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Facebook proven to negatively impact mental health

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Re: Facebook proven to negatively impact mental health

#141

Post by ejb999 »

karaterobot wrote: post #132
holoduke wrote: post #77

Today I disabled Facebook and Instagram. I also removed all shortlinks to various newssites. I want to avoid them as well. Including Reddit . The only thing I am allowed to read is hackernews. I find that one of the few good sources. Even for general news.

That's great! Sadly, a lot of the HN front page is just a direct link to Twitter. Reddit shows up occasionally. It would be nice if there was a way to filter out sources from the front page.

I agree, I can't even get to any of the twitter 'posts' by clicking on them - all major social media is blocked (by me) in my hosts file - which rules out a lot of the low-effort reposts from twitter.

Re: Facebook proven to negatively impact mental health

#142

Post by bakal »

PuppyTailWags wrote: post #86
gergov wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, engagement at all cost it is, but there is a fundamental difference. Television required professionals where even wrestling and reality TV is scripted: it requires some sort of willful ignorance from the viewer to engage with it. Social media pushes the illusion that you are not engaging with professionals but peers, and the dominant signals (how many views, likes, comments, etc.) of this day and age were not…

I don't really agree with this. Rush Limbaugh successfully ran a platform on mostly entirely television that deeply poisoned the cultural landscape of the USA at the time (he was defending Reagan's neglect of HIV/AIDS and playing "another one bites the dust" when Freddie Mercury died), and laid the foundation on current polarized rhetoric strategies. He spread lies that Obama wasn't a natural born citizen. He blamed…

No post body was provided.

Re: Facebook proven to negatively impact mental health

#144

Post by random314 »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #136
Tainnor wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In most fields of study you can't really perform double-blind experiments. We know that smoking is linked to cancer through decades of correlational studies and careful analysis of confounding factors, for example. The article discusses how the study looked at different universities during the same time period, some of which had access to facebook and some of which didn't, and discovered that in the first case there…

The smoking comparison is very apt I think. People and institutions persistently pointing out that correlation isn't causation is a big part of why it took decades for the link between smoking and cancer to become commonly accepted after it was well established. Some were surely acting in their own personal financial interests but I'm also certain that a lot of it was more nuanced and personal. People need to think o…

Smoking to lung cancer has a very direct delivery mechanism, inhaling tar into the lungs. The effect size and sample sizes are big. The hypothesized mechanisms here - unfavorable social comparison is far more tenuous, and the sample size here is number of universities- not number of students.

These 2 are vastly different situations.

To give an example. Establishing causal effect between nicotine and lung cancer is an open question, even as the causal effect of smoking on cancer is very clear.

Re: Facebook proven to negatively impact mental health

#146

Post by sixstringtheory »

andrewla wrote: post #137
sixstringtheory wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, the article claims the exact opposite > While many studies have found a correlation between the use of social media and various symptoms related to mental health, so far, it has been challenging to ascertain whether social media was actually the cause of poor mental health. By applying a novel research method, researchers have now succeeded in establishing such a causality But doesn't elaborate on the new metho…

I note in my other reply in this thread that they do describe some of the methodology (although I have not yet located a copy of the paper itself) appears to be address this. They looked at the mental health (as measured by self-reported surveys) among schools over time and cross-referenced that with the rollout of Facebook over time. So they could compare the change in mental health at schools the received Facebook…

Hmm, yes I read that but it seemed so basic that I assumed it couldn't be considered "novel." Also it would appear to establish correlation but not causation.

I assume to do that you have to establish the complete pathway and mechanism from someone using facebook to an increase in depression, like showing observations of changes in neurotransmitters or brain structure that have been proven to cause changes in mental health, and then proving that facebook caused the changes in those levels. (FWIW I assume this could be done and that we may see those kinds of results if it were done, but I haven't actually seen a study like that. I also assume the hypothesis in general.)

For instance, using the example of smoking from another commenter, from the CDC website [0]:

> - Poisons in cigarette smoke can weaken the body’s immune system, making it harder to kill cancer cells. When this happens, cancer cells keep growing without being stopped.

> - Poisons in tobacco smoke can damage or change a cell’s DNA. DNA is the cell’s “instruction manual” that controls a cell’s normal growth and function. When DNA is damaged, a cell can begin growing out of control and create a cancer tumor.

These seem more like things that can be tested in laboratory settings that are easily reproducible and rely on more objective observations than self-reporting.

I'm neither a neuroscientist or social scientist so I'm just trying to understand, not saying they're wrong or that the research is even flawed.

[0]: https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/campaign/tips/diseases/cancer.ht...

Re: Facebook proven to negatively impact mental health

#147

Post by pohl »

tmpz22 wrote: post #44
wahnfrieden wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you know you can look at profiles, not just the feed?

So if we engage with facebook more, and invest more time, we can have slightly better content?

Maybe think of it in terms of active vs passive engagement, rather than more or less engagement. In other words: using the tool, rather than letting the tool use you.

Re: Facebook proven to negatively impact mental health

#148

Post by srcreigh »

andrewla wrote: post #99

As with all studies in the social sciences, one of two principles apply. First, if the conclusions are counterintuitive or unexpected, then when you look closer, you will find that the methodology is garbage and that it does not support the conclusions given. Second, if the conclusions reflect things that you believe are true, when you look closer, you will find that the methodology is garbage and that it does not su…

The methodology in this paper is a step above simple correlation analysis. Facebook in its early rollout period was released to some universities & colleges and not others. This study compares the increases of depression & anxiety in the schools where Facebook was made available vs schools where it wasn't.

Of course, it'd be nice to see if the difference in increased rates of depression & anxiety are themselves abnormal in the first place... Not sure if the study goes into that depth.

Re: Facebook proven to negatively impact mental health

#149

Post by rajup »

andrewla wrote: post #140
andrewla wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately I was not able to locate a preprint for the paper itself, so we only have this article summarizing. First I'll say that without preregistration of the methodology, there's a lot that is immediately suspicious. > The researchers built an index based on 15 relevant questions in the NCHA, in which students were asked about their mental health in the past year Why these 15? What was the "relevance" criteria…

I hate that I was baited into taking a closer look at this rather than just sticking with my trite dismissal. I did locate a preprint of the paper [1], but have not yet looked at it to determine if any of my above criticisms hold water. Nonetheless I remain blithely confident that this study is not going to be the one to break the mold. [1] https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/256787/1/1801812535....

So it is a low-effort shallow dismissal then?

Re: Facebook proven to negatively impact mental health

#150

Post by pjscott »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #78

Is the research design capable of distinguishing from the opposite causation here; what if people who are more depressed are more likely to use facebook more? This occurred to me because I more and more think of social media use in terms of addiction. For more typical addictive behavior with drugs, we are more likely to think people who are depressed are more likely to develop addictive relationship to alcohol (or ot…

Yes, the study design is able to tell which way the causality points. Not all colleges got access to Facebook at the same time (back before it was open to the general public) so this is sort of a natural experiment: you can look at the colleges that had Facebook access and compare them to the ones that didn't, assuming that they're probably pretty similar in all other confounding variables, and that people don't choose their college based on whether or not it has Facebook access. For more information on this type of design, the phrase to google is "difference in differences".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Difference_in_differences

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