tend to be wrong when it comes to what the kids are doing these days.
I called 100% BS on the last one (video games desensitise children to violence), "but this time it's different" ;)
Moral panics are usually baseless, but this doesn't fit the usual mould. This is rather coming from the other direction, where parents and teachers are observing children change for the worse in real time. They also observe how they get better when internet devices are taken away (usually as punishment for poor behaviour).
The only two demographics that are hard bent on denying these effects are sub-groups of childless young adults, and parents who don't parent ("I have work to do, here's an iPad").
I think it's super interesting that the "violent videos games" moral panic is basically non-existent as a mainstream narrative these days.
Yet, both time spent playing videos games per young male and school shootings have risen dramatically over the last two decades.
So you would think that particular moral panic would be at its peak, given how much moral panickers claim to care about "the data" (basically correlation = causation fallacies, but still).
Which basically suggests these are just memetic hysterias that run their course. Once all the eyeballs and ad dollars have been squeezed out of the narrative, the narrative dies. Nobody actually cares about looking too closely at the supposed "data" or whether said correlation is actually true. I'd bet a large sum of money this is where the smartphones/social media/etc. panics will end up as well.
There’s plenty of evidence in the real world
Do the authors disclose their funding sources?
In my country we screen people at age 12 and if your testscores are bad your dreams are over.
Walking around in a society were some people live in 3 million euro mansions and others in ghettos. Kids aren't stupid I'm amazed suicide rates aren't higher.
The Surgeon General's report [0] cited 3 studies showing 1) that limiting social media to 30 minutes per day among college students for 3 weeks significantly reduced loneliness and depression [1], 2) deactivating Facebook before the 2018 midterm elections increased subjective wellbeing and polarization,[2] and 3) that 10,904 14 year olds in the UK Millennium Cohort Study experienced an increase in depressive symptoms in association with greater daily social media use, with a stronger association for girls than boys (depressive symptoms in adolescents using social media for 3 to <5 h versus 1-3 hours daily were elevated 21% in boys and 26% in girls; with 5 or more hours of use versus 1-3 hours of use daily, depressive symptom scores were elevated 35% in boys and 50% in girls) [3].
Fully 57% of high school aged girls--(more than half!)--experienced feelings of persistent sadness or hopelessness in 2021, up from 36% in 2011 [4]. Over the same timeframe, average time spent using social media each day among teens doubled from about 1.5 hours to more than 3 hours [5].
I am not waiting for a randomized controlled study. There are serious harmful effects of the environment our kids are growing up in today, and part of that is a growth in social media. Let us not forget that Mark Zuckerberg, "personally and repeatedly thwarted initiatives meant to improve the well-being of teens on Facebook and Instagram...[overruling] Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri and President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg, who had asked Zuckerberg to do more to protect the more than 30 million teens who use Instagram in the United States." [6] Not enough evidence? In the words of Bob Dylan, "you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows."
Sources
0.https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/sg-youth-mental-heal...
1.https://guilfordjournals.com/doi/10.1521/jscp.2018.37.10.751
2.https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20190658
3. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5...
4. https://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/data/yrbs/pdf/YRBS_Data-Sum...
5. https://images.nature.com/lw1200/magazine-assets/d41586-023-...
6. https://www.cbsnews.com/sacramento/news/zuckerberg-rejected-...
Weirdly, many of the posts expressing skepticism about this paper's findings are being downvoted (someone's not happy)
'The Phrase "No Evidence" Is A Red Flag For Bad Science Communication'
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-phrase-no-evidence-is-a...
Since the full text is only available behind a paywall it's difficult to make any substantive comment except that there sure is a lot of grant money available to study this topic. The lack of any conclusive or strong evidence given the multiplicity of the same studies over and over suggests if there is an effect it is weak at best. Also notable is that most studies pre-2019 on childrens mental health were fairly positive and most post 2019 negative. I can think of a lot of things that changed in 2019 but use of "social media" is not one of them.
He posted a related paper on his website looks like. Not sure if it's the same one.
https://www.christopherjferguson.com/Social%20Media%20Experi...
Edit: the authors look different so probably just related
Ok, now let's see the study that shows it is beneficial to teen mental health.
I quit it and my mental health improved. Many others in a controlled study found the same effect.
Alcott and colleagues (2020) randomly assigned 2743 adults to either deactivate their Facebook accounts for one month or not. This study also found that deactivation significantly improved subjective well-being and that “80% of the treatment group agreed that deactivation was good for them.” The treatment group was also more likely to report using Facebook less and having uninstalled the app from their phones post-experiment.
Source: https://www.afterbabel.com/p/phone-based-childhood-cause-epi...
Finally, this strikes me as the same playbook that big tobacco used in the 90s. "Doubt is our product," Michaels quotes a cigarette executive as saying, "since it is the best means of competing with the 'body of fact' that exists in the minds of the general public.
Do teens even use social media? I am under the impression that they are all about what is effectively cable TV. That is what the hip-and-with it services provide, and what the boomer social media platforms are more and more clamouring to become.
