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Comment by spywaregorilla | Hacker News Reader

Which points made you stop and think

For example:

> In fact, in 11 of 12 areas on the slide referenced by the Journal -- including serious areas like loneliness, anxiety, sadness and eating issues -- more teenage girls who said they struggled with that issue also said Instagram made those difficult times better rather than worse.

All the reporting has been about how the research found that Instagram was so terrible for teenage girls, but that seems to be a total mischaracterization. Honestly, it seems like if you ask teenage girls about anything (clothing stores, schools, television) there's going to be a mix of positive and negative experiences. Is the bar we are holding facebook to that no matter how much good they do that any negative experiences outweigh that? Is that a bar we would hold anything else to?

> According to internal studies retrieved by Haugen, Facebook found that 13.5% of teen girls say Instagram makes thoughts of suicide worse, and 17% of teen girls say Instagram makes eating disorders worse.

This is a snippet of the research mark's referring to. Oh good, only 13.5% of girls feeling more suicidal.

No that's of girls who have thoughts of suicide, 13.5% say it makes it worse. Ok, is that good or bad? The number is meaningless without a control.

One person having one more thought of suicide is too many. So no number - other than zero - is "meaningless".

If Facebook made money doing something they knew there was a non-zero risk of pushing even one person to suicide, they are a sociopathic organization.

That's a high bar. Let's shut down malls, competitive sports, grades in schools, hell schools themselves, teen magazines, television, arcades, even suicide hotlines, etc because they all made at least one person feel more suicidal.

And then you could say, well, maybe some of those places didn't do the research. In which case, isn't that worse? If they are making people more suicidal and they don't even care enough to research and find out, how are they possibly going to get better? I would much rather an institution research the harms (and benefits) that it may be causing than to just turn a blind eye.

While we're at it, we should start tearing down any large or particularly beautiful bridges and condemning their architects and engineers, there's a ton of researching showing how those things increase suicides.

They compared to other social media and found that IG is worse.

> No that's of girls who have thoughts of suicide,

Are you sure? Do you have the study? Iirc the sample was extremely small. It's unlikely that they had a large enough subset of suicidal girls.

While it did make it (suicidal thoughts, aiui) worse for 13.5%, it made it better for 38% (see https://s.wsj.net/public/resources/documents/mental-health-f... slide 10). Is that better than schools? Is that better than television? Is it better than malls? Is that even good overall or bad overall? How does it compare to competitive sports? What about grades in school?

I mean, we could take the position that if any of these cause any teen girls (or boys) to be more suicidal we should condemn that thing and rid ourselves of it, but I think that would be a mistake.

I think you'd find that there's nothing left after you got rid of all the things that even one teenager reports makes their life worse.

We need to see the actual data to conclude either way. It's so easy to make a statement like that which sounds compelling but conveniently hides some nastiness somewhere else. Just as it is so easy for the whistleblower to cherry pick a stat to make her point. Neither of them are lying but their framing may have some level of dishonesty which is obscured from us since we can't look at the bigger picture. We have no idea how these questions were asked, the methodology, etc.

Anyway, there's lots of research on social media done in universities, so we don't need to take their word for it.

Is there a link to the actual findings of the study? I feel like that statement is cherry picking, and without context there's not much weight to it.

The ultimate issue here (unless I'm misunderstanding the controversy) is about whether Facebook decided to act on the findings of the study which showed Facebook/Instagram was causing harm to teenagers. This sentence from Zuckerberg seems to be disputing the findings of the study, and implying that everything everyone is saying is wrong and/or a lie (or a "mischaracterization" as you called it)

Zuckerberg has zero credibility in my eyes, so I am inclined to call bullshit on that. But if the actual original study is out there, I might skim through it to see if this is just another one of his lies.

> Is there a link to the actual findings of the study?

https://about.fb.com/news/2021/09/research-teen-well-being-a...

> I feel like that statement is cherry picking, and without context there's not much weight to it.

How can you form an option about whether it’s cherry picking if you’re unaware of the context?

As I understand it, the decks linked there are altered post-controversy. I think there are wsj links to the original decks that are more damning.

> As I understand it

You don't. The decks aren't altered. They are annotated. The FB released ones are also much higher quality than the WSJ scans.

> if social media were as responsible for polarizing society as some people claim, then why are we seeing polarization increase in the US while it stays flat or declines in many countries with just as heavy use of social media around the world?

I have a kind of unpopular belief that we'd still have similar polarization if misinfo were just distributed on Fox + MSNBC, websites, and Twitter.

Social media is absolutely not the only responsible party. Many factors are at play, in my opinion our own decisions to think in dualities.

I think Facebook is “that bad”, but one point I thought was believable was about major advertisers not wanting to be associated with hate mongering posts in the first place.

I’m prone to believe that, but also not sure that is has anything to do with the other issues at hand.

I'm not convinced that this is a real concern for most advertisers. Facebook and its properties are so big that they're a potential revenue source you can't ignore. Also, it's different than your ads programmatically appearing on some extremist website for the world to openly make the association. Everyone lives in their own little bubble, and they know the ads have little to do with the content they're seeing, and more with what they engage with or are more likely to buy.

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