Facebook's own data is not as conclusive about teens and mental health
npr.org
npr.org
And since when do teens care about the disapproval of adults? When I was a kid, video games were the terrible thing. I didn't know any kids who bought into that narrative—we knew they were harmless fun and kept playing.
I still struggle with this idea, and have been working to overcome feeling immense guilt when I take some time to blow off steam playing a game for a few hours.
I recall a classmate in college relating to me that he had put in over 8000 hours in various games. I almost pitied him. A year of his life gone, unproductively looking at a computer screen.
Of course plenty of people have similar habits. Older people watch a ton of television, others sink themselves into social media. But I'm glad I never got addicted to gaming.
Your perspective and opinion is valuable. But try not to judge or dismiss others' without the full story. Some of us who played so much did get a lot out of it: socially, intellectually, creatively, etc.
if time is enjoyed, it isn’t wasted, so they say
It’s possible that if it wasn’t video games it would have been something else like partying and drinking.
Some people do it to escape, to block out real life, the means can be substituted if some forms aren’t available.
Do you pity me? I'm not entirely convinced Litterature with a capital L is any better than any other form of escapism. Arguably worse than cleaning the floor of a soup kitchen.
This is kind of argument by stereotype. Of course teens are impact by media.
But if they are telling you social media will make you feel bad about yourself, and you actually are feeling bad about yourself, you are likely to say.. yeah that is probably right. It allows them to cast their insecurities on to "Social Media" and say "I feel this way because of X". Otherwise where are these feelings coming from? Am I really a loser?
My daughter is getting to the age where some of her friends are starting to get smartphones, so I'm trying to sort out what will actually be best for her long-term development. I don't want her to be socially stunted, but I also don't want her to expose her to something that could be detrimental to her mental well-being.
In an ideal world, these kinds of networks would be based on open, federated platforms a la Mastodon, Pixelfed, etc. As it stands I don't feel comfortable trusting the advertising industry to determine how these things should be run.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28812310
Edit: As pointed out by another poster, FB pays NPR, even further muddling the waters. Aaaaaggggghhhhh
Like it or not some entity or group need to be responsible for handling illegal and dangerous content.
As to the article, yeah NPR receives money from a lot of places. Is anyone asking about the motivation of NYT, WSJ, etc? Just trying to remain open minded about motives on all sides!
That being said, this doesn’t mean that Facebook doesn’t have harmful effects. Facebook can lead to negative effects on users, but you have to take content by media platforms notoriously publicly opposed to it with a grain of salt
Public opinion is important to various interests. Don't you think they'd try to manipulate it? Don't you think that astroturf campaigns on social media would be effective in driving narratives? Tons and tons and tons of internet sentiment these days is one influence op or another, and it's immediately obvious when you find a community where sentiment is organic: the difference is night and day, like between Bud Light and a great craft beer.
I also remeber everything being bad for my well being as a teen. Magazines and photoshop were the big thing, now it's just Instagram I guess. There's no shortage of ways to mess with a kids self esteem. Why single out tech and social media? What about sats and college admissions, and sports?
IMO there's not much you can do here. If all her friends are using Insta and she wants to too, she'll have one whether you like it or not.
The only difference is whether you'll know about it, but even that is up for question because many teens create secondary Insta accounts explicitly for the purpose of avoiding their parents' watchful eyes.
Of course this will never happens.
Only thing that is not my choice are ads, though those are relatively benign (but I actively hide uninteresting ads or ads I don't want to see).
Your point would be stronger if you attacked her arguments directly.
> According to Facebook's own annotations of the leaked slides, the finding broadly reported as "30% of teen girls felt Instagram made them feel worse about their bodies" was based on 150 respondents out of a few thousand Instagram users surveyed. They only answered the question about Instagram's role if they had already reported having body image issues. So the finding does not describe a random sampling of teenage girls, or even all the girls in the survey. It's a subset of a subset of a subset.
Can you see how insane this paragraph is? It's like Big Tobacco getting caught with a study that shows that smoking causes cancer. But then they annotate their leaked internal slides saying "well it only cause cancer in 150 out of like thousands of people.. trust us, we annotated the slides." My emphasis is to show how biased the author is -- are we seriously giving credence to the very company that the Wall Street Journal reporting was criticizing? And now we're trusting an employee that has a material stake (stock options, her salary, reputation) in protecting the company? I'm not sold that social media is the "worst thing ever," but NPR really needs to have higher journalistic standards.
> This type of innuendo based commentary is a staple of Fox and conservative media.
It really isn't, and I think this is a really unfair criticism of GP. It's pretty much just being skeptical 101.
I think a better analogy to smoking would be "30% of smokers felt that cigarettes caused them to cough chronically" in a survey of people who already had a chronic cough.
