Social media does not cause depression in children
norwegianscitechnews.com
norwegianscitechnews.com
That gives some handholds but it clearly isn't enough to determine anything that you could act on. From personal observation - which I trust more than any single random study - social media seems to be a net negative or a net positive dependent on social background and on whether or not the participant was socially active or isolated before they started using it. If they were socially active they tend to become less so, and if they were not then they tend to become more so. But that's a super limited sample and it still lumps together people that are from very different backgrounds.
I think in general making blanket statements such as TFA title does here about things where personal interaction is a major factor is fraught with peril and error. These things differ substantially from person to person and even if true in the average case that leaves a lot of room for outliers for whom the experience can be extremely negative (plenty of examples for that) or extremely positive (also plenty of examples).
First off it's a quite high quality longitudinal study with 4 waves (different birth years) and several thousand participants, where screen time was used to quantify social media use, and mental health outcomes were quantified through interviews with mental health professionals.
It finds that "use of social media is not correlated with developing depression or anxiety".
It also finds "developing depression or anxiety is not correlated with change in use of social media".
It specifically does not say anything about whether using social media while having a mental health disorder is good or bad.
Let's suppose you swap out "using social media" with "drinking alcohol", and "10-16 year olds" with "18-25 year olds". Nobody would be surprised if you found both a) that whether a person drinks alcohol or not isn't a good predictor for mental health issues, but also b) that if you have mental health issues, reducing alcohol consumption is very good for your mental health. Both of those can be true at the same time.
It shouldn't really require a scientific study to know that the longer you can keep kids away from that stuff, the better. Yes, there's also amazing educational resources online, but they can be accessed via a filtered internet connection on a home PC, where parents can have some idea of what their kids are doing online.
If kids need phones for communication, maybe an old dumb Nokia that can make calls+texts, has no internet access, is practically indestructible, and isn't a theft magnet might be a better option than a smartphone?
It seems to me that building expectations based on social media (e.g. just by browsing) is the real problem, not posting or not.
With social media usage we see also a strong rise in asian societies wrt mental health problems especially in girls. Good to investigate further.
Also, the NRA tried to put the blame on anything except for prevalence of guns: there's money behind that narrative.
Never forget that scientists are under strong pressures to present results favourable to them getting future funding. This works out in the wash, but individual studies are inevitably biased.
I think what we can establish is that social media has some negative and positive effects but its hard to know if social media is just a conduit or if it is the root cause.
You may as well look to personal experience; if you have a bad time on social media then stop using it. If it helps you build community and joy, keep using it.
I am not claiming it outright immediately causes depression (it probably does in same vein girls' magazines set unhealthy standards on looks for example but that's nothing new), but it definitely causes some hard damage in their long term happiness. For every success story there are 10 or 100 quiet failures. Many apps, be it social or games, also cause outright addictions and kids are very vulnerable to those and designers aim exactly at that. Does addiction create depression? I think everybody can answer for themselves.
Its failure of both parents and regulators to not see this harm, or see but ignore/give up on it. I have plenty of examples around me, seeing say 10 year old kids or younger playing hard mental games with their parents to get more time on phone is not much better than seeing some heroin addict craving for his next kick.
I think we generally lack some serious education step about current parenting, what are challenges faced, how to cope with them, and assist at least some form of actual help (not meaning some generic call helpline). I see more than not utter shock of people conceiving a kid or 2 and only later realizing how fucked they are in terms of free time, hobbies, passions, lack of sleep and overall sacrifices required, not for a year but much more. And no, you can't effectively outsource these to grand parents or nannies and call yourself a good parent, kids development will suffer in various ways, to be seen mostly later in life.
However half-assed this study is, it's less half-assed than making any conclusion based on your anecdotal evidence. You saw 10 children, you say? Do you think that's statistically relevant?
Without commenting on specifics, studies aren't necessarily better than anecdotal evidence. We live in an age of reproductivity crisis - most studies can't be reliably replicated. It's almost trivial to cheat with statistics - so it's not true at all that a study is infallible and must be deferred to at all times.
Double blind randomized controlled trial or it didn't happen.
Can I add preregistered? And big? And published in a serious peer review journal?
And check it was made in human. And check the exclusion list near the bottom of the paper. (I still remember the hidroxicloroquine paper where they get a better results in the treatment group after excluding the dead guy and other 5 bad cases. The control group has no exclusions (nor death), and was not even a real control group, juts an unrelated bunch of guys in another city.)
