Live data from Hacker News

Most Canadians believe Facebook harms their mental health

theglobeandmail.com

261–270 of 273 posts

Re: Most Canadians believe Facebook harms their mental health

#261

The knee jerk reaction to this is likely one to push for regulation but I don't think that is the solution. We should keep in mind that we still have choice, we can choose not to use Facebook. That choice is likely to have a powerful effect on the direction Facebook (or any other platform) takes. My fear is that government control of social media is such a tempting power it would be hard for politicians not abuse it.…

gambling, cigarettes and alcohol are tightly regulated where I'm from. Let's stop pretending that people are able to act in their own best interest.

When I was a kid *all* advertising in F1 was for cigarettes. We stopped that shit because smoking fucking sucks for all of society.

Fuck Facebook. It's an evil company. Not because Zuck or the people working there are inherently evil, it's just that their incentives (profit) happens to coincidentally and unfortunately be aligned with extreme negative externalities.

Re: Most Canadians believe Facebook harms their mental health

#263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook is so harmlessly impotent, it has not even managed to get me to create an account. You know, maybe spend less time on QAnon-anything.

The fact it is impotent for you does not mean it is impotent in general. That is my exact point. I have hardly any problem with FB usage, but I see many people dear to me that do. I imagined that this is a problem that will go by itself. That people will inoculate themselves against conspiracy. But now, I'm not so sure.

Maybe it's not Facebook. Maybe it's society that makes people go crazy?

Humans are not fit to live in a hyper capitalist society. We crave stability.

Re: Most Canadians believe Facebook harms their mental health

#264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's definitely the format and the quantity for me. Seeing an old friend in person and having them tell me about their life and accomplishments, even showing me pictures, does not make me feel the same way. I think it's also the fact that I turn to social media when I'm feeling lonely, so seeing a feed of people at their best moments, on vacation with friends, getting married, having children, etc... makes me feel ev…

I think also that the format is different, the link between people is not the same on social media posts. There is a difference between seeing something interesting, thinking of a friend who might be interested and sending it to him with a personal message like "check this out, it made me think of you, you might like it" and just putting something on display for people to see it, and add like to it to give you some s…

This is very true. And it reminds me that, at first, I did like Facebook, and I thought it was fun and cool. It's only when you realize how little meaning there is to the interactions that they start to feel shallow and depressing.

Re: Most Canadians believe Facebook harms their mental health

#265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, that was rude of you. Sorry, you being judgy and condescending about my mental state and whether I am or not curious is not conducive to a conversation here. I'll let you have the last word.

Oh, oops, I'm sorry about my sloppy writing that seemed rude. I intended the generic "you". I see now how that failed to come across. I wrote: > You're already in a less open, less curious state when your language is that of "blame". And DUH, that reads first to almost anyone (including myself on re-reading) as "you (yes, you, person I'm replying to) are in a less open state… blah blah blah" When what I meant to expr…

Ah, sorry yes I think I did misread your comment. Thanks for explaining!! I wasn't offended or anything, I just didn't see a path forward in the conversation.

Anyhoo, I'm not saying we need to abandon looking at how external agents influence behavior, all I'm saying is that personal responsibility is critical in informing how we look at behavior. Without that lens, it would almost impossible to implement a fair justice system. We can all work towards structural changes while still adopting a punitive stance when it comes to egregious violations of criminal and civil law.

Re: Most Canadians believe Facebook harms their mental health

#266
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very unbiased. Only sampled people who were online and ostensibly only those who used Facebook. Since maybe ~60% of people use Facebook, I don't think the results speak for _all_ Canadians. If it did that's saying a lot for secondhand effects of social media platforms.

It's not a facebook poll, not sure why you thought that. It was a poll taken from a random (presumably population-reflecting) sample of Leger's online polling platform. It's not technically a random poll like wardialing in the 40s got you but it's not just an opt-in facebook poll either. https://leger360.com/surveys/legers-north-american-tracker-o...

Without access to the questions I don't know exactly who would have a tendency to respond. But would you answer a poll about how a service is affecting you if you didn't use it? And if not, that's my point -- that both the article's title and contents seem to speak for Canadians en masse but is likely not to, because it likely only sampled the 60% who use Facebook.

Re: Most Canadians believe Facebook harms their mental health

#267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have accounts with a couple of banks and can't say I've ever seen them using OAuth. But if they did, I'd consider other banking options.

how is using OAuth any different from using your email for a password reset.

