8 ms·

No evidence social media time is correlated with teen mental health problems

64 points by beefman 2y ago

beefman 2y ago
Full title: There is no evidence that time spent on social media is correlated with adolescent mental health problems: Findings from a meta-analysis.
bdangubic 2y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
m0llusk 2y ago
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.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- MailleQuiMaille 2y ago
  Never understood how using meta analysis constitutes any form of legitimate research. It always to me felt like trying to make a mix of "discussable" studies, like a bouillabaisse or something. Maybe it's because I hate fish, I don't know.
artur_makly 2y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
superkuh 2y ago
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.
- batch12 2y ago
  He posted a related paper on his website looks like. Not sure if it's the same one. https://www.christopherjferguson.com/Social%20Media%20Experiments%20Meta.pdf https://www.christopherjferguson.com/Social%20Media%20Experi... Edit: the authors look different so probably just related
invalidname 2y 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?
- wpasc 2y ago
  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 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)
- jwagenet 2y ago
  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.
  - invalidname 2y ago
    Yes but then why would it impact girls far more than boys?
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - orwin 2y ago
      Different coping mechanism, boys will more often look for external causes.
      - positr0n 2y ago
        Doesn't answer OP's question, but males and females have different behavior around suicide in general (in aggregate obviously). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_differences_in_suicide https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_differences_in_suicid... Females are far more likely than males to attempt suicide, and males are far more likely than females to die by suicide (be successful in their attempt).
Jimpulse 2y ago
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 https://www.afterbabel.com/p/fundamental-flaws-part-3.
- beala 2y ago
  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-jonathan-haidt 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-phones https://www.thestudiesshowpod.com/p/episode-25-is-it-the-pho...
  - Jimpulse 2y ago
    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-meta-analytic-methodology https://shoresofacademia.substack.com/p/perils-of-flawed-met....
  - nonrandomstring 2y ago
    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.
pfdietz 2y ago
Given the propensity for moral panics, I'd bet there's a whole lot of nothing in this one too.
insane_dreamer 2y ago
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-numbers.html https://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/mental-health/mental-health... I'd also want to know where the funding for this meta study came from.
- orwin 2y ago
  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.
- insane_dreamer 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- huem0n 2y ago
  https://libgen.li/file.php?md5=65ffe05c8aa64367b0e87965de1c25cd 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.
lazyeye 2y ago
Memories of tobacco "researchers" claiming the science linking smoking to cancer is inconclusive.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
  Whose bread I eat, his song I sing.
  - ada1981 2y ago
    "They are eating the dogs. They are eating the cats." - Former US President (Cue the downvotes!)
- pfdietz 2y ago
  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.
  - el_memorioso 2y ago
    > 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.
    - pfdietz 2y ago
orourke 2y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
bpodgursky 2y ago
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.
- adamrezich 2y ago
  That sounds an awful lot like not Trusting the Science.
  - ghusto 2y ago
    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.
- diggan 2y ago
  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?
  - bpodgursky 2y ago
    > 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.
- onelesd 2y ago
  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.
cwoolfe 2y ago
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-epidemic 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.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- randomdata 2y ago
  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.
  - elashri 2y ago
    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.
    - randomdata 2y ago
      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.
stonethrowaway 2y ago
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.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
spondylosaurus 2y ago
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.
- Spivak 2y ago
  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."
  - elicksaur 2y ago
    > 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 https://www.afterbabel.com/p/fundamental-flaws-part-3
slothtrop 2y ago
am reminded of: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38909735 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38909735
sim7c00 2y ago
"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.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
joemazerino 2y ago
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.
- westurner 2y ago
  It takes a professional to determine whether harassing them about their electronics is the actual cause of the behaviors in question.
  - westurner 2y ago
    From "New Mexico: Psychologists to dress up as wizards when providing expert testimony" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40085678 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40085678 : > Clean Language
- diggan 2y ago
  > 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"?
  - spondylosaurus 2y 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 https://www.thisamericanlife.org/204/81-words
- exe34 2y ago
  Interestingly, Skinner found that even pigeons can be superstitious. Just because you want to believe something doesn't mean it's true.
- randomdata 2y ago
textlapse 2y ago
Is a control group even possible in this day and age?
- ffujdefvjg 2y ago
  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.
  - textlapse 2y ago
    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
georgeburdell 2y ago
Do the authors disclose their funding sources?
HumblyTossed 2y ago
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.
ergonaught 2y ago
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".
- insane_dreamer 2y ago
  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
  - pembrook 2y ago
    Nothing says scientific method like "0% doubt in my mind the hypothesis is true."
    - insane_dreamer 2y ago
      Looks like you missed the word “anecdotal“ at the start of the sentence.
- ghusto 2y ago
  Every parent already knows this. I wonder why they're trying to disprove it so badly?
  - Const-me 2y ago
    Because big tech companies who own these social media platforms have exceptionally deep pockets?
  - ahahahahah 2y ago
    Every parent also already knows that sugar causes hyperactivity.
elmomle 2y ago
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.
- pyuser583 2y ago
  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!"
  - taylodl 2y ago
    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.
Neonlicht 2y ago
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.
insane_dreamer 2y ago
Weirdly, many of the posts expressing skepticism about this paper's findings are being downvoted (someone's not happy)
pembrook 2y ago
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.
- ghusto 2y ago
  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").
  - pembrook 2y ago
    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.
dmje 2y ago
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.
hyeonwho4 2y ago
> 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 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.
reducesuffering 2y ago
'The Phrase "No Evidence" Is A Red Flag For Bad Science Communication' https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-phrase-no-evidence-is-a-red-flag https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-phrase-no-evidence-is-a...
ghusto 2y ago
"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?
- rich_sasha 2y ago
  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.
huem0n 2y ago
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.
jl6 2y ago
“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.
Triphibian 2y ago
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.
JSDevOps 2y ago
There’s plenty of evidence in the real world
westcort 2y ago
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-health-social-media-advisory.pdf https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/sg-youth-mental-heal... 1.https://guilfordjournals.com/doi/10.1521/jscp.2018.37.10.751 https://guilfordjournals.com/doi/10.1521/jscp.2018.37.10.751 2.https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20190658 https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20190658 3. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370(18)30060-9/fulltext#t0010 https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5... 4. https://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/data/yrbs/pdf/YRBS_Data-Summary-Trends_Report2023_508.pdf#page=64 https://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/data/yrbs/pdf/YRBS_Data-Sum... 5. https://images.nature.com/lw1200/magazine-assets/d41586-023-00402-9/d41586-023-00402-9_24014506.png https://images.nature.com/lw1200/magazine-assets/d41586-023-... 6. https://www.cbsnews.com/sacramento/news/zuckerberg-rejected-meta-proposals-to-improve-teen-mental-health-court-documents-allege/ https://www.cbsnews.com/sacramento/news/zuckerberg-rejected-...
kpmcc 2y ago
I think a useful framing might be to compare social media to drugs. Many people do various sorts of drugs. Some people can do some drugs and not have their lives destroyed by said drugs. Other people have their lives upended by some drugs, sometimes the same ones that other people do without such serious consequences. We recognize that not all drugs are equivalent and recognize that they need to be taken seriously, limited, or prohibited outright. Many people, and clearly many teenagers are able to use social media and not be all that harmed. For some, that's clearly not the case.