That's not the same thing as "smoking causes chronic cough in 30% of people" - rather "smoking makes coughing worse in 30% of people who already had a chronic cough." Maybe they got that from smoking, maybe they didn't, but the data doesn't show that, and it cannot be extrapolated to the general population. More data is needed.
It is in fact a subset of a subset.
[edit] btw 150 people can be enough to draw statistically significant conclusions but you need to properly design your survey and you need a suitably random sampling of your target population. Not sure this has either?
Looking at the data : https://about.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Instagram-Te...
From page 4: The research presented instagram users with a survey about a select negative experience they may have had. Only if the user reported having had such an experience did they get a random "deep dive" ...
So the "reported" here just mean answered a previous question and does not precede using Instagram or smoking.
(From my perspective, I'm a statistician by training, the misrepresentation is egreggious IMHO. )
Indeed, "fallacies" are just discrete constraints on a problem like this.
Ie., that the author's relationship to facebook makes no difference to the truth of their claims shows that we need evidence relevant to their truth first.
In otherwords, you're effectively conditioning on the claims being false when you include this relationship.
> Academic achievement (n= 2,020) was obtained from administrative records providing the end-of-grade standardized test scores for reading and math for the 2014–2015 school year.
> School belonging (n= 2,104) was assessed with the six-item Psychological Sense of School Membership23 self-report scale of school membership (e.g., I feel like a real part of my school; People at my school are friendly to me; [0] Not at all true to [5] very true), α= 0.84.
> Conduct problems (n= 2,103) were assessed using the 26-item Problem Behavior Frequency Scale24 of behavioral aggression and violence in the last 30 days (e.g., In the last 30 days, how many times have you …skipped school; stolen something from another student; [0] Never, [1] 1–2 times, [2] 3–5 times, [3] 6–9 times, [4] 10–19 times, and [5] 20+ times). This scale was converted into a count of reported problems (binary for each item rated >1 then summed).
> Psychological distress (n=2,104) was assessed using the six-item Kessler Psychological Distress Scale25 to measure the frequency of participants’ feelings of distress over the past month (e.g., During the past 30 days… about how often did you feel worthless; about how often did feel restless or fidgety? [0] None of the time to [4] all of the time), α= 0.66.
> General physical health (n= 2,097) was assessed with an item from the Add Health General Health and Diet survey26 (i.e., In general, how is your health? [0] Poor to [4] excellent).
I find it not surprising that having a social media account is not statistically related to the results of these measurements. And I suspect for example, being exposed to online sexual contents will also not affect as well. When talking about these things, I tend to be skeptical of behaviorism and feel like a more nuanced methodology should be taken.
At the very least an editors note disclosing such a substantial conflict ought to be at the top of the page, not the bottom. This really colors my opinion of NPR’s editorial and ethical standards.
I think most people view whistleblower protections as aligning the interests of the public and the whistleblower.
Sure, it may create an incentive to do so. However, the facts must prove to be true and enforcement action must happen before the payout happens. So, however exaggerated the claims being made by the whistleblower in question, if it is not borne out by facts and substantiation, they are not getting anything for it. I am not sure I see an issue with that.
The whistleblower must provide actionable (in court) and therefore truthful information. Such information was, by definition, kept secret from regulation authorities who are tasked with enforcing societal rules. Rewarding this the whistleblower is not a conflict of interest.
I mean, you could construe the wordings to say that the conflict is between loyalty towards the firm and loyalty to society / laws, and if this is a meaningful and acceptable rather than absurd contrast, then you are probably Elon Musk. For everyone else, it is hard to see a conflict of interest here.
This is exactly what NPR and the journalist has done here.
https://adfontesmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Media-B...
(For an example of a source that has the same goal but does a better job, see something like PBS Newshour. They've got a pretty thorough leftward bias, but it doesn't compromise the quality of their reporting nearly as severely as it does NPR's).
The one surprise here is the claim that The Atlantic is farther left than the other sources mentioned, as far left as MSNBC. I still remember them as the first mainstream source brsve enough to break the taboo of acknowledging that the lunatic illiberalism sweeping the country had a solid foothold on the left too, after a couple years of being shocked by the phenomenon and the media's silence on it. They continue to publish taboo-breaking analysis; I can't think of any analogue the NYT to Bruenig or Friesersdorf.
Eg: Stratchery for tech, Sinocism for China, Derek Lowe for drug development, Razib Khan for Genomics based anthropology etc. I also follow a select few twitter handles that do all the 1st source reporting on specific topics. This is super useful for war/contentious zones like the Middle East & Kashmir, etc. Statistically sound sources like 538 and Pew Research tend to be pretty good too.