Social media is for old people still trying to re-live what the internet was like 20 years ago. And, I expect, that is the tree you actually want to bark up. Does parental social media use impact their children negatively? That answer to that is probably yes.
Teens are using social media that adults usually use it less on average. Instagram and TikTok are the prominent examples. They will use less of "x" and facebook because for them is where old people hang out.
TikTok is not social media. It is cable TV.
Instagram, being quite old at this point, still has some vestiges of social media to keep the older people who started using it decades ago happy, but it too is moving towards the cable TV model as much as it can.
You have an old mental view about social media that teens would disagree with you. They will do communicate and engage in trends on tiktok. They don't engage in text as much as we did.
Some teenagers trying to become the next TV star is not the same as them using social media. Social media is not defined by text, but it is defined by community. TikTok, and increasingly Instagram (and even, more and more, Facebook), has no real semblance of community. These services would rather show you a beautiful stranger that has no relevance to your life than foster a neighbourhood, just like cable TV always has. Social media is from a bygone area and, let's face it, is mostly dead at this point, only marginally propped up by some old people still trying to live in the past.
I understand how it can be confusing, though. Many services that were built to foster community originally, and given the social media moniker at that time, are transitioning (if not fully transitioned already) into being cable TV providers to try and remain relevant with the slow death of social media, so it can be easy to forget that times are a changing and still think of them as being social media even when they are no longer. Indeed, people tend to be quite susceptible to getting an idea in their head and then holding onto that idea forevermore, not looking again to see if anything has changed.
am reminded of: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38909735
Memories of tobacco "researchers" claiming the science linking smoking to cancer is inconclusive.
So, where is the equivalent of cancer-in-animals experiments for social media?
Also, if putative negative effects from social media exposure were as strong and unambiguous as lung cancer in smokers, we wouldn't be having this discussion.
> Also, if putative negative effects from social media exposure were as strong and unambiguous as lung cancer in smokers, we wouldn't be having this discussion.
This is not necessarily true. Lung cancer was rare before cigarettes. Research had already revealed cigarettes to cause lung cancer in the 1940s and 1950s. Even so, in 1960, only 1/3 of doctors believed that cigarettes caused cancer. This was largely due to the tobacco industry's denialist propaganda. Even as late as 1972, the tobacco industry was putting out propaganda that was having a noticeable effect on teens and young adults. So, even with the "strong and unambiguous" negative effects of cigarettes, it still took 25+ years for most of the US population to accept that cigarettes are bad.
That was the tail end of tobacco's supremacy, but look back to where it started. When explorers found it being cultivated and used medicinally in the New World, it soon became one of the largest cash crops here.
Tobacco was exported to the rest of the world, became a hot commodity for vast plantations, creating a huge labor market (which was filled with enslaved people), and built wealth for many Americans.
Tobacco shaped the Americas as we know them today, and our history would be completely different if it weren't for that industry. And bringing up lung cancer, and expanded diagnoses, and expanded detection, is miniscule in the scope of things, because everyone knew it was a psychoactive drug, everyone knew that smoke makes you cough and clogs everything with gunk, but it had been worth its weight in gold. (Not to mention its gradual adulteration and dilution into something unrecognizable from 500 years ago.)
There's another term of art: "social communication", which encompasses radio, television, and Internet modes such as email and instant message. So we can discuss 'social media' as a specific phenomenon, or we can discuss its niche in the longer history of social communications. It is a morally neutral thing for humans to communicate with one another, but, if the medium is the m[ae]ssage, then the mode of communication will shape how it's composed, sent, received and absorbed.
We would not be having this discussion because the metaanalysis would have been unambiguous.
Whose bread I eat, his song I sing.
"They are eating the dogs. They are eating the cats." - Former US President
(Cue the downvotes!)
I almost, ALMOST thought we would go an entire week without a Haidt post. And I don’t know whether to be relieved or not.
Meta analysis because scraping a bunch of studies about mental health is a robust way of understanding risk? This is really shameless and implies the writers have no connection with children who use social media.
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"drugs r bad m'kay"
it's painfuly obvious the opposite is true. either mental health problems is boxed in too narrow, or the title is misleading to what the actual findings are. for example ' following a methodology of xyz there is no direct scinetific evidence of abc'.
many people say their mental health improved a lot when quitting social media. less anxiety, self-image issues, lack of confidence etc.
also ots relatively obvious more social media time is less being mindful and attentive to ones surroundings, less time outside etc. absorbing and experiencing the real world.
many things untested in an experiment or research doesnt mean evidence is not there... it was just omitted due to a narrow scoped experiment trying to draw way to broad and general conclusions.
especially in social studies this has to stop. 'we polled 1k people and now draw a conclusion about a billion or more people'. no thanks.
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The APA has lost it's credibility some time ago with it's political stances. It doesn't take a researcher to see a correlation between phone time and youth issues.
There is also a clear correlation between deaths from falling down stars and phone time. Perhaps we can infer that deaths have increased due to more people falling down stairs, and, from that, conclude that those who survive but bump their heads are more likely to encounter these mental health issues?