64 points by beefman 2y ago

Full title: There is no evidence that time spent on social media is correlated with adolescent mental health problems: Findings from a meta-analysis.

bdangubic 2y ago

[flagged]

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

m0llusk 2y ago

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.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
MailleQuiMaille 2y ago
Never understood how using meta analysis constitutes any form of legitimate research. It always to me felt like trying to make a mix of "discussable" studies, like a bouillabaisse or something. Maybe it's because I hate fish, I don't know.

artur_makly 2y ago

[flagged]

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

superkuh 2y ago

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.

batch12 2y ago
He posted a related paper on his website looks like. Not sure if it's the same one. https://www.christopherjferguson.com/Social%20Media%20Experiments%20Meta.pdf https://www.christopherjferguson.com/Social%20Media%20Experi... Edit: the authors look different so probably just related

invalidname 2y 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?

wpasc 2y ago
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 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)
jwagenet 2y ago
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.
- invalidname 2y ago
  Yes but then why would it impact girls far more than boys?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - orwin 2y ago
    Different coping mechanism, boys will more often look for external causes.
    - positr0n 2y ago
      Doesn't answer OP's question, but males and females have different behavior around suicide in general (in aggregate obviously). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_differences_in_suicide https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_differences_in_suicid... Females are far more likely than males to attempt suicide, and males are far more likely than females to die by suicide (be successful in their attempt).

Jimpulse 2y ago

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 https://www.afterbabel.com/p/fundamental-flaws-part-3.

beala 2y ago
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-jonathan-haidt 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-phones https://www.thestudiesshowpod.com/p/episode-25-is-it-the-pho...
- Jimpulse 2y ago
  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-meta-analytic-methodology https://shoresofacademia.substack.com/p/perils-of-flawed-met....
- nonrandomstring 2y ago
  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.

pfdietz 2y ago

Given the propensity for moral panics, I'd bet there's a whole lot of nothing in this one too.

insane_dreamer 2y ago

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-numbers.html https://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/mental-health/mental-health... I'd also want to know where the funding for this meta study came from.

orwin 2y ago
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.
insane_dreamer 2y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
huem0n 2y ago
https://libgen.li/file.php?md5=65ffe05c8aa64367b0e87965de1c25cd 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.

