11 ms·

Study: Inflammation drives social media use

DoreenMichele 3y ago
"Misery loves company." At least, if it is due to inflammation, it seems.
b800h 3y ago
Depression is the probably the hidden variable here. Surprised it wasn't called out in this remarkable press release. The photo is an interesting choice. Role of inflammation in depression: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6658985/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6658985/ Depression and social media: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7364393/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7364393/
- FedorinoGore 3y ago
  I think it's not only depression but also general "discomfort" that comes often with increased inflammation. You feel bad - you turn to people around you for support/distraction. So it would be interesting to see "if people seek communication" online and offline. Offline would be harder to quantify though would also add this research direction: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24331897/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24331897/
  - b800h 3y ago
    Inflammation can be rather subtle. Someone ostensibly unaffected could have a load of biomarkers of inflammation, and it's associated with all sorts of odd and bad stuff. This is a strange study, perhaps the press release is just dodgy and the paper is easier to understand.
  - cpncrunch 3y ago
    Mental stress releases CRP, so I suspect inflammation isn't causing anything here, just a marker.
    - hgsgm 3y ago
      Or is it a proxy? Suppose X causes inflammation and social media use. Suppose you want to reduce social media use. You look at this study and think I should reduce inflammation, so I can reduce social media use? How do I do that? By removing causes of inflammation. The thing to be careful about is to avoid jumping to some medication or surgery that directly removes inflammation, and be sure to eliminate something that causes inflammation.
      - cpncrunch 3y ago
        I think we just need to ask: what are the most common causes of this type of inflammation? Probably depression, type 2 diabetes and heart disease. So, the options are: - inactive people use social media more, and the inactivity causes inflammation due to heart disease / diabetes - depression causes inflammation, and depressed people use social media more - social media causes depression, which causes inflammation
    - InSteady 3y ago
      >Mental stress releases CRP The body is full of these chicken-egg relationships. It really is a gigantic and bewildering system of positive and negative feedback loops (in terms of effect, not value judgements). Mental stress is one trigger, sure, but if you accept my interpretations below it is not much of a leap to see that CRP can also lead to significant increases in mental stress. I think it would be more accurate to say inflammation isn't the primary underlying cause but is rather an adaptive response gone awry. However, once triggered, inflammation (and it's downstream effects) can have a significant influence on one's subjective experience and behavior, by way of physiological alterations to brain chemistry and function. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6658985/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6658985/ >Increased inflammation is seen in the periphery in both depression and fatigue. This inflammation leads to increased permeability of the BBB,* allowing for easier entry of inflammatory molecules or immune cells into the CNS. If you happen to have a disruption/disorder of your microbiome that includes loosening of the tight junctions of your epithelium (aka intestinal permeability aka "leaky gut"), that means that cytotoxic byproducts of bacterial metabolism and your body's immune responses to their presence (eg Mast cell release of histamine, heparin, cytokines, chemokines, etc) can enter your bloodstream and then cross your BBB to get into your brain. I believe that inflammation plays a role in each of these three steps: loosening of the tight junctions in epithelium, release of chemical mediators by mast cells (eg in response to detection of cytokines, rather than strictly in the presence of allergens and toxins), and increasing the permeability of the blood brain barrier. The chemokines are particularly concerning: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11786310/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11786310/ >Chemokines in the brain have been recognised as essential elements in neurodegenerative diseases and related neuroinflammation. Fun times!
  - gcr 3y ago
    is there any research linking this with alcoholism / smoking / other shortsighted comforts?
- swayvil 3y ago
  Add "desire for anonymity" to that list of symptoms. A recent survey (1) found that "because I'm afraid of crazy people tracking me down" to be in the top 3 reasons for preferring anonymity on social media. Consider that. A whole population afraid of each other. That's some kind of epidemic. 1) https://lemm.ee/post/4655237 https://lemm.ee/post/4655237
  - Martinussen 3y ago
    Seems like "a desire to be publicly accessible at all times" is the outlier as far as history goes, surely. Social media use isn't exactly a known positive indicator :b.
    - swayvil 3y ago
      >"desire to be publicly accessible at all times" Is this a variety of FOMO? (Fear of missing out). I hear that's a big thing now. And of course there's the employee version of that too. Where boss can talk to you 24-7. I don't know what the name for that is. It's a kind of massive force for unsolitude.
      - lazide 3y ago
        Eh kinda. FOMO is more about things like ‘I didn’t get rich like everyone else did.’. The boss thing is as often about trying to avoid negative consequences/staying in control of an interaction. If you’re always available to your boss, it’s harder for them to blame you for something not working (because you weren’t there to walk them through it at 2am). If you respond to a negative social media post before everyone else reads it, you have a better chance in getting ahead of a shitstorm, etc.
    - m1sta_ 3y ago
      expression without accountability
      - swayvil 3y ago
        A big manifestation of that is quoting. You see a lot of that in some scenes. Whole discussions where nobody issues a personal opinion. Only copy-pasting authoritative utterances. And if you ask for an interpretation of one of those quotes they get evasive.
- taude 3y ago
  I was going to suggest, is it the person's workout that's causing inflammation? Or the need to go tell everyone about it on social media. I'm not sure this study accounted for this.
- soudiere 3y ago
  The researcher looked at depression in their 2022 paper, it was not statistically significant, agreed it's odd they didn't mention. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8864418/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8864418/
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belltaco 3y ago
I thought being depressed when sick was a mechanism to keep humans or animals indoors so that they don't spread the disease.
- djangelic 3y ago
  Isn’t that where social media is consumed? It makes sense that this isolation drives us to connect, and in ways that are not as helpful as real meaningful connections.
mmastrac 3y ago
