Hacker News Reader

Comment by dan-robertson | Hacker News Reader

Yeah I also find it surprising that people are shocked that Facebook have internal studies into e.g. whether instagram causes depression in teenage girls (answer: inconclusive), like they’re a bad company for investigating whether their products have negative effects on people…

View on HN

Its more that people are shocked* that facebook communicated to the outside that such problems were nonexistent, despite knowing that this was a lie.

*not sure wether shocked is the right term to begin with, it seemed more like indignation to me.

Did they actually know it was a lie? E.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/10/opinion/instagram-faceboo...

Thank you for this article. I was beginning to lose hope that there was anyone with a measured view on this issue.

Thanks for the article, it was an interesting read, since I was mostly going of the WSJ stuff before. I nonetheless feel that with social research in the private sector absolute certainty or even studies that would pass peer review are a bit too high of a bar to meet before we can talk about the organisation knowing something. But I guess thats more of a semantic argument.

After reading the NYT article it still seems to me that a more ethical company would have done more to address the probable issues. Meta did very little and seemed to cherrypick the most favourable public studies. Anyyway, all this doesn't seem suprising or even unusual to me. I generally don't think that we should expect companies to act very ethical. Rather, incentive structures should be created/amended in a way so that purely self interested companies act as if they were ethical.

The shock is that someone at Meta looked into these studies and decided not to take actions to fix it because it might hurt their revenue.

We are told again and again that correlation is not causation, but we readily ignore this maxim when we are looking for an account that we hope is true. At a time when Facebook is regularly vilified (sometimes deservedly), wanting to believe that its practices have caused teenagers’ mental health to suffer is understandable. But wanting doesn’t make it so.

[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/10/opinion/instagram-faceboo...

> We are told again and again that correlation is not causation

I'm beginning to suspect that maybe we're told this too often, so we're starting to take it for granted that correlation can't be causation. But the saying actually only means that correlation is not necessarily causation. Quite often, correlation is actually there because of causation.

The shock comes because it doesn’t fit the narrative that Facebook is all evil, all the time. Nuance, complexity, and evenness are lost on some. No one and nothing is all bad all the time.

I think the shock is how old the reports are, and how since then things have not changed, but in fact worsened.

Didn't their own research show that it made 13% of teenage girls who use the platform seriously depressed?

The reporting on this study has been terrible. It was a really small study of female teenage Instagram users who reported having various problems. Of them, 13% blamed Instagram for making things worse, which was actually less than the number that said Instagram made things better. And this is all based on self-reported data anyway, so none of us should be taking it very seriously.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com