Researchers, lawmakers want Facebook's mental health research

Do you happen to have a link? Would love to share it with some friends showing signs of depression who are heavy social media users

You should follow my Instagram.

Its horribly taken pictures of kinda boring moments

I see it all as "magic tricks" to varying degrees.

The "reveal" may look cool, but what they did and how much time/effort/money it took to get the result is hidden from you.

It seems likely though, doesn't it? If you take away their social media, where would you expect the depressed users to go next? TV in particular is something that has surely been researched, as it was probably the biggest sedentary "escape" prior to the internet, and the linked study would surely cite other research which eventually includes this.

The lit review cites two prior studies, both are quite interesting:

> People who spend > 4 h of screen time such as: TV watching and computer use, are at higher risk of developing depression (de Wit et al., 2011, Hamer et al., 2013). While, it is also reported that people with depressive symptoms spend significantly more hours in a day, watching TV and using computer (de Wit et al., 2011).

From the abstract of the first reference (de Wit et al):

> Our study sample consisted of 2353 participants (age 18–65) of whom 1701 had a current anxiety and/or depressive diagnosis and 652 were healthy controls. Anxiety and depression diagnoses were conducted using the DSM-IV based Composite International Diagnostic Interview. Controlling for sociodemographics and physical activity level we found that persons with a major depressive disorder (MDD) spend significantly more leisure time using the computer. We found that persons with dysthymia, panic disorder and agoraphobia spend significantly more daily hours watching television compared to controls.

So interestingly, the choice seems to correlate with severity of depression.

The other study was looked at possible causal mechanism between sedentary behavior (as defined by TV time) and depression. Since they focused on TV you can look at their own lit review and find TV-specific studies such as:

Lucas, M., Mekary, R., Pan, A., Mirzaei, F., O’Reilly, E.J., Willett, W.C., Koenen, K., Okereke, O.I., Ascherio, A., 2011. Relation between clinical depression risk and physical activity and time spent watching television in older women: a 10-year prospective follow-up study. Am. J. Epidemiol. 174, 1017–1027.

I realized maybe a week or two ago regarding subjects that I am an expert on and professionally trained that people on Hacker News discuss it in a very uninformed manner and out of ignorance and that this ignorance spreads across the site like wildfire. People make bold and categorical claims that one would only expect of a subject matter expert when it's clear that they're anything but that. The issue is that the number of experts on a topic is much smaller than the number of people who read a comment, find it appealing, and upvote it, so it's hard to dispel a lot of misinformation. Furthermore based on my own experience, the amount of effort needed to demonstrate that someone is wrong is significant, consumes a lot of time, and even if you manage to do so, it likely is nested deep within the conversation and goes unnoticed.

In my own area of expertise, I have literally been downvoted for providing links to primary sources that conclusively disprove unsourced claims.

So given that I know that discussions in my area of expertise on this site is full of misinformation, I have now come to doubt the quality and reliability of conversations on this site on some other topics that tend to attract a lot of assertive discussion. Topics that don't attract a lot of assertive discussion still seem legit, for example few people make assertions or categorical claims in physics discussions or pure math discussions and the few who do I think are trustworthy since they tend to provide extensive explanations justifications, and sources. Most people in those topics are inquisitive, they ask questions, they make clear that they have an opinion or a belief and wonder if others share that opinion... but when it comes to law people just downright state things as if they're facts and they're qualified to know that it's a fact.

So I now doubt that many people on this site who discuss the law with such authority are remotely informed to do so and that motivated my original line of inquiry; is the original poster and everyone else in agreement with them actually informed to understand the law to make such a big statement on the subject, or are they just making things up the same way people on this site make things up about the topic that I know I am an expert on. Are other readers upvoting comments because they can verify it and upvotes are serving as a kind of quality control mechanism, or are people upvoting comments that sound appealing and that they wish was true, but really are not qualified to know, and hence upvotes are a reflection of this site's ignorance on a topic.

I can only answer that for myself, but I think the replies to my line of inquiry have been poor and misinformed, and so I think the best way to make use of this site going forward is to avoid participating in discussions other than those I think still retain some degree of quality: physics, math, machine learning, things where I trust there are enough experts here that no one would make such strong claims that are false without being shut down by the community for doing so.

Law, biology and health care, the environment, finance/economics are not among those topics.