Elon Musk plus the terribleness of Facebook helped me cut my social media addiction. I wouldn't say I'm happier with or without it, but I don't think it was a positive other than the handful of friends I made there that I wouldn't have made otherwise.
- nkingsy 3y ago
  And we found the mandatory “I’m not on social media” comment on the social media platform. There’s at least one on every post on the subject. Literal definition: websites and applications that enable users to create and share content or to participate in social networking.
  - kzrdude 3y ago
    Platforms like Twitter and Facebook put the network in the center - it's about relationships between accounts (Friend/Follower). HN doesn't do that, so HN is a forum which is a slightly different genre of medium, isn't it? At least a kind that I'm much more in favour of.
    - nkingsy 3y ago
      I get value from it, but it still gives me the social high from interacting, plus a big multiplier added with voting.
    - hk__2 3y ago
      > Platforms like Twitter and Facebook put the network in the center - it's about relationships between accounts (Friend/Follower) At the beginning yes, but nowadays that’s less the case. Twitter’s "For You" is the default view and it contains popular content that have little to do with who you’re following. TikTok/Instagram behave in the same way, showing you a mix of stuff from people you follow (but not everything) and from other sources. I’m not been on Facebook recently, but I believe they do the same.
  - mmastrac 3y ago
    Your snarky reply is not appreciated. I specifically said "cut my social media addiction" not "cut out social media". While Hacker News is a great time sink full of wonderful people, I don't spend nearly as much time here as I do on other platforms (and often go long swaths of time without commenting).
zzzeek 3y ago
am I wrong or is this a really huge leap from correlation to causation? why isn't it that people who spend all day on social media get less sunlight and exercise therefore have more inflammation? OK well they said this, sure: > “For some people the relationship between social media use and inflammation may be a positive feedback loop, a cycle where more social media use leads to more inflammation, and more inflammation then leads to more social media use,” he says.
- hgsgm 3y ago
  That quote is commentary, not science. You should ignore that from the paper/scientist, as it doesn't belong in research. It belong in the non scientific comment forums.
jsemrau 3y ago
Social Media creates the illusion of social connectivity. While I might tweet a reply to Garry Tan and he might like it. It doesn't mean we are best buddies.
- izzydata 3y ago
  I've been mentioning how weird parasocial relationships like this are to people for at least 10 years now and everyone thinks I'm being ridiculous. I still don't think anybody should be caring about social interactions when it is on a scale of 1 to 1 million. Where it is 1 person interacting with a million people. If you can't respond to me as an individual on a 1 to 1 scale then I simply do not care about your personal life.
  - vorpalhex 3y ago
    You are not ridiculous and yes, the problem is gravely concerning. I would recommend, instead of saying what people should do, is investigate why this parasocial relationship failure mode exists. Why do people not only end up in a losing proposition, but actively seek it out? (I am quite sure there is no nice well contained single answer)
    - izzydata 3y ago
      Who knows. Perhaps a lot of us are lacking a sense of community and instinctively seek it out in the wrong places. Still, I'm not going to care about who Taylor Swift's new boyfriend is unless she cares about the same for me. I'd rather be depressed and alone. Understandably not everyone is going to be so masochistic about it and will fill that gap however they can.
  - tenebrisalietum 3y ago
    This was even weirder when it was common to have no capability to interact with the parasocial target at all--in the pre-Internet world--through TV, music, or movies. Before then tabloids like Enquirer Magazine gave people the sordid details of celebrities personal lives, which I always found very strange to care about.
hospitalJail 3y ago
My initial response was: Duh Then I read this: "“It seems that inflammation not only increases social media use, but our results show preliminary evidence that it’s also associated with using social media to specifically interact with other users, like direct messaging and posting to people’s pages. Interestingly, inflammation did not lead people to use social media for other purposes—for example, entertainment purposes like watching funny videos,” This is a really bold claim. What are the odds this is never replicated? I'd love to have a science gambling website, heck, I wonder if those odds could be added to confidence of a study.
- haswell 3y ago
  I’m not sure that this is so bold or even surprising. I suspect the finding is because people are seeking actual social connection, not just diversion. The body knows what’s going on even if we’re not consciously aware of it, and a response like: “seek out other humans” when the body is inflamed makes sense from an evolutionary perspective in a social species. Obviously this needs further study, but it makes some kind of logical sense at least.
  - RugnirViking 3y ago
    that doesn't really tie in with my experience at least. Most people I know when hurting retreat into themselves. It's much more common to find someone sitting at home eating ice cream or whatever when under significant stress than at a bar
- OJFord 3y ago
  My reaction's still 'duh' to be honest - you wouldn't necessarily want to do much more of things like watching videos than you were doing already, but the social interaction is replacing something. At least assuming it's serious enough that you're stuck at home recovering - I'm realising as I write that my reading of it was quite biased by the image. Otherwise I would not think on reading 'inflammation' that it was particularly serious. If they studied people with slightly swollen ankle or whatever, but walking about, at work, etc. and found a significant increase in their interest in socialising (social media just being the most easily measured form) that is pretty interesting.
golemotron 3y ago
> If inflammation does indeed increase social affiliative motivation, it should also lead people to turn to social media, under such circumstances, as a means to fulfill social needs. It would be interesting to see if introverts have lower inflammation in general. Sociality could be a disease condition.
bearjaws 3y ago
Watch twitch for 20 minutes, any streamer in the top 20 is a master of either making drama or performing commentary on drama.
l33t7332273 3y ago
I have never seen more talk about “inflammation” in any other context, physical or virtual, than I have on HN. To me, talking about health problems from “inflammation” sounded at first like a buzzword used to sell snake oil(much like “toxins”), but there seem to be real studies by real scientists discussing it. Am I in a bubble, or why is it such a rarely mentioned topic elsewhere?
- lukas099 3y ago
  The immune system is pretty important and powerful.
- aliasxneo 3y ago