lazyeye 2y ago

Memories of tobacco "researchers" claiming the science linking smoking to cancer is inconclusive.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
Whose bread I eat, his song I sing.
- ada1981 2y ago
  "They are eating the dogs. They are eating the cats." - Former US President (Cue the downvotes!)
pfdietz 2y ago
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.
- el_memorioso 2y ago
  > 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.
  - pfdietz 2y ago

orourke 2y ago

[flagged]

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

bpodgursky 2y ago

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.

adamrezich 2y ago
That sounds an awful lot like not Trusting the Science.
- ghusto 2y ago
  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.
diggan 2y ago
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?
- bpodgursky 2y ago
  > 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.
onelesd 2y ago
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.

cwoolfe 2y ago

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-epidemic 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.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
randomdata 2y ago
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.
- elashri 2y ago
  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.
  - randomdata 2y ago
    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.

stonethrowaway 2y ago

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.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

spondylosaurus 2y ago

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.

Spivak 2y ago
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."
- elicksaur 2y ago
  > 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 https://www.afterbabel.com/p/fundamental-flaws-part-3

slothtrop 2y ago

am reminded of: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38909735 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38909735

sim7c00 2y ago

"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.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

joemazerino 2y ago

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.

westurner 2y ago
It takes a professional to determine whether harassing them about their electronics is the actual cause of the behaviors in question.
- westurner 2y ago
  From "New Mexico: Psychologists to dress up as wizards when providing expert testimony" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40085678 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40085678 : > Clean Language
diggan 2y ago
> 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"?
- spondylosaurus 2y 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 https://www.thisamericanlife.org/204/81-words
exe34 2y ago
Interestingly, Skinner found that even pigeons can be superstitious. Just because you want to believe something doesn't mean it's true.
randomdata 2y ago

textlapse 2y ago

Is a control group even possible in this day and age?

ffujdefvjg 2y ago
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.
- textlapse 2y ago
  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

georgeburdell 2y ago

Do the authors disclose their funding sources?

HumblyTossed 2y ago

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.

ergonaught 2y ago

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".

insane_dreamer 2y ago
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
- pembrook 2y ago
  Nothing says scientific method like "0% doubt in my mind the hypothesis is true."
  - insane_dreamer 2y ago
    Looks like you missed the word “anecdotal“ at the start of the sentence.
ghusto 2y ago
Every parent already knows this. I wonder why they're trying to disprove it so badly?
- Const-me 2y ago
  Because big tech companies who own these social media platforms have exceptionally deep pockets?
- ahahahahah 2y ago
  Every parent also already knows that sugar causes hyperactivity.

elmomle 2y ago

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.

pyuser583 2y ago
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!"
- taylodl 2y ago
  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.

Neonlicht 2y ago

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.

insane_dreamer 2y ago

Weirdly, many of the posts expressing skepticism about this paper's findings are being downvoted (someone's not happy)

pembrook 2y ago

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.

ghusto 2y ago
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").
- pembrook 2y ago
  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.

dmje 2y ago

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.

hyeonwho4 2y ago

> 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 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.

reducesuffering 2y ago

'The Phrase "No Evidence" Is A Red Flag For Bad Science Communication' https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-phrase-no-evidence-is-a-red-flag https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-phrase-no-evidence-is-a...

ghusto 2y ago

"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?

rich_sasha 2y ago
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.

huem0n 2y ago

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.

jl6 2y ago

“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.

Triphibian 2y ago

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.

JSDevOps 2y ago

There’s plenty of evidence in the real world

westcort 2y ago

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-health-social-media-advisory.pdf https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/sg-youth-mental-heal... 1.https://guilfordjournals.com/doi/10.1521/jscp.2018.37.10.751 https://guilfordjournals.com/doi/10.1521/jscp.2018.37.10.751 2.https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20190658 https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20190658 3. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370(18)30060-9/fulltext#t0010 https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5... 4. https://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/data/yrbs/pdf/YRBS_Data-Summary-Trends_Report2023_508.pdf#page=64 https://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/data/yrbs/pdf/YRBS_Data-Sum... 5. https://images.nature.com/lw1200/magazine-assets/d41586-023-00402-9/d41586-023-00402-9_24014506.png https://images.nature.com/lw1200/magazine-assets/d41586-023-... 6. https://www.cbsnews.com/sacramento/news/zuckerberg-rejected-meta-proposals-to-improve-teen-mental-health-court-documents-allege/ https://www.cbsnews.com/sacramento/news/zuckerberg-rejected-...

kpmcc 2y ago

I think a useful framing might be to compare social media to drugs. Many people do various sorts of drugs. Some people can do some drugs and not have their lives destroyed by said drugs. Other people have their lives upended by some drugs, sometimes the same ones that other people do without such serious consequences. We recognize that not all drugs are equivalent and recognize that they need to be taken seriously, limited, or prohibited outright. Many people, and clearly many teenagers are able to use social media and not be all that harmed. For some, that's clearly not the case.