I would not want to rely on a social media company to vouch for my identity for something as crucial as my finances

Re: Most Canadians believe Facebook harms their mental health

#268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, oops, I'm sorry about my sloppy writing that seemed rude. I intended the generic "you". I see now how that failed to come across. I wrote: > You're already in a less open, less curious state when your language is that of "blame". And DUH, that reads first to almost anyone (including myself on re-reading) as "you (yes, you, person I'm replying to) are in a less open state… blah blah blah" When what I meant to expr…

Ah, sorry yes I think I did misread your comment. Thanks for explaining!! I wasn't offended or anything, I just didn't see a path forward in the conversation. Anyhoo, I'm not saying we need to abandon looking at how external agents influence behavior, all I'm saying is that personal responsibility is critical in informing how we look at behavior. Without that lens, it would almost impossible to implement a fair justi…

Glad to actually get clarification of the misunderstanding. Thanks for being responsive!

I agree with you fully here. The semantic thing is that there's this useful self-reflective framing of contrasting "responsibility" from "blame" similarly to contrasting restoration vs retribution. The idea is that blame is about accountability, about finding fault, and it's commonly the mindset we're in when we're reactive in the sort of sense of not being stoic, being stuck on being mad that the world is the way it is and so on. By contrast, if we are taking responsibility, we are asking ourselves how to actually respond to the reality we face instead of focusing on figuring out who to blame. I know that's not a universally recognized distinction, but I find it very useful.

Re: Most Canadians believe Facebook harms their mental health

#269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an odd disclaimer. If it's a quota-based sample then the performance in terms of nominal coverage is going to look similar to a probabilistic sample (especially given the current environment for probabilistic samples, which is quite poor). Probabilistic samples don't report design effects or adjust MOEs to reflect them either, the norm is just to report a classical normal approximate binomial confidence interval…

This disclaimer is applied to pretty much all polling done online, even if the samples are weighted to match the population. If you go look at election polls, for eg., the non-IVR ones will all have something like this, or a "If this were a traditional phone poll, the margin of error would be..." Online polls are usually done by letting people opt-in and then sorting and weighting to sample, just like phone polls. Th…

You replied like you were replying to me. I literally do this for a living. My original post speaks to all of this.

Quota-based sampling -- a preferable term to convenience sampling -- (i.e. non-random samples that allow respondents to opt-in but with invitations to opt in extended to a large pool about whom basic information is gathered in advance, with invitations extended in a manner to quota on population weight targets, often with additional post-survey weighting to hit interaction terms in the targets) is non-probabilistic, but its performance is fine -- and indeed given reasonable quotas, the coverage of the classical MOE -- as I said, a conservative normal approximate binomial CI e.g. +- 1.96 * sqrt(0.5 * 0.5 / n) ~= +- 1/sqrt(n) -- is about the same as it is in a probabilistic survey. If your quotas are exactly correct then it's literally the same.

As you allude to by linking that article, sampling error is a small component of the TSE framework. And crucially, both probabilistic and quota-based samples typically do weighting to targets after they get their sample, and neither typically report the design effect (i.e. how the choice to weight affects the sample variance) when reporting results. The choice not to be honest about design effects is a shame of the polling industry. It probably leads to a good deal of "movement" in the polls being completely illusory, which was part of Gelman's point in his earlier writing on the subject.

What I don't understand is why you would report an estimate like this and not attempt to report any uncertainty. The reader is not likely to take away "design-based inference considerations require that we refuse to state a classical MOE representing sampling error on principled grounds", and instead is likely to take away "number in headline = correct".

I don't think that they "just did a dumb Facebook poll". I am concerned that they did not do a defensible quota sample or that they don't have reasonable population weight targets and that may be the cause for the failure to state any measure of uncertainty.

The article you linked is very, very old, reflecting a fear of convenience sampling within AAPOR a decade ago. YouGov more or less won that argument.

Re: Most Canadians believe Facebook harms their mental health

#270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the ideal would be if everyone had social account like they do with email where they post their content be it pictures text video what have you. and friending someone was simply subscribbing to a rss feed hosted by that persons provider. possiblly with a automated generation and exchange of pgp key for encryption/signing under the hood

Social media sites generally want a large user base. This approach sounds very technical so I'd imagine this being a big barrier to entry. PGP will make this even worse.

My thought is using PGP under the hood where users would never see it basically as a personal ssl cert only invisible to the user.
Post reply on HN