  I had to learn a ton about it in the last year for my health-related issues. It's possible that it's just new information that's still propagating (and for some reason happens to concentrate on HN). For reference, my recommendations came from my therapist when battling with depression (i.e. I wasn't really influenced by anything on HN).
- ssddanbrown 3y ago
  Inflammation is a key factor of many medical conditions, many which can be identified by a "-itis" suffix. Might just not be in your bubble if you haven't crossed paths with these kinds of conditions. Personally, I had not come across much inflammation talk until I had uveitis, which led to an identification of my ankylosing spondylitis (a form of spinal arthritis) which has also brings me enthesitis. All of these are inflammation based.
- hgsgm 3y ago
  It's like "stress". It's real, but extremely diffuse.
tqi 3y ago
> The current paper used an existing data set of middle-aged adults for the first study, who completed survey questionnaires and provided blood samples the researchers analyzed for CRP. The authors collected their own data for the second and third studies using similar methods for college students. Was the hypothesis pre-registered, or did they just check the survey results against a bunch of markers to see what popped? While the conclusion certainly seems plausible, it's hard to imagine that something as diffuse and hard to measure as social media use could be reliably correlated to a specific biomarker...
pkdpic 3y ago
Are we in agreement that social media is bad for us or not? I'm a little confused as to why anyone is still using it, why people are still defending it, why we're all still talking about it and why I'm getting more (not less) random texts from friends / colleagues pressuring me to get back on to big social platforms. What are the motivations for people to be daily activate users these days? Honestly just curious.
- hk__2 3y ago
  > What are the motivations for people to be daily activate users these days? Honestly just curious. Why do you go on HN? That may be the beginning of a response since HN is a social platform.
  - BoxFour 3y ago
    An excellent query, as it neatly encapsulates the only response to the original post. People tend to view every other social media platform negatively except for the one they personally use, and they're prepared to staunchly defend their choice no matter what.
    - Robotbeat 3y ago
      On the contrary, I’m always hating on Twitter, which is my primary social platform. I’m just addicted to it.
      - catchnear4321 3y ago
        one of the biggest reasons it persists, even after all of the chaos. a fair amount of the customers would have to go to rehab to successfully leave. that isn’t judgement. just facts.
    - pkdpic 3y ago
      I have honestly never met anyone who would defend hacker news or reddit as a good use of their time or pressure their peers to use the platforms more. Are we saying that all social media platforms are the same? Are there teams working on the hacker news platform trying to tweak the algorithms to drive addictive user engagement? Is the sorting algorithm not a matter of public record? Correction to my original comment, I am asking about Instagram / Facebook / Twitter. I know why I (maybe we) go on HN and its because Im bored and weak and Ive never felt manipulated by it or addicted to it or wanted to be on it for more than 15 minutes. I have chores I should be doing.
jeezfrk 3y ago
someone failed to mention this is from the onion. like... the research team and everyone.
lusus_naturae 3y ago
Social science, psych, biomed and pharma research should pass some kind repeatability threshold before it gets to make headlines; see Gino at Harvard for example.
- readthenotes1 3y ago
  Sadly, a lot of commenters seems to take the attached article as fact, as if the replicability crisis never happened
explosion-s 3y ago
Wouldn't you use social media more if you were sick/hurt somehow because you're being less active/feeling worse?
kens 3y ago
I was pretty skeptical from the original article, since it totally seemed like correlation. But the study looked at directionality, that inflammation one week results in more social media the next week. The paper also describes other research that producing inflammation increases social interaction, so this study isn't just a random thing. My conclusion is that this study is legit. The one important thing that I didn't get from the summary is the size of the effect. Here's a link to the paper (partially paywalled): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0889159123001289 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S08891...
- cheald 3y ago
  I'll bet that if you looked at calorie intake, you'd find a similar pattern. I'd be willing to bet that it's not because the person is eating more to heal their body (at least in the first world, where we have to work to avoid caloric surplus, and where much of our diet is inflammatory), but because the brain seeks dopamine when you're under stress or uncomfortable. To put it another way: it's not that inflammation causes social media use, but that stress causes pleasure cravings.
tosser0001 3y ago
Could someone explain what is meant by "inflammation" in this context? What exactly is inflamed and is it manifested externally in some visible way? I feel like I constantly hear about inflammation but it's never clear to me what is physically happening.
- deleted 3y ago
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- thenerdhead 3y ago
  It's in the first paragraph: > Across three studies involving more than 1,800 participants, the findings — published in the journal Brain, Behavior and Immunity — indicate that increased levels of C-reactive protein (CRP), which the liver makes in response to inflammation in the body, can promote social media use among middle-aged adults and college students. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-reactive_protein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-reactive_protein
- arroz 3y ago
  I think it means getting people mad / to rage
- creamyhorror 3y ago
  It's because they're not only talking about everyday visible inflammation. My understanding is that "inflammation" is a phenomenon in which cells release chemicals telling other cells that there's an injury, pathogens, or toxins nearby. These chemicals cause other cells to release further chemicals (a "signalling cascade"), leading to all sorts of effects ranging from the familiar swelling and redness and summoning of immune cells, all the way to allergic reactions, neural effects, long-term health outcomes, and (apparently) increased social media use. The effects no doubt differ based on the types and levels of inflammation-signalling compounds being released (of which there are many). The overall level of inflammation is commonly determined by measuring the level of C-reactive protein in blood (it rises as a result of inflammation). It's commonly measured in blood tests. There's a natural role for inflammation in the body, but it's also possible to have too much inflammation and experience negative outcomes as a result. A lot of recent research has been about the effects of inflammation signalling throughout the body, and much of the interest in antioxidants is because they may serve to reduce oxidative stress (which damages cells and also comes about as a result of inflammation). "Chronic low-grade inflammatory process, on the other hand, plays a central role in the pathogenesis of a number of chronic diseases." - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4736408/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4736408/
