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Memories of tobacco "researchers" claiming the science linking smoking to cancer is inconclusive.
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.
That sounds odd considering pretty clear statistics correlating teen girls suicide rates with the rise of Instagram. Can someone who understands the subject matter more than I do comment on this further?
I quit it and my mental health improved. Many others in a controlled study found the same effect.
Alcott and colleagues (2020) randomly assigned 2743 adults to either deactivate their Facebook accounts for one month or not. This study also found that deactivation significantly improved subjective well-being and that “80% of the treatment group agreed that deactivation was good for them.” The treatment group was also more likely to report using Facebook less and having uninstalled the app from their phones post-experiment.
Source: https://www.afterbabel.com/p/phone-based-childhood-cause-epi...
Finally, this strikes me as the same playbook that big tobacco used in the 90s. "Doubt is our product," Michaels quotes a cigarette executive as saying, "since it is the best means of competing with the 'body of fact' that exists in the minds of the general public.
Since the full text is only available behind a paywall it's difficult to make any substantive comment except that there sure is a lot of grant money available to study this topic. The lack of any conclusive or strong evidence given the multiplicity of the same studies over and over suggests if there is an effect it is weak at best. Also notable is that most studies pre-2019 on childrens mental health were fairly posi…
https://www.christopherjferguson.com/Social%20Media%20Experi...
Edit: the authors look different so probably just related
That sounds odd considering pretty clear statistics correlating teen girls suicide rates with the rise of Instagram. Can someone who understands the subject matter more than I do comment on this further?
I mean, I think it also correlates with poor environmental and financial outlook on the future, more pressure to perform well in activities or academically, stricter rules around going outside and doing things on your own or friends without scrutiny, among other things.
social media use does not predict mental health problems in youth
- Social media use by itself doesn't predict mental health problems because kids without mental health problems also use social media.
- Social media use by itself doesn't predict mental health problems because there are benefits to certain kids that offset the equivalent problems they would have in its absence (e.g., the closeted gay kid in a rural town would be depressed without supportive online communities).
- Social media by itself doesn't predict mental health problems because the type of social media platform is more important than the binary of using/not using.
- Social media by itself doesn't predict mental health problems because it exacerbates problems without necessarily causing new ones outright.
- Social media by itself doesn't predict mental health problems because kids who don't use it are (sadly) more socially isolated and suffer as a result.
And maybe none of those are true! But I'm curious to see if there's something unexpected going on.
Not so sure about this; would need to read the whole paper. "No evidence" could just mean that causality could not be proved (admittedly very difficult to prove), which doesn't mean that there is indeed no causality. I'm not sure I'd trust this researcher any more than I'd trust any other single paper on the topic; and the preponderance of papers has shown there is a link though the details may be in dispute. What is…