In some cases, reading somewhat biased sources on each side is also helpful. Sources like Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, Greenwald, etc., all have their biases, but they have a high moral bar. They never lie, but their biases do make them opine in ways that can sometimes include jumping to conclusions or purposely ignoring possible causations. Either ways, they are a part of healthy media diet. I generally like things coming out of the Rat-o-sphere & Scott Alexander, as they have a high bar on what constitutes a good source or proof.
The Economist and The Atlantic have been doing relatively good even handed reporting. NYT seems like it is in an internal crisis, but it does occasionally produce gems when reporting as 1st sources. WaPo/Guardian/BBC have long stopped being worth my time. In India, I really like The Print.
Hope that helps.
“I've been covering kids + tech since ~2007. The Art of Screen Time pubbed in 2018. I've spoken on these topics at Aspen Ideas, Atlantic Fest, Apple, Google, SXSW. Collaborated with Mozilla. Adam's startup was acquired by Facebook in 2019. He works in hardware.”
I'm not a huge fan of Facebook (been off the platform since 2012), but these are great ideas, especially the last one. It's refreshing in the midst of all the doom.
If the research we got is the best we can realistically get, this author is making a dishonest and misleading argument.
At one point, escaping the negativity of it was enough, these days you're plastered with its toxicity even when not being a part it.
'no such thing as bad publicity' I guess.
That said, the article makes what I think is an important point, that social media is not universally negative, it has some positive effects for some people. I usually use the word "cancer" to describe my attitude to Facebook and Twitter, and why I won't use it, but that is intentional hyperbole to stop further discussion.
I used to believe that rhetoric like 'permeates the fabric of society' was so cheesy used when used to refer to the outward damage generated by social media, and yet here we are today when even when not being a part of it you are made to be a part of it.
You even see it everywhere, ads, media, recruitment agencies asking you for social profiles, etc... I dont know a single person [IRL] that does not have a Facebook account, not a single one. And everybody acts like they actually depend on them... How sad is that?
I used to enjoy web forums a lot, back in the PHP dominated era (MyBB, PHPBB, SMF, vBulletin, Invision, etc). I was an active part of that culture... Had Fotolog, MySpace, DeviantArt, and the like for ages... Grew up as social media evolved and enjoyed Facebook as much as the next guy at a time... I even evangelized for it when other social networks were leading... matter of fact, I reported a XSS vulnerability to them back in 2006, never got thanked for it...
But it changed... It became dark, negative... I felt worse after logging in, and became antagonized by it... So I figured it was me, and maybe I was just too old for it, just like that old pub I used to go, 'its all kids these days'... So I quit... And now more people are realizing the same... Maybe its an age thing... A lot of people go with 'but that's the way I reach my loved ones', bullshit... I live half way across the world and got no problem reaching my fam through Telegram or whatever...
I grew out of Facebook, I guess...
I'd like to reference a past comment I made on this issue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28314603
Most people I know have Facebook accounts and use sparingly to keep up with friends, family, and hobby groups. For the majority of users, the realities of Facebook are relatively boring. Nothing like the hyper-dramatic portrayal of social media as a "threat to our democracy" or an incurable, society-destroying addiction.
I think traditional media is overplaying their hand by cherry-picking the most problematic Facebook users and trying to tell everyone that those rare edge cases are actually the norm on Facebook. These stories are extremely popular with people who don't use Facebook because they validate their decision in an almost self-congratulatory manner. Everyone likes being told they made the right decision, so reading stories that Facebook is evil is some nice validation for someone who happens to fall into the non-Facebook camp.
Meanwhile, I think the general public is going to tire of these hyper-dramatic Facebook stories. The anti-Facebook news stories are starting to feel like an exaggerated moral panic relative to the boring realities of the average person's Facebook experience.
I am, however, concerned about the second-order effects of this new anti-Facebook culture war. What, exactly, do people expect to come of all of these calls for more regulation of speech on the internet? It's starting to feel like the tech communities are being tricked into rallying behind calls for more government intervention and censorship of speech on the internet, which is not something I would have predicted a decade ago.
* That a complete madman would be elected president of the US.
* That people would gobble up all kinds of nonsense facts on an ongoing pandemic; which for many lead to them not getting vaccinated which ultimately lead to their death.
* Some LARPers on a chan forum would garner a cult following in and outside the US and "anon" would be an almost household name. Many people believed this cult so strongly that it in many cases lead to families being shattered; a few even lead an insurrection on the US capital.Life immediately became less depressing after leaving social media for good. Because my family, especially my cousins, use Facebook and Instagram for communication I'm still forced to use them to a minimal extent. When I do use them, I don't see a lot of happy people. In fact I see a lot of signs of mental instability in the profiles that these two sites want me to see and friend/follow. Lots of narcissism.
Guess what? Not all data is good.