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harles 3y ago
> increased levels of C-reactive protein (CRP), which the liver makes in response to inflammation in the body, can promote social media use among middle-aged adults and college students. Sounds like they found correlation and called it causation. I’m keeping an open mind, but I find this article dubious. No link to any of the studies, no alternative explanations (I would guess any negative health markers are associated with higher tech use), and the title is a little too strong “Inflammation linked to social media use” would be easier to swallow, or even “contributes to”. I find press releases like this both not useful and overall bad for the scientific community. It’s unfortunate because this may genuinely be an interesting line of research.
- nonameiguess 3y ago
  It'd be nice if they included a link or even the title of the paper being referenced here to see the methods. It's hard for me to imagine how causation could even be investigated for this. You'd need to randomly induce inflammation on purpose to study participants, which seems like something you couldn't get through an IRB, nor would anybody consent to it if you could. Otherwise, sure, you're telling me all of the factors associated with inflammation, i.e. illness, disability, injury, sedentary life, are also associated with people spending more time on social media than they might otherwise, doesn't seem like a revelation.
  - ceroxylon 3y ago
    Found the paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0889159123001289 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S08891...
    - iak8god 3y ago
      Most people won't be able to access the paper via that link. I was able to get to it by going to Google Scholar and searching "Brain, Behavior and Immunity" david lee. The first result was a sciencedirect link that did allow me to read the whole thing.
greenhearth 3y ago
Inflammation may also come from physical isolation. There have been studies that lack of physical contact promotes a sort of "hunger" that has to be satisfied or else becomes destructive. Socio-physical contact rebalances some chemicals that satiate it. I wonder if this yearning causes an immune response. In case of social media, if this is what happens, the feedback loop is extremely obvious: the offer of some social contact while operating in actual complete physical isolation. This is a sort of a closed circuit, a thing that creates the need for itself.
lifeisstillgood 3y ago
There is an old english expression "to vent one's spleen" - to rant angrily on social media (or write letters to the editor of The Times, one's MP etc) Maybe an inflamed spleen is the problem after all :-)
riazrizvi 3y ago
Sure, elevated inflammatory cytokines are consistently shown in imaging studies to reduce brain activity in motivation areas, and drive it in anxiety related areas [1]. So it makes sense to me that we would seek the lower effort emotional rewards that social media platforms can provide. What I'm surprised by here is that they don't find it's then used for entertainment value, but rather for social engagement. Which would indicate it drives a need to seek particular levels of oxytocin and vasopressin specifically: > it's associated with social media to specifically interact with other users, like direct messaging and posting to people’s pages. Interestingly, inflammation did not lead people to use social media for other purposes—for example, entertainment purposes like watching funny video [1] 2018, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5997866/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5997866/
- hinkley 3y ago
  There's definitely a straightforward enough evolutionary advantage to being more sedentary (demotivated) when recovering from an injury or an illness. The problem is we're getting inflammation without earning it the old fashioned way: misadventure.
orthecreedence 3y ago
[flagged]
kypro 3y ago
Hmmm... CRP correlates to all kinds of things like lower levels of Vit D, less exercise, illness, etc... If people are going out less, say because it's winter and they've been feeling unwell then we should expect CRP levels to be higher. We should probably also expect social media use while people are at home is probably going to be higher than when they're outside in the sun. The idea that an inflammatory marker would actually drive people to seek out social media seems highly suspect to me. Do people with cancer develop an insatiable urge to use social media?
- captainbland 3y ago
  If it is true I think it would arise from a bit more of a transitive relationship but with more straightforward leaps in logic. Sick people are tired, tired people want to partake in sedentary activities more than they want to take part in highly physical activities relative to the rest of the population, social media is a highly popular sedentary activity among the studied cohort of students.
nialv7 3y ago
Why doesn't it link to the paper? Is this study even published?
tomohawk 3y ago
Why wouldn't it be the other way around? I know people who reduced inflammation by staying off social media and away from news media. These things tend to induce stress, which can cause inflammation.
remote_phone 3y ago
I’m 100% sure this is one of those “joke” papers that show how bad pest-reviewed papers and journals are these days.
baryphonic 3y ago
Some personal anecdata: I have a genetic auto-immune condition, and my current treatment requires an injection every eight weeks. If untreated, the symptoms include inflammation of my body, especially sinuses, hands & fingers, feet & toes, elbows & knees. After taking my injection, the inflammation subsides. About a year after starting treatment, I noticed that during the final week of that eight-week cycle and continuing for a few days after treatment, my time on Twitter was much higher than during the other 6.5-ish weeks. I figured it was something psychological, and was able to get my doctor to increase the frequency of doses, which curbed my Twitter visits even more. Recently, I had a bout where due to insurance nonsense, I was delayed in getting my injection. I was heavily on Twitter, not as a result of conscious choice, but just because I felt like it. I took my shot a couple weeks ago, and have barely logged into Twitter over the last week and a half. Correlation does not imply causation, but using my own anecdata, I can't rule out this study and in fact have some personal evidence to confirm it. I find it interesting that someone attempted to test a hypothesis that I had informally stated a few years ago.
theptip 3y ago
Simple hypothesis: I use my phone more when I am laid up on the sofa with an ankle sprain.
eshack94 3y ago
"An association with" does not indicate that a factor necessarily "drives" the outcome. It might just be associated with it but not caused by it. What a terrible PR release written by a non-scientist ("News Content Manager") for clicks and hype and zero critical thinking. The worst part is, they didn't even include a link to the full study in the press release.

