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Comment by julienb_sea | Hacker News Reader

This article discusses correlational evidence. The basis for causation is speculative at best, and there is a long list of cofounding factors.

The side effects of attempting to bar social media usage by teens might further amplify the problem, driving them away from carefully moderated platforms.

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Screen time in general is correlated with depression ( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5574844/ ), so it shouldn't be surprising that specific screen time activities are correlated with depression.

It's popular to demonize Facebook, but the reality is that sedentary activities in general are highly correlated with depressive symptoms. This goes both ways: Being sedentary instead of active is unhealthy and can exacerbate depression, and being depressed can exacerbate sedentary behavior.

Facebook is just one example of a sedentary activity, but watching TV and using a computer for leisure are also highly correlated with depression.

It's entirely possible that Facebook has some unique properties that make it worse than other sedentary time-wasting activities, but we need to be honest that it might simply be equivalent to other sedentary screen time activities in this regard. Without actual data, we're just guessing and projecting our feelings about Facebook onto correlation studies.

> This article discusses correlational evidence. The basis for causation is speculative at best, and there is a long list of cofounding factors.

If you had a well formed hypothesis before conducting a correlational study, and the outcome supported your hypothesis, it is not "just speculative causation" anymore. In fact, short of human experimentation, that is as good of a data as we could ever get.

> The side effects of attempting to bar social media usage by teens might further amplify the problem, driving them away from carefully moderated platforms.

Is there any data, even correlational, for this particular speculation?

Are you calling Facebook "carefully moderated"?

I certainly am calling Facebook and other mainstream social media more carefully moderated than off-the-beaten-path social networks which glorify anorexia, self-harm and other disorders.

Guess it depends on what you want moderated. I don’t consider Facebook very well moderated. They moderate what helps them sell ads and leave the rest of their sewer alone.

These are very serious issues and I don't in any way mean to minimize them but, honestly, nazis and anti-vaxxers are legion on facebook. These groups both pose serious societal threats especially in the middle of a pandemic.

Your very words: "off-the-beaten-path" describes the difference between FB and ... them.

FB does seem to have a moderation system of sorts but it cannot possibly cope with the tsunami of incoming content. FB cannot be considered moderated in any meaningful way unless FB employs a significant proportion of the world's population.

So, I do not agree with you that FB effectively moderate their forum/network. I don't care about other forums/networks - that's whataboutery.

I assert that FB routinely allows: misogyny, misandry, racism and all other forms of hate speech to permeate their network without effective detection, identification and control of such.

Call me out.

They have fractionally more moderation after a white nationalist committed the Christchurch massacre. FB remained silent for two weeks in the aftermath then contributed the below (which doesn’t seem to actually name any changes).

There was a strongly negative reaction here on HN when ISPs started blocking access to the killer’s live stream.

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/facebook-chief-operating...

Moderation is actually the problem. The internet was a better place for everyone when it was just webrings, usenet, and goatse.

The internet was a better place when it didn't have all those people that require moderation.

I think we only feel and think this way because that wss prior to a wider and more gradual Eternal September. I don't think we can go back at this point.

I'd actually attribute that to the technical inaccessibility of the internet meaning that, while not everyone on the internet at that point was smart, they were almost all curious about new things. The user base of the early internet was basically self-selected to be quite full of skeptics.

Yup, you can see this effect all the way to the 2010s, before which "Internet kid" was practically a subculture (or group of subcultures). Once everybody arrived on Facebook, the Internet became an almost-universal social phenomenon. This is cool in its own way, but it also means that "internet people" converges rapidly to "people".

i think size is actually the problem. smaller moderated communities are way better than facebook or unmoderated shitholes

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