5 ms·
Is there actually strong evidence that social media harms teens' mental health? From what I can find, the correlation between social media use and mental healt
by verteu 3y ago
Is there actually strong evidence that social media harms teens' mental health?
From what I can find, the correlation between social media use and mental health problems is small [1] or nonexistent [2]. There are few causal studies, and their results are even smaller, eg: halting Facebook usage for a month decreased depression by 0.09 stdev [3].
[1] "We found a small but significant positive correlation (k=12 studies, r=.11, p<.01) between adolescent social media use and depressive symptoms."
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0165032720323727 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01650...
[2] "There was no association between frequency of social media use and SITBs [self-injurious thoughts and behaviors] however, studies on this topic were limited."
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0272735821000817 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02727...
[3] "A study using an experimental design measured the effects of abstaining from
Facebook for four weeks in an adult population and found that there
was a slight decrease (SD=0.09) in depression."
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0165032720323727 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01650...
- broptimist 3y agoI assume your third link was meant to be to this study: https://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/facebook.pdf https://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/facebook.pdf My first criticism would be that intervening only to restrict Facebook would likely just result in a substitution effect, with instagram, snapchat, youtube, reddit, etc filling the void. Likewise, if I remove cake from my diet for 4 weeks but make no restrictions on all other forms of sugary baked goods, I'm not likely to see the same magnitude of effect as I would've otherwise. Here's an associational study that found almost 3x odds of having depression between the most and least frequent users of social media sites. This was among US adults aged 19-32 and adjusted for age, sex, race, relationship status, living situation, household income, and education level https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4853817/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4853817/
- verteu 3y agoThanks for the study! I was hoping for something about teens (not adults >=19), and ideally a meta-analysis. This article looks promising: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Facebook#Psychological/sociological_effects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Facebook#Psycholo... I know the media often cites Instagram's internal research saying "we make body image issues worse for 1 in 3 teen girls", but the actual stat is not too damning IMO: 'Among teen girls with body image issues, 32% said Instagram made it worse, 22% said Instagram made it better, and 46% said it had no impact' [1] [1] page 14 of https://about.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Instagram-Teen-Annotated-Research-Deck-1.pdf https://about.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Instagram-Te...