"Misery loves company." At least, if it is due to inflammation, it seems.

Depression is the probably the hidden variable here. Surprised it wasn't called out in this remarkable press release. The photo is an interesting choice. Role of inflammation in depression: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6658985/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6658985/ Depression and social media: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7364393/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7364393/

FedorinoGore 3y ago
I think it's not only depression but also general "discomfort" that comes often with increased inflammation. You feel bad - you turn to people around you for support/distraction. So it would be interesting to see "if people seek communication" online and offline. Offline would be harder to quantify though would also add this research direction: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24331897/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24331897/
- b800h 3y ago
  Inflammation can be rather subtle. Someone ostensibly unaffected could have a load of biomarkers of inflammation, and it's associated with all sorts of odd and bad stuff. This is a strange study, perhaps the press release is just dodgy and the paper is easier to understand.
- cpncrunch 3y ago
  Mental stress releases CRP, so I suspect inflammation isn't causing anything here, just a marker.
  - hgsgm 3y ago
    Or is it a proxy? Suppose X causes inflammation and social media use. Suppose you want to reduce social media use. You look at this study and think I should reduce inflammation, so I can reduce social media use? How do I do that? By removing causes of inflammation. The thing to be careful about is to avoid jumping to some medication or surgery that directly removes inflammation, and be sure to eliminate something that causes inflammation.
    - cpncrunch 3y ago
      I think we just need to ask: what are the most common causes of this type of inflammation? Probably depression, type 2 diabetes and heart disease. So, the options are: - inactive people use social media more, and the inactivity causes inflammation due to heart disease / diabetes - depression causes inflammation, and depressed people use social media more - social media causes depression, which causes inflammation
  - InSteady 3y ago
    >Mental stress releases CRP The body is full of these chicken-egg relationships. It really is a gigantic and bewildering system of positive and negative feedback loops (in terms of effect, not value judgements). Mental stress is one trigger, sure, but if you accept my interpretations below it is not much of a leap to see that CRP can also lead to significant increases in mental stress. I think it would be more accurate to say inflammation isn't the primary underlying cause but is rather an adaptive response gone awry. However, once triggered, inflammation (and it's downstream effects) can have a significant influence on one's subjective experience and behavior, by way of physiological alterations to brain chemistry and function. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6658985/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6658985/ >Increased inflammation is seen in the periphery in both depression and fatigue. This inflammation leads to increased permeability of the BBB,* allowing for easier entry of inflammatory molecules or immune cells into the CNS. If you happen to have a disruption/disorder of your microbiome that includes loosening of the tight junctions of your epithelium (aka intestinal permeability aka "leaky gut"), that means that cytotoxic byproducts of bacterial metabolism and your body's immune responses to their presence (eg Mast cell release of histamine, heparin, cytokines, chemokines, etc) can enter your bloodstream and then cross your BBB to get into your brain. I believe that inflammation plays a role in each of these three steps: loosening of the tight junctions in epithelium, release of chemical mediators by mast cells (eg in response to detection of cytokines, rather than strictly in the presence of allergens and toxins), and increasing the permeability of the blood brain barrier. The chemokines are particularly concerning: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11786310/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11786310/ >Chemokines in the brain have been recognised as essential elements in neurodegenerative diseases and related neuroinflammation. Fun times!
- gcr 3y ago
  is there any research linking this with alcoholism / smoking / other shortsighted comforts?
swayvil 3y ago
Add "desire for anonymity" to that list of symptoms. A recent survey (1) found that "because I'm afraid of crazy people tracking me down" to be in the top 3 reasons for preferring anonymity on social media. Consider that. A whole population afraid of each other. That's some kind of epidemic. 1) https://lemm.ee/post/4655237 https://lemm.ee/post/4655237
- Martinussen 3y ago
  Seems like "a desire to be publicly accessible at all times" is the outlier as far as history goes, surely. Social media use isn't exactly a known positive indicator :b.
  - swayvil 3y ago
    >"desire to be publicly accessible at all times" Is this a variety of FOMO? (Fear of missing out). I hear that's a big thing now. And of course there's the employee version of that too. Where boss can talk to you 24-7. I don't know what the name for that is. It's a kind of massive force for unsolitude.
    - lazide 3y ago
      Eh kinda. FOMO is more about things like ‘I didn’t get rich like everyone else did.’. The boss thing is as often about trying to avoid negative consequences/staying in control of an interaction. If you’re always available to your boss, it’s harder for them to blame you for something not working (because you weren’t there to walk them through it at 2am). If you respond to a negative social media post before everyone else reads it, you have a better chance in getting ahead of a shitstorm, etc.
  - m1sta_ 3y ago
    expression without accountability
    - swayvil 3y ago
      A big manifestation of that is quoting. You see a lot of that in some scenes. Whole discussions where nobody issues a personal opinion. Only copy-pasting authoritative utterances. And if you ask for an interpretation of one of those quotes they get evasive.
taude 3y ago
I was going to suggest, is it the person's workout that's causing inflammation? Or the need to go tell everyone about it on social media. I'm not sure this study accounted for this.
soudiere 3y ago
The researcher looked at depression in their 2022 paper, it was not statistically significant, agreed it's odd they didn't mention. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8864418/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8864418/

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belltaco 3y ago

I thought being depressed when sick was a mechanism to keep humans or animals indoors so that they don't spread the disease.

djangelic 3y ago
Isn’t that where social media is consumed? It makes sense that this isolation drives us to connect, and in ways that are not as helpful as real meaningful connections.

