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Comment by crate_barre | Hacker News Reader

Where’s that insta internal investigation on how it’s toxic to young girls (indicative of social media in general).

Nowhere? I suspect few people actually read the report [1]. They asked teen girls (and boys) how Instagram made them feel. The most common response for girls was "no effect" 43%, followed by "somewhat better" 29%, then "somewhat worse" at 18%, then "much better" at 8%, and lastly "much worse" at 3%. The media conspicuously ignored that substantially more girls felt that Instagram made them feel better than worse.

1. https://about.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Instagram-Te...

I don't trust any research Facebook releases about the impact of their own platform and would take such with a grain of salt. There is no incentive for them to ever release negative results.

That's easily spotted if they preregister their experiments.

You might not trust them, but the quote is taken out of context by the media and whenever it gets regurgitated on the internet. It's used as some kind of a "See, I knew I was correct in disliking them!" idea.

They didn't release these results. It was leaked.

That "much worse" at 3% was represented by a single reply.

When i read about the study my biggest surprise was how poorly it was. A poll with 40 people is so pointless that I don't understand why they didn't hire professionals to do a real survey.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com