No evidence social media time is correlated with teen mental health problems • Hacker News Board

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

#121

Post by taylodl » Fri, Oct 04, 2024, 9:53 PM UTC

pyuser583 wrote: post #106

elmomle wrote: post #69

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.

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!…

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.

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

#122

Post by AStonesThrow » Fri, Oct 04, 2024, 9:55 PM UTC

el_memorioso wrote: post #53

pfdietz wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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 t…

That was the tail end of tobacco's supremacy, but look back to where it started. When explorers found it being cultivated and used medicinally in the New World, it soon became one of the largest cash crops here.

Tobacco was exported to the rest of the world, became a hot commodity for vast plantations, creating a huge labor market (which was filled with enslaved people), and built wealth for many Americans.

Tobacco shaped the Americas as we know them today, and our history would be completely different if it weren't for that industry. And bringing up lung cancer, and expanded diagnoses, and expanded detection, is miniscule in the scope of things, because everyone knew it was a psychoactive drug, everyone knew that smoke makes you cough and clogs everything with gunk, but it had been worth its weight in gold. (Not to mention its gradual adulteration and dilution into something unrecognizable from 500 years ago.)

There's another term of art: "social communication", which encompasses radio, television, and Internet modes such as email and instant message. So we can discuss 'social media' as a specific phenomenon, or we can discuss its niche in the longer history of social communications. It is a morally neutral thing for humans to communicate with one another, but, if the medium is the m[ae]ssage, then the mode of communication will shape how it's composed, sent, received and absorbed.

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

#123

Post by gopher_space » Fri, Oct 04, 2024, 10:07 PM UTC

elicksaur wrote: post #57

Spivak wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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

There were factual errors specific enough that the erroneous data could be used to support opposing conclusions?

Everything about this lit review (sorry, meta-analysis) gets weird in the conclusions. It's like reading anthro papers written before the 70s.

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

#124

Post by Urovovic » Fri, Oct 04, 2024, 11:03 PM UTC

ghusto wrote: post #95

ergonaught wrote: post #68

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…

Every parent already knows this. I wonder why they're trying to disprove it so badly?

[dead]

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

#125

Post by gotoeleven » Sat, Oct 05, 2024, 12:11 AM UTC

oneepic wrote: post #115

gotoeleven wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is this "scathing"? He's literally just positing simple facts, which may or may not be true. This tendency of people nowadays to focus on tone and other irrelevant characteristics of an argument (as it is made) is dumb.

I argue it's relatively scathing, because Haidt's wording is much more dramatic, negative, and more aimed at a person than Ferguson's wording is. By "facts" I assume you mean claims, no? I'm not sure how tone would be irrelevant; similar to what a sibling commenter said, tone conveys quite a bit of information. It seems unwise or "dumb" to ignore that, because we're still humans talking to each other, even if it's bi…

Sorry what exactly does his tone, whatever it may be, convey about whether or not the study in question was done well? I know it's difficult for some people but if you want to do science you have to focus on the facts. This tactic of mentioning the tone ("scathing") has only one purpose in a scientific discussion and that is to throw chaff into the air and derail the conversation with nonsense. Other examples of this are: you pronounced a name wrong! that's not my pronoun! "othering"! racisnogynism!

And yes a posited fact is also known as a claim.

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

#126

Post by positr0n » Sat, Oct 05, 2024, 8:02 AM UTC

orwin wrote: post #43

invalidname wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but then why would it impact girls far more than boys?

Different coping mechanism, boys will more often look for external causes.

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_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).

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

#127

Post by charlie90 » Sat, Oct 05, 2024, 8:21 AM UTC

randomdata wrote: post #56

elashri wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Anything with a comment section is social media in my eyes, TikTok has a comment section. So does YouTube, Twitch, Instagram, and all the other popular social media sites.

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

#128

Post by MailleQuiMaille » Sat, Oct 05, 2024, 1:20 PM UTC

m0llusk wrote: post #4

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.

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.

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

#129

Post by ergonaught » Sat, Oct 05, 2024, 2:43 PM UTC

ghusto wrote: post #95

ergonaught wrote: post #68

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…

Every parent already knows this. I wonder why they're trying to disprove it so badly?

Because almost everything "everyone knows" is actually false.

As in my own anecdote, our kids probably need better friends. It may not be their social media time that causes problems, but their friend groups coupled with their current state of neurological/psychological development.

ex: I don't have enough information to reliably conclude that "social media" causes their problems. If they had better friends, "social media time" might have improved their "mental health".

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

#130

Post by mike_hearn » Sat, Oct 05, 2024, 6:23 PM UTC

spondylosaurus wrote: post #62

Spivak wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think skepticism is warranted since (1) This study is specifically NOT making the claim "social media is definitely fine and good for kids," so really more like skepticism at anyone trying to draw a conclusion of "...and therefore we should let Instagram off the hook :)" and (2) There is a reasonable case to be made that a lot of adults say that social media makes them miserable, and therefore that probably extends…

Instagram starts off the hook by default. If there's no evidence it's causing a problem, then there's no hook for it to be let off to begin with.

> No single study is definitive, including this one!

We default to the null hypothesis of no effect. It's not good scientific practice to assume a thing is true and then assert (for any study) that because it's just one study it can't convince you otherwise. This particular paper is at any rate not a study at all, it's a meta-analysis. So what it's saying is that they reviewed a lot of research and there's no evidence.