mmastrac 3y ago

Elon Musk plus the terribleness of Facebook helped me cut my social media addiction. I wouldn't say I'm happier with or without it, but I don't think it was a positive other than the handful of friends I made there that I wouldn't have made otherwise.

nkingsy 3y ago
And we found the mandatory “I’m not on social media” comment on the social media platform. There’s at least one on every post on the subject. Literal definition: websites and applications that enable users to create and share content or to participate in social networking.
- kzrdude 3y ago
  Platforms like Twitter and Facebook put the network in the center - it's about relationships between accounts (Friend/Follower). HN doesn't do that, so HN is a forum which is a slightly different genre of medium, isn't it? At least a kind that I'm much more in favour of.
  - nkingsy 3y ago
    I get value from it, but it still gives me the social high from interacting, plus a big multiplier added with voting.
  - hk__2 3y ago
    > Platforms like Twitter and Facebook put the network in the center - it's about relationships between accounts (Friend/Follower) At the beginning yes, but nowadays that’s less the case. Twitter’s "For You" is the default view and it contains popular content that have little to do with who you’re following. TikTok/Instagram behave in the same way, showing you a mix of stuff from people you follow (but not everything) and from other sources. I’m not been on Facebook recently, but I believe they do the same.
- mmastrac 3y ago
  Your snarky reply is not appreciated. I specifically said "cut my social media addiction" not "cut out social media". While Hacker News is a great time sink full of wonderful people, I don't spend nearly as much time here as I do on other platforms (and often go long swaths of time without commenting).

zzzeek 3y ago

am I wrong or is this a really huge leap from correlation to causation? why isn't it that people who spend all day on social media get less sunlight and exercise therefore have more inflammation? OK well they said this, sure: > “For some people the relationship between social media use and inflammation may be a positive feedback loop, a cycle where more social media use leads to more inflammation, and more inflammation then leads to more social media use,” he says.

hgsgm 3y ago
That quote is commentary, not science. You should ignore that from the paper/scientist, as it doesn't belong in research. It belong in the non scientific comment forums.

jsemrau 3y ago

Social Media creates the illusion of social connectivity. While I might tweet a reply to Garry Tan and he might like it. It doesn't mean we are best buddies.

izzydata 3y ago
I've been mentioning how weird parasocial relationships like this are to people for at least 10 years now and everyone thinks I'm being ridiculous. I still don't think anybody should be caring about social interactions when it is on a scale of 1 to 1 million. Where it is 1 person interacting with a million people. If you can't respond to me as an individual on a 1 to 1 scale then I simply do not care about your personal life.
- vorpalhex 3y ago
  You are not ridiculous and yes, the problem is gravely concerning. I would recommend, instead of saying what people should do, is investigate why this parasocial relationship failure mode exists. Why do people not only end up in a losing proposition, but actively seek it out? (I am quite sure there is no nice well contained single answer)
  - izzydata 3y ago
    Who knows. Perhaps a lot of us are lacking a sense of community and instinctively seek it out in the wrong places. Still, I'm not going to care about who Taylor Swift's new boyfriend is unless she cares about the same for me. I'd rather be depressed and alone. Understandably not everyone is going to be so masochistic about it and will fill that gap however they can.
- tenebrisalietum 3y ago
  This was even weirder when it was common to have no capability to interact with the parasocial target at all--in the pre-Internet world--through TV, music, or movies. Before then tabloids like Enquirer Magazine gave people the sordid details of celebrities personal lives, which I always found very strange to care about.

hospitalJail 3y ago

My initial response was: Duh Then I read this: "“It seems that inflammation not only increases social media use, but our results show preliminary evidence that it’s also associated with using social media to specifically interact with other users, like direct messaging and posting to people’s pages. Interestingly, inflammation did not lead people to use social media for other purposes—for example, entertainment purposes like watching funny videos,” This is a really bold claim. What are the odds this is never replicated? I'd love to have a science gambling website, heck, I wonder if those odds could be added to confidence of a study.

haswell 3y ago
I’m not sure that this is so bold or even surprising. I suspect the finding is because people are seeking actual social connection, not just diversion. The body knows what’s going on even if we’re not consciously aware of it, and a response like: “seek out other humans” when the body is inflamed makes sense from an evolutionary perspective in a social species. Obviously this needs further study, but it makes some kind of logical sense at least.
- RugnirViking 3y ago
  that doesn't really tie in with my experience at least. Most people I know when hurting retreat into themselves. It's much more common to find someone sitting at home eating ice cream or whatever when under significant stress than at a bar
OJFord 3y ago
My reaction's still 'duh' to be honest - you wouldn't necessarily want to do much more of things like watching videos than you were doing already, but the social interaction is replacing something. At least assuming it's serious enough that you're stuck at home recovering - I'm realising as I write that my reading of it was quite biased by the image. Otherwise I would not think on reading 'inflammation' that it was particularly serious. If they studied people with slightly swollen ankle or whatever, but walking about, at work, etc. and found a significant increase in their interest in socialising (social media just being the most easily measured form) that is pretty interesting.

golemotron 3y ago

> If inflammation does indeed increase social affiliative motivation, it should also lead people to turn to social media, under such circumstances, as a means to fulfill social needs. It would be interesting to see if introverts have lower inflammation in general. Sociality could be a disease condition.

bearjaws 3y ago

Watch twitch for 20 minutes, any streamer in the top 20 is a master of either making drama or performing commentary on drama.

l33t7332273 3y ago

I have never seen more talk about “inflammation” in any other context, physical or virtual, than I have on HN. To me, talking about health problems from “inflammation” sounded at first like a buzzword used to sell snake oil(much like “toxins”), but there seem to be real studies by real scientists discussing it. Am I in a bubble, or why is it such a rarely mentioned topic elsewhere?

