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Comment by ahahahahah | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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

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.

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.

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