Evidence Grows That Online Social Networks Have Negative Effects
technologyreview.com
Evidence Grows That Online Social Networks Have Negative Effects
1–10 of 46 posts
Re: Evidence Grows That Online Social Networks Have Negative Effects
#2Hm,
I don't think the title quite follows from the article. There might be an association, but even supposing there is causation the independent/dependent variables aren't necessarily known here: people with low social trust (for other reasons) could be more likely to engage in online social networks as opposed to meatspace social networks.
Re: Evidence Grows That Online Social Networks Have Negative Effects
#3I signed up on facebook because my friends went on a trip and I wanted to see the photos of the foreign country they are visiting.
When you add people you barely know, I think it would be a different feel when they upload how beautiful their life is.
Re: Evidence Grows That Online Social Networks Have Negative Effects
#4I signed up on facebook because my friends went on a trip and I wanted to see the photos of the foreign country they are visiting. When you add people you barely know, I think it would be a different feel when they upload how beautiful their life is.
That's just it though: No one has much of an interest of presenting anything less than a "beautiful" life on FB. What you're watching in that news feed isn't reality, it's a carefully curated set of ideal content to make that person look better/happier/richer than they actually are.
Everyone has demons, but no one wants to air that to their peers.
Re: Evidence Grows That Online Social Networks Have Negative Effects
#5Re: Evidence Grows That Online Social Networks Have Negative Effects
#6I signed up on facebook because my friends went on a trip and I wanted to see the photos of the foreign country they are visiting. When you add people you barely know, I think it would be a different feel when they upload how beautiful their life is.
That's just it though: No one has much of an interest of presenting anything less than a "beautiful" life on FB. What you're watching in that news feed isn't reality, it's a carefully curated set of ideal content to make that person look better/happier/richer than they actually are. Everyone has demons, but no one wants to air that to their peers.
I think you're focusing on the wrong part of the point being made by notastartup though. Given that people are going to try to make their selves look good regardless, it's wise to be selective in who you let into your newsfeed. Someone who connects with a lot of people they barely know will be worse off than someone who only accepts (and requests) connections to people with whom they have a close enough relationship that the happiness will always be mutual.
Re: Evidence Grows That Online Social Networks Have Negative Effects
#7Bad title. Article only says about correlation.
Re: Evidence Grows That Online Social Networks Have Negative Effects
#8Hm, I don't think the title quite follows from the article. There might be an association, but even supposing there is causation the independent/dependent variables aren't necessarily known here: people with low social trust (for other reasons) could be more likely to engage in online social networks as opposed to meatspace social networks.
Endogenous factors are addressed in the paper. Nothing personal, but I'm getting so tired of people on HN saying 'well, maybe they made an elementary statistical mistake...' They're professional statisticans working with a large and robust dataset,a nd they devoted 6-7 pages of the paper to discussing how they controlled for such factors. And they brought up your exact point in the very first paragraph of that discussion:
[...] In particular, while the effect on well-being has been largely explored in the case of face-to-face interactions, we do not have conclusive evidence about the endogenous relationship between online interactions and well-being. This weakness suggests caution about the generality of the results provided by previous literature. Individual effects such as personal characteristics may be correlated with both participation in SNSs and well-being. Happier people may also be more outgoing and open-minded, and may have a higher propensity for various kinds of social interaction. [...]
It's fine to be skeptical, but couldn't you at least do the authors the courtesy of looking at their methods and pointing out where you think they fall short?
Re: Evidence Grows That Online Social Networks Have Negative Effects
#9This is my summary based on skimming the article:
The authors find that social network usage has a negative correlation with happiness.
To control for unhappy people turning to social networks (reverse causality), the use instrumental variables (IV). This involves finding an instrument, that is something that causes people to use social networks more/less in a quasi-random way. Their instrument is availability of DSL. I'm not sure how they deal with DSL availability also affecting happiness through other mechanisms (e.g. general internet usage). In any case, the correlation between social network usage and happiness is not significant once they use the IV strategy.
They then use a method I'm not familiar with (structural equation modelling, SEM) to obtain some other results which are discussed in the abstract.
I believe that the abstract (and the popular article discussing it) should have mentioned the insignificance of the correlation when using the IV strategy, since I doubt many casual readers would by able to critically evaluate the SEM strategy (which yielded the results that the abstract and journalistic article discussed).
Re: Evidence Grows That Online Social Networks Have Negative Effects
#10Hm, I don't think the title quite follows from the article. There might be an association, but even supposing there is causation the independent/dependent variables aren't necessarily known here: people with low social trust (for other reasons) could be more likely to engage in online social networks as opposed to meatspace social networks.
Endogenous factors are addressed in the paper. Nothing personal, but I'm getting so tired of people on HN saying 'well, maybe they made an elementary statistical mistake...' They're professional statisticans working with a large and robust dataset,a nd they devoted 6-7 pages of the paper to discussing how they controlled for such factors. And they brought up your exact point in the very first paragraph of that discus…
I agree that we should always at least read the linked article (and sometimes the original paper) before bringing out "correlation does not equal causation".
However, you are overstating the case for the author's having dealt with reverse causality. From the conclusion:
When we addressed causality in IV estimates, the significance of the correlation between participation in social networking sites and subjective well-being disappeared.
See my top level comment for my own take on the article.