lukas099 3y ago
The immune system is pretty important and powerful.
aliasxneo 3y ago
I had to learn a ton about it in the last year for my health-related issues. It's possible that it's just new information that's still propagating (and for some reason happens to concentrate on HN). For reference, my recommendations came from my therapist when battling with depression (i.e. I wasn't really influenced by anything on HN).
ssddanbrown 3y ago
Inflammation is a key factor of many medical conditions, many which can be identified by a "-itis" suffix. Might just not be in your bubble if you haven't crossed paths with these kinds of conditions. Personally, I had not come across much inflammation talk until I had uveitis, which led to an identification of my ankylosing spondylitis (a form of spinal arthritis) which has also brings me enthesitis. All of these are inflammation based.
hgsgm 3y ago
It's like "stress". It's real, but extremely diffuse.

tqi 3y ago

> The current paper used an existing data set of middle-aged adults for the first study, who completed survey questionnaires and provided blood samples the researchers analyzed for CRP. The authors collected their own data for the second and third studies using similar methods for college students. Was the hypothesis pre-registered, or did they just check the survey results against a bunch of markers to see what popped? While the conclusion certainly seems plausible, it's hard to imagine that something as diffuse and hard to measure as social media use could be reliably correlated to a specific biomarker...

pkdpic 3y ago

Are we in agreement that social media is bad for us or not? I'm a little confused as to why anyone is still using it, why people are still defending it, why we're all still talking about it and why I'm getting more (not less) random texts from friends / colleagues pressuring me to get back on to big social platforms. What are the motivations for people to be daily activate users these days? Honestly just curious.

hk__2 3y ago
> What are the motivations for people to be daily activate users these days? Honestly just curious. Why do you go on HN? That may be the beginning of a response since HN is a social platform.
- BoxFour 3y ago
  An excellent query, as it neatly encapsulates the only response to the original post. People tend to view every other social media platform negatively except for the one they personally use, and they're prepared to staunchly defend their choice no matter what.
  - Robotbeat 3y ago
    On the contrary, I’m always hating on Twitter, which is my primary social platform. I’m just addicted to it.
    - catchnear4321 3y ago
      one of the biggest reasons it persists, even after all of the chaos. a fair amount of the customers would have to go to rehab to successfully leave. that isn’t judgement. just facts.
  - pkdpic 3y ago
    I have honestly never met anyone who would defend hacker news or reddit as a good use of their time or pressure their peers to use the platforms more. Are we saying that all social media platforms are the same? Are there teams working on the hacker news platform trying to tweak the algorithms to drive addictive user engagement? Is the sorting algorithm not a matter of public record? Correction to my original comment, I am asking about Instagram / Facebook / Twitter. I know why I (maybe we) go on HN and its because Im bored and weak and Ive never felt manipulated by it or addicted to it or wanted to be on it for more than 15 minutes. I have chores I should be doing.

jeezfrk 3y ago

someone failed to mention this is from the onion. like... the research team and everyone.

lusus_naturae 3y ago

Social science, psych, biomed and pharma research should pass some kind repeatability threshold before it gets to make headlines; see Gino at Harvard for example.

readthenotes1 3y ago
Sadly, a lot of commenters seems to take the attached article as fact, as if the replicability crisis never happened

explosion-s 3y ago

Wouldn't you use social media more if you were sick/hurt somehow because you're being less active/feeling worse?

kens 3y ago

I was pretty skeptical from the original article, since it totally seemed like correlation. But the study looked at directionality, that inflammation one week results in more social media the next week. The paper also describes other research that producing inflammation increases social interaction, so this study isn't just a random thing. My conclusion is that this study is legit. The one important thing that I didn't get from the summary is the size of the effect. Here's a link to the paper (partially paywalled): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0889159123001289 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S08891...

cheald 3y ago
I'll bet that if you looked at calorie intake, you'd find a similar pattern. I'd be willing to bet that it's not because the person is eating more to heal their body (at least in the first world, where we have to work to avoid caloric surplus, and where much of our diet is inflammatory), but because the brain seeks dopamine when you're under stress or uncomfortable. To put it another way: it's not that inflammation causes social media use, but that stress causes pleasure cravings.

tosser0001 3y ago

Could someone explain what is meant by "inflammation" in this context? What exactly is inflamed and is it manifested externally in some visible way? I feel like I constantly hear about inflammation but it's never clear to me what is physically happening.

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thenerdhead 3y ago
It's in the first paragraph: > Across three studies involving more than 1,800 participants, the findings — published in the journal Brain, Behavior and Immunity — indicate that increased levels of C-reactive protein (CRP), which the liver makes in response to inflammation in the body, can promote social media use among middle-aged adults and college students. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-reactive_protein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-reactive_protein
arroz 3y ago
I think it means getting people mad / to rage
creamyhorror 3y ago
It's because they're not only talking about everyday visible inflammation. My understanding is that "inflammation" is a phenomenon in which cells release chemicals telling other cells that there's an injury, pathogens, or toxins nearby. These chemicals cause other cells to release further chemicals (a "signalling cascade"), leading to all sorts of effects ranging from the familiar swelling and redness and summoning of immune cells, all the way to allergic reactions, neural effects, long-term health outcomes, and (apparently) increased social media use. The effects no doubt differ based on the types and levels of inflammation-signalling compounds being released (of which there are many). The overall level of inflammation is commonly determined by measuring the level of C-reactive protein in blood (it rises as a result of inflammation). It's commonly measured in blood tests. There's a natural role for inflammation in the body, but it's also possible to have too much inflammation and experience negative outcomes as a result. A lot of recent research has been about the effects of inflammation signalling throughout the body, and much of the interest in antioxidants is because they may serve to reduce oxidative stress (which damages cells and also comes about as a result of inflammation). "Chronic low-grade inflammatory process, on the other hand, plays a central role in the pathogenesis of a number of chronic diseases." - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4736408/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4736408/

