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Comment by trentgreene | Hacker News Reader

Lukewarm take: It's hard to isolate FB as a major determiner in kids well being when its rise (and controversy) coincides with declining economic opportunities and massive political instability. Was Facebook the reason I was depressed as a teenager, or was it that my single mom was visibly living paycheck to paycheck? Hard to say.

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On the other hand, when I was a teenager, Facebook still had a chronological feed, and at one point didn't even have a feed. Friends posted photos of what they were doing. People didn't really post links, presumably because they didn't show pretty preview thumbnails and summaries.

For a kid growing up in a rural area with few opportunities to socialize without driving for miles, Facebook and texting were a genuinely great way for me to have a social life.

Of course, with algorithmic feeds, nobody posting original content any more, ads, and blogspam links radicalizing my relatives, Facebook is not longer a good place to socialize. Even when people do post original content, it's hard to see because it gets buried behind oceans of promoted content and ads. But I think I can safely say that an older incarnation of Facebook had a positive mental impact on me.

Related: Does anyone know of any studies that actually isolates social media as harmful to well being? Time spent on social media is a poor indicator given that it could be valuable escapism. Like any comparison of kids who have _no_ exposure to social media, but share otherwise identical socio-economic situations?

Do you mean besides Facebook’s own internal research that shows it’s harmful? It seems like their employees would know best, since they have access to the most data.

https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/facebook-knows-instagram-is...

The data is based on asking people things. It’s not scientific. Repeatedly pointing out this as an easy gotcha against FB is not helping. It makes attacks on FB appear to lack real merit and authenticity.

TBH, having worked in big companies, I don't really trust the quality of their research without really thinking through it myself -- is there a non-paywall version of that article that has specifics about what the data showed?

More direct to your question: Not necessarily anything more than their research, but something that details what specifically their research shows and what those research methods were?

FWIW: I did end up finding a nonpaywall version, and the research wasn't super reliable / great. They asked people specifically how instagram made them feel, which is subject to a lot of biases and not a solid objective indicator. I understand it may be the best we do, but that's not a great reason to trust it.

> Was Facebook the reason I was depressed as a teenager, or was it that my single mom was visibly living paycheck to paycheck?

Probably, the collapse of nuclear family in western society and ultimately the sexual liberation. Personal circumstances aside, statistically speaking.

> coincides with declining economic opportunities and massive political instability

If you mean the US (as per $DEFAULT_COUNTRY), it's kinda hilarious to see that you call this ‘massive political instability’.

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