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This severely underplays the "risks" of not banning social media for teenagers. The link between social media use and mental health problems in teens is extreme

by droidjj 4mo ago

This severely underplays the "risks" of not banning social media for teenagers. The link between social media use and mental health problems in teens is extremely well documented.

D-Machine 4mo ago
No, the evidence is quite flimsy and correlational, and this is clearly a moral panic. EDIT: See e.g. https://www.nationalacademies.org/read/27396/chapter/6#93 https://www.nationalacademies.org/read/27396/chapter/6#93, and if you think this is what constitutes "clear evidence", well, you have some very questionable epistemological standards. EDIT2: Also, limit yourself to proper longitudinal studies and then look at the actual effect sizes reported. You will find, yes, there is broad evidence that social media is likely slightly more harmful to adolescents than beneficial / not harmful, but the actual effect size is so tiny broad interventions are unlikely to have practical consequences. I.e. the most plausible explanation is that the vast majority people are not meaningfully affected, and small subgroups benefit and/or are negatively affected. It is the usual pseudoscientific / social science attempts to launder "statistical significance" (which you get trivially with enough samples) into practical significance, in order to justify sweeping societal changes.
- droidjj 4mo ago
  I'm not an expert in this area, but this seems far from flimsy. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370(18)30060-9/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5... https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/2749480 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/... https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2834349 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle... https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/2737909 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/... Can you please explain how I'm wrong?
  - D-Machine 4mo ago
    You're gish-galloping a bunch of random studies, most of which appear to be cross-sectional. I've linked a broad review. Even the longitudinal studies are poor here. See, for example, as this Nature article notes: "The study has multiple limitations that need to be considered. First, to interpret the parameters from our analyses as estimates of causal effects one would need to adopt the following assumptions: (a) there are no time-varying unobserved confounders that impact the relation between social media use and life satisfaction; (b) the model adequately accounts for unobserved time-invariant confounding through the inclusion of a random intercept; (c) there is no measurement error in the variables; (d) the time interval between studies (one year) is the right length to capture the effects of interest; and (e) the bidirectional links estimated by our longitudinal model are linear in nature. Only if these assumptions are met can this observational study be said to capture the causal effects between social media and life satisfaction. Second, the data are self-report and therefore only allow inferences about the impact of self-estimated time on social media, rather than objectively measured social media use." https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-29296-3#Sec2 I'd also suggest looking at the coefficients (effect sizes) in the above (standardized regression coefficients barely approaching 0.2 - and this is one of the stronger findings), and other articles. The effects here, even if we were to pretend they were clearly established, are incredibly tiny. Examples: - social media explaining only 0.4% of variance (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30944443/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30944443/) - social-media/mental-health effect around β = .061 (https://christopherjferguson.com/Social%20Media%20Meta.pdf https://christopherjferguson.com/Social%20Media%20Meta.pdf) These are basically nothing, and yet you have such absolute confidence from people that social media is this big harmful thing. The evidence just isn't there.
    - droidjj 4mo ago
      ~Qualifying all of this with the caveat that I'm not a social scientist.~ I really appreciate your response, which made me realize this is more nuanced than I thought at first blush. (I wrote that reply before you linked the National Academies review, which was quite helpful.) Maybe I am truly morally panicked, but I'm really hesitant to brush aside the evidence as "basically nothing." Small effects are worth paying attention to (https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2022-26026-014 https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2022-26026-014). And quantifying the harms of social media use is less like quantifying the harms of, say, smoking cigarettes, because social media has (indeed, is built on) network effects. You could plop a kid from the 50's into a modern American neighborhood and their mental health might decline even if they don't use social media because of the way it has changed childhood. When the social life of an entire generation is transformed by technology, it stops making sense to ask "How much does one hour of Instagram hurt mental health?" Yet that is essentially the question all the studies are designed to answer, and even still, we see an effect. Anyway, thanks for taking to time to explain your perspective.

by droidjj 4mo ago

This severely underplays the "risks" of not banning social media for teenagers. The link between social media use and mental health problems in teens is extremely well documented.

D-Machine 4mo ago

No, the evidence is quite flimsy and correlational, and this is clearly a moral panic. EDIT: See e.g. https://www.nationalacademies.org/read/27396/chapter/6#93 https://www.nationalacademies.org/read/27396/chapter/6#93, and if you think this is what constitutes "clear evidence", well, you have some very questionable epistemological standards. EDIT2: Also, limit yourself to proper longitudinal studies and then look at the actual effect sizes reported. You will find, yes, there is broad evidence that social media is likely slightly more harmful to adolescents than beneficial / not harmful, but the actual effect size is so tiny broad interventions are unlikely to have practical consequences. I.e. the most plausible explanation is that the vast majority people are not meaningfully affected, and small subgroups benefit and/or are negatively affected. It is the usual pseudoscientific / social science attempts to launder "statistical significance" (which you get trivially with enough samples) into practical significance, in order to justify sweeping societal changes.

droidjj 4mo ago
I'm not an expert in this area, but this seems far from flimsy. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370(18)30060-9/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5... https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/2749480 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/... https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2834349 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle... https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/2737909 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/... Can you please explain how I'm wrong?
- D-Machine 4mo ago
  You're gish-galloping a bunch of random studies, most of which appear to be cross-sectional. I've linked a broad review. Even the longitudinal studies are poor here. See, for example, as this Nature article notes: "The study has multiple limitations that need to be considered. First, to interpret the parameters from our analyses as estimates of causal effects one would need to adopt the following assumptions: (a) there are no time-varying unobserved confounders that impact the relation between social media use and life satisfaction; (b) the model adequately accounts for unobserved time-invariant confounding through the inclusion of a random intercept; (c) there is no measurement error in the variables; (d) the time interval between studies (one year) is the right length to capture the effects of interest; and (e) the bidirectional links estimated by our longitudinal model are linear in nature. Only if these assumptions are met can this observational study be said to capture the causal effects between social media and life satisfaction. Second, the data are self-report and therefore only allow inferences about the impact of self-estimated time on social media, rather than objectively measured social media use." https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-29296-3#Sec2 I'd also suggest looking at the coefficients (effect sizes) in the above (standardized regression coefficients barely approaching 0.2 - and this is one of the stronger findings), and other articles. The effects here, even if we were to pretend they were clearly established, are incredibly tiny. Examples: - social media explaining only 0.4% of variance (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30944443/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30944443/) - social-media/mental-health effect around β = .061 (https://christopherjferguson.com/Social%20Media%20Meta.pdf https://christopherjferguson.com/Social%20Media%20Meta.pdf) These are basically nothing, and yet you have such absolute confidence from people that social media is this big harmful thing. The evidence just isn't there.
  - droidjj 4mo ago
    ~Qualifying all of this with the caveat that I'm not a social scientist.~ I really appreciate your response, which made me realize this is more nuanced than I thought at first blush. (I wrote that reply before you linked the National Academies review, which was quite helpful.) Maybe I am truly morally panicked, but I'm really hesitant to brush aside the evidence as "basically nothing." Small effects are worth paying attention to (https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2022-26026-014 https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2022-26026-014). And quantifying the harms of social media use is less like quantifying the harms of, say, smoking cigarettes, because social media has (indeed, is built on) network effects. You could plop a kid from the 50's into a modern American neighborhood and their mental health might decline even if they don't use social media because of the way it has changed childhood. When the social life of an entire generation is transformed by technology, it stops making sense to ask "How much does one hour of Instagram hurt mental health?" Yet that is essentially the question all the studies are designed to answer, and even still, we see an effect. Anyway, thanks for taking to time to explain your perspective.