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harles 3y ago

> increased levels of C-reactive protein (CRP), which the liver makes in response to inflammation in the body, can promote social media use among middle-aged adults and college students. Sounds like they found correlation and called it causation. I’m keeping an open mind, but I find this article dubious. No link to any of the studies, no alternative explanations (I would guess any negative health markers are associated with higher tech use), and the title is a little too strong “Inflammation linked to social media use” would be easier to swallow, or even “contributes to”. I find press releases like this both not useful and overall bad for the scientific community. It’s unfortunate because this may genuinely be an interesting line of research.

nonameiguess 3y ago
It'd be nice if they included a link or even the title of the paper being referenced here to see the methods. It's hard for me to imagine how causation could even be investigated for this. You'd need to randomly induce inflammation on purpose to study participants, which seems like something you couldn't get through an IRB, nor would anybody consent to it if you could. Otherwise, sure, you're telling me all of the factors associated with inflammation, i.e. illness, disability, injury, sedentary life, are also associated with people spending more time on social media than they might otherwise, doesn't seem like a revelation.
- ceroxylon 3y ago
  Found the paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0889159123001289 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S08891...
  - iak8god 3y ago
    Most people won't be able to access the paper via that link. I was able to get to it by going to Google Scholar and searching "Brain, Behavior and Immunity" david lee. The first result was a sciencedirect link that did allow me to read the whole thing.

greenhearth 3y ago

Inflammation may also come from physical isolation. There have been studies that lack of physical contact promotes a sort of "hunger" that has to be satisfied or else becomes destructive. Socio-physical contact rebalances some chemicals that satiate it. I wonder if this yearning causes an immune response. In case of social media, if this is what happens, the feedback loop is extremely obvious: the offer of some social contact while operating in actual complete physical isolation. This is a sort of a closed circuit, a thing that creates the need for itself.

lifeisstillgood 3y ago

There is an old english expression "to vent one's spleen" - to rant angrily on social media (or write letters to the editor of The Times, one's MP etc) Maybe an inflamed spleen is the problem after all :-)

riazrizvi 3y ago

Sure, elevated inflammatory cytokines are consistently shown in imaging studies to reduce brain activity in motivation areas, and drive it in anxiety related areas [1]. So it makes sense to me that we would seek the lower effort emotional rewards that social media platforms can provide. What I'm surprised by here is that they don't find it's then used for entertainment value, but rather for social engagement. Which would indicate it drives a need to seek particular levels of oxytocin and vasopressin specifically: > it's associated with social media to specifically interact with other users, like direct messaging and posting to people’s pages. Interestingly, inflammation did not lead people to use social media for other purposes—for example, entertainment purposes like watching funny video [1] 2018, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5997866/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5997866/

hinkley 3y ago
There's definitely a straightforward enough evolutionary advantage to being more sedentary (demotivated) when recovering from an injury or an illness. The problem is we're getting inflammation without earning it the old fashioned way: misadventure.

orthecreedence 3y ago

[flagged]

kypro 3y ago

Hmmm... CRP correlates to all kinds of things like lower levels of Vit D, less exercise, illness, etc... If people are going out less, say because it's winter and they've been feeling unwell then we should expect CRP levels to be higher. We should probably also expect social media use while people are at home is probably going to be higher than when they're outside in the sun. The idea that an inflammatory marker would actually drive people to seek out social media seems highly suspect to me. Do people with cancer develop an insatiable urge to use social media?

captainbland 3y ago
If it is true I think it would arise from a bit more of a transitive relationship but with more straightforward leaps in logic. Sick people are tired, tired people want to partake in sedentary activities more than they want to take part in highly physical activities relative to the rest of the population, social media is a highly popular sedentary activity among the studied cohort of students.

nialv7 3y ago

Why doesn't it link to the paper? Is this study even published?

tomohawk 3y ago

Why wouldn't it be the other way around? I know people who reduced inflammation by staying off social media and away from news media. These things tend to induce stress, which can cause inflammation.

remote_phone 3y ago

I’m 100% sure this is one of those “joke” papers that show how bad pest-reviewed papers and journals are these days.

baryphonic 3y ago

Some personal anecdata: I have a genetic auto-immune condition, and my current treatment requires an injection every eight weeks. If untreated, the symptoms include inflammation of my body, especially sinuses, hands & fingers, feet & toes, elbows & knees. After taking my injection, the inflammation subsides. About a year after starting treatment, I noticed that during the final week of that eight-week cycle and continuing for a few days after treatment, my time on Twitter was much higher than during the other 6.5-ish weeks. I figured it was something psychological, and was able to get my doctor to increase the frequency of doses, which curbed my Twitter visits even more. Recently, I had a bout where due to insurance nonsense, I was delayed in getting my injection. I was heavily on Twitter, not as a result of conscious choice, but just because I felt like it. I took my shot a couple weeks ago, and have barely logged into Twitter over the last week and a half. Correlation does not imply causation, but using my own anecdata, I can't rule out this study and in fact have some personal evidence to confirm it. I find it interesting that someone attempted to test a hypothesis that I had informally stated a few years ago.

theptip 3y ago

Simple hypothesis: I use my phone more when I am laid up on the sofa with an ankle sprain.

eshack94 3y ago

"An association with" does not indicate that a factor necessarily "drives" the outcome. It might just be associated with it but not caused by it. What a terrible PR release written by a non-scientist ("News Content Manager") for clicks and hype and zero critical thinking. The worst part is, they didn't even include a link to the full study in the press release.