> The APA has lost it's credibility some time ago with it's political stances.
Ah, lost their credibility since 1960? Isn't there entire point of the APA "Council of Representatives" to issue policy statements on things like abortion, the rights of mentally ill, human trafficking and such?
I thought that was a big part of the entire purpose. What changed "some time ago"?
Maybe in the 70s when they stopped classifying homosexuality as a mental illness? (/s)
In all seriousness, this is a great listen: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/204/81-words
Interestingly, Skinner found that even pigeons can be superstitious. Just because you want to believe something doesn't mean it's true.
It takes a professional to determine whether harassing them about their electronics is the actual cause of the behaviors in question.
That sounds odd considering pretty clear statistics correlating teen girls suicide rates with the rise of Instagram. Can someone who understands the subject matter more than I do comment on this further?
Someone commented above, but Jonathan Haidt "the anxious generation" is a place to start for a deeper analysis on the issue. Here is part 1 of a 3 part series of posts of his. I can't speak to the correlations and study directly, but Haidt's work is probably what you're looking for. https://www.afterbabel.com/p/the-case-for-causality-part-1 (the commenter elsewhere linked part 3 which I believe directly refutes this meta analysis)
"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."
I have seen statistics but none that have clearly shown a link which is why the possible link is in dispute.
I mean, I think it also correlates with poor environmental and financial outlook on the future, more pressure to perform well in activities or academically, stricter rules around going outside and doing things on your own or friends without scrutiny, among other things.
Yes but then why would it impact girls far more than boys?
Different coping mechanism, boys will more often look for external causes.
I don't want to sound unscientific, but when a paper is directly in conflict with what is obviously true, it's OK to use common sense.
Hint: "obviously true" and "common sense" are two very strong signals of "unscientific".
If it's "obviously true", then it should be easy to author your own paper that proves whatever is "obviously true". Or maybe reality isn't so easy?
> then it should be easy to author your own paper that proves whatever is "obviously true". Or maybe reality isn't so easy?
Yes, this is my point. It's very easy to publish papers which say anything, if you don't mind that the results are junk or fraudulent. This is why most science is un-replicable, and you should have low confidence in a randomly selected paper, especially if the results conflict with bayesian expectations.
It's actually very hard to perform and publish good science.
My own (anecdotal) experience tells me that increased social media use is directly proportional to increased bad feelings. Common sense tells me that increased bad feelings over time leads to bigger, worse bad feelings.
My experience agrees with you. At the very least, I had no idea how many of the people I grew up with were as stupid, shallow and bigoted as they are until I heard them announce their opinions on social media. I may not have hung out with many of them after high school, but at least I still sort of had some respect for them.
"The thing I have noticed is when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. There's something wrong with the way you are measuring it," - Jeff Bezos
Very reasonable!
The scientific method is so easily abused, that it's only really valuable if the scientist is sincere.
In other words, the scientific method doesn't protect against deceit, it only helps against deceiving yourself, as a scientist.
That sounds an awful lot like not Trusting the Science.
I trust science completely, it's all we have. I don't trust the people doing the science.
In the same way that you can trust laws, but not most lawyers. Medicine, but not certain doctors. It's not the scientific method that's at fault, it's its abuse.
Not so sure about this; would need to read the whole paper. "No evidence" could just mean that causality could not be proved (admittedly very difficult to prove), which doesn't mean that there is indeed no causality. I'm not sure I'd trust this researcher any more than I'd trust any other single paper on the topic; and the preponderance of papers has shown there is a link though the details may be in dispute.
What is not in doubt is that there has been a sharp increase in teen mental health difficulties in recent years: look at this 30% increase from 2017 to 2021[0]. This also coincides with a significant increase in social media use among young people. Correlation is not causation, but there haven't been many other theories as to what might be driving this change.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/mental-health/mental-health...
I'd also want to know where the funding for this meta study came from.
https://libgen.li/file.php?md5=65ffe05c8aa64367b0e87965de1c2...
I don't see funding or conflict of interest mentioned, but the author has previous publications about videogames not causing increased violence.
Phone usage increase, sleep quality decrease, quality of life decrease for the worker class, increase in inequalities (gini coefficient increase) ... There is a lot of confounding factors here.
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Plenty has already been written about how young people are caught in a Catch-22: being on social media sucks, but being off of social media has major social penalties. Given that this is already well known, this study seems intentionally, even maliciously, naive.
This is a really important point - we're stuck on social media, even if we hate. My career would suffer without it, and I like being able to support my family.
When you're that stuck with something, you kind of have to ignore the negative consequences. Does it matter how bad it is for my mental health? Or my kids mental health.
But this lets us go wild in our heads: "Maybe it's really bad, like tobacco bad! Or worse! Maybe we'll all be killed by apathy and a rouge AI trained on our social media feed!"
Yet you don't discuss the root cause of mental angst amongst today's children (of which I have three): rapacious capitalism. Our children know they're playing a game that was rigged for them to lose. But sure, blame social media. All social media did was hold up a mirror to reflect what we actually are.