This is tangential, but are we all just credulously swallowing this claim now? What's next, casual references to the obviously-stolen 2020 election? The Facebook study claimed nothing close to "destroying teens' mental health"; it didn't even show net harm! The topline claims were something like 30% of teens self-reporting that use made them feel worse... With 30% reporting no change and 30% reporting it made them feel better. That's ignoring the multiple other problems with the interpretations of the study that are floating around:
1) intentionally unrepresentative sample and minuscule sample size
2) self-reporting, which decades of higher-quality research has shown is not correlated with harm when it comes to the relationship between teens and media use (high-quality studies have so far shown a minimal relationship between phone/social media use and any objective measure of teen mental health)
3) other larger studies are even more positive than Facebook's internal study, showing almost 3x as many teens claiming an improvement in mental health from social media than a decline[1]
I know we're in a post-truth world, but it's a really jarring reminder how universally the rot has spread that this is an Ars Technica article posted on HN, both entities that I once considered to at least display a _pretense_ of intellectual honesty.
The weirdest part about all of this is that I hold and have always held a very low opinion of Facebook, and think their amoral reputation is fully deserved. It's just a more strongly-held belief that it's insane to barrel full-speed towards destroying any sense that we all live in the same reality. It's no more defensible when Ars+HN does it than when a QAnon Facebook group does.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2021/10/06/1043138622/facebook-instagram...