Screen time and the young brain – a contemporary moral panic? [pdf]

I see this constantly in his work, he writes as though his argument is driven by data, but if you look closely, the two are often barely related.

> At this point, there is only one theory we know of that can explain why the same thing happened to girls in so many countries at the same time

Ok this is what I mean. The idea that “there is only one theory” is something that’s 100% his opinion (and also, very obviously the opinion he came into the analysis to start with) yet he presents it as something that the royal “We” have agreed upon.

There are hundreds or thousands of theories one could posit about this trend. One of which is the very obvious fact that attitudes towards mental health are changing. I went to school in the mid-2000s. I knew so many people who attempted suicide none of whom were ever hospitalized for it.

I am not arguing that social media on phones is good or that it couldn’t be part of the problem, just that the more data I see going further back the more it looks like there are other things involved too.

I was a teen during precisely that golden age. I was isolated and kind of depressed as a teen but I also remember a ton of interesting culture that really made me feel like there was something to live for. The three standouts in my memory were the great music, the teen and youth subcultures (which back then really were kind of underground), and the incredible frontier feeling of BBSes and then the early Internet.

If I were a teen today I have no idea what would feel like that. There just seems to be nothing. The music is awful. The movies are all remakes and comic book crap. The experience of the Internet is just scrolling social media. All subcultures have been publicized and commoditized. Maybe someone actually living it can contradict me. I hope I’m just old but it really does look bleak.

This perpetuates the narrative of the “coddled mind” AKA dysfunctional generation who are glued to their phones and unable to cope with the “real world” requiring “safe spaces”. How we are all victims to radicalization from social media even though research has not been able to link the two.

It also completely ignores the fact that women are much more likely to be abused, men under-report depression/anxiety, our diets consist of shitty process foods, we don’t exercise as much, the economy has favored the rich again and again, the several research studies which suggest reverse causation, parental abuse etc.

Some readings.

https://www.yesmagazine.org/health-happiness/2023/03/02/soci...

> The CDC’s 2022 report found 3 to 4 times more teens reporting parental abuses (55%) than its 2023 report found for school (15%) or cyber (16%) bullying, even though the agency’s definition of parental abuse is narrower than for peer bullying. LGBTQ+ youth again suffer the most. They are 4 times more likely to be violently abused by household adults and 3 to 5 times more likely to have attempted suicide than non-LGBTQ+ youth.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/we-know-...

> Given the transformative effects of social media, Haidt insisted, it was important to act now, even in the absence of dispositive evidence. “Academic debates play out over decades and are often never resolved, whereas the social-media environment changes year by year,” he said. “We don’t have the luxury of waiting around five or ten years for literature reviews.”

Gabor Mate has more weight in my mind on explaining the rise of mental illness in western society. His book “Myth of Normal” is great and does not contain new information so much as it ties things we know together.

Many things happened the last decades to account for such things.

It's hard to solely blame it on phones with cameras and Instagram. Although it's clear the huge impact it has. We already had social media like msn and pre fb like sites before 2010 that could have had similar effects. Of course fb funded research shows a net positive. And most teenagers already switched to more messy platforms like Snapchat a long time ago.

Anxiety is also higher in boys which have less visual pressure.

Things like older parent and excessive nurturing and overbearing parents also seem to play a big part. As well as the rise of victim culture, which also might have to do with social media.

Uhm, my N900 from 2009 has a front-facing camera and I'm quite sure it wasn't the first.

1. The time period over which he looks is extremely short. Although the change in data looks compelling, I'd really want to see more than just a few years of "normal" levels to be convinced there's really a major deviation from the norm.

2. The argument starts by asserting a correlation (rollout of smart phones, change in the data) but then moves smoothly to a different correlation (social media usage, change in the data).

3. The biggest problem: this is all social science. Someone took a close look at the studies Haidt is using to try and prove a link to social media specifically (vs other causes) and discovered they're of the sort of quality we've come to expect from the field, dominated by tiny unrepresentative samples, bad methodologies, bad statistics and so on.

https://reason.com/2023/03/29/the-statistically-flawed-evide...

To his credit I found this rebuttal on Haidt's Twitter feed and he promises a response. Unfortunately, judging from his tweets so far, that response might not be convincing:

Haidt: "Brown requires a standard of proof not appropriate for a public health crisis"

Reply from someone on Twitter: "Oh no, that's a bad argument I think! We shouldn't be calling for lower standards of evidence during a public health crisis, but the inverse"

Haidt: "Aaron has set his skepticism meter so high that he says none of the 300 studies in the google doc are valid. That is too high. No studies pass muster?"

I don't think Brown actually does assert all 300 are invalid, just that he checked quite a few and none of the ones he spot checked were valid.

But this is a way of thinking that crops up all the time in academic work. Back when I was reviewing COVID papers I was constantly hitting this kind type of assumption in the public health space, that quantity is some proxy/substitute for quality, or that you don't need to verify the quality of studies you're citing because they can't all be wrong, or (worst of all) that because a problem seems important the standard of evidence should be low.

It's totally possible that there is an abnormal increase in teen mental health issues lately but it's too early to consider it proven. More raw data is needed stretching back a lot further in time. Additionally the claim that it's driven by social media needs a smaller number of higher quality studies before it's taken seriously. Right now not only do the studies not convince, but it's not even clear what they're measuring. For example the growth in smartphones would also make it much easier to consume news around the clock, and social media often rebroadcasts news, so it could be hard to decorrelate these things to decide to what extent it's selfies vs headlines that drives the depression.

"20 minutes of curated content" sounds an awful lot like "20 minutes of supervised play time in the playground with kids we've vetted", minus the actual exercise. Good luck with this policy by the time they hit 10+

TikTok also seems to 'run out' of new material to show you easily. This makes sense, mathematically -- there just isn't enough new content to avoid repeats and quality drop if you view it for hours at a time.

You will get more interesting content that appeals to you if you interact with the app honestly, instead of grabbing someone else's phone for a few minutes and then trying to prove whatever point you're on about here.