Anyway, for comparison, the claims that the vaccines are useful and safe come form people that was forced to dot all the i's and cross all the t's, and make a preregistered double blind randomized controlled trial in humans published in a serious peer review journal and with a lot of additional checking and paperwork to ensure it's reliable.
Once you start removing each of the check in that list, the confidence in the result start to diminish.
This website seems legit, even though the domain sounds like it's some kind of blogspam website.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...
Maybe I can believe teens there can use social media responsibly but I don’t see anyone not damaged by social media in my own social circles in the USA, regardless of age, from old to young.
This is not the average case scenario as the majority of children on social media and the longest amount of screen use are of children who are often not in after school programs or daycares. The reality is that this study is not a good measure of if social media causes depression or not.
I have found articles linking social media to worse sleep quality (and sleep quality and depression are well known to influence each other) but still no direct link.
Do you happen to know what papers prove the link between depression and social media use in children? The theory makes sense but I can't find studies that prove more than mete correlation.
I'd say it doesn't so much contradict the existing science as it suggests the possibility that the population-level correlations we see are not explained by direct effects of social media use on individuals.
Just as an illustrative example, suppose Alice has an higher-than-average need for in-person social interaction in order to remain mentally healthy, and so has decided not to use social media. If the people around Alice start spending more than some critical percentage of time on social media instead of in-person socializing, then her mental health might decline even though she doesn't use social media.
Norway also has Seasonal Affective Disorder. But in the USA, all of a sudden with the rise of social media we get such huge statistics:
https://abcnews.go.com/amp/Health/us-teen-girls-considered-a...
Moreover, it isn’t necessarily the AMOUNT of social media one consumes that makes one depressed. It is other factors:
1) Body image
2) Expectations
3) New norms of behavior
4) New social norms
5) New social goals
Social media has been omnipresent for years, it's not a new phenomenon anymore, and the continuing toll on mental health doesn't really coincide with just the introduction of social media anymore.
It would be easy if we could just blame Instagram for everything, but there are much worse factors at play. The yearly climate extremes, the massive inflation, the covid pandemic, the housing crisis, the cost of living crisis, and so many other factors give any young person reason to get sucked into depression.
I'm sure the changing social landscape is part of the problem, but many other negative factors got started around the time social media took over the world.
Besides, the upper age groups are definitely aware of the news and the various crises adults are dealing with.
Platforms like Instagram are also 13 years old. Many others have come and gone.
Actually, there was a profit motive in children’s programming, it was for merchandise, and also had predictable results as capitalism always has:
https://www.pbs.org/video/frontline-merchants-cool/
https://www.history.com/news/action-figures-g-i-joe-star-war...
Many of the children’s shows (ahem, YuGiOh, Pokemon) were explicitly around selling shit to them, but at least it was external and not about their body image and social goals and expectations.
Actually, the best analogy I can give, in terms of destructive power, to the TikTok/Instagram effect on teen girls, was the Gangsta Rap effect on teen boys (typically Black boys because that is who was selected by the music industry to be promoted). And with the same industry always claiming there is “no effect”, while an entire generation started cussin’ and acting much more violently than their parents.
Sure, there are of course other socioeconomic factors, such as the rise of single-parent households typically without a father in the home, or both parents working long hours and neglecting the kids. That cannot be dismissed either. But that is also a result of corporations and their profit motive, selling a collective dream to adults (not children) that climbing the corporate ladder leads to better self-actualization. I was there when Sheryl Sandberg revealed her book “Lean In”, for instance, I saw firsthand the narratives that corporate america inclucates in families.
Whether it’s social media, the music industry, or corporations, they exert a huge pressure on our society and psyche. Sometimes it’s very overt:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xNzXze5Yza8
But most of the time it is simply pervasive, like “the American dream” etc.
This goes against their title. I am saying somewhat similar things but expanding far beyond a paragraph that uses “weasel words” to hedge all their conclusions.
Their study at best shows that the amount of consumption of social media past a certain point isn’t correlated to the negative outcomes.
You could use social media a lot, and be extremely unhappy whenever you use it, and still not be clinically depressed or have an anxiety disorder.
An analogy: every time you ride a roller coaster, you are made anxious, and so is everyone else. This doesn't mean that rolle coasters "cause anxiety" - they just cause you to feel anxious while using it. There's a difference.
A lot of people who don't have direct experience with depression or anxiety disorders don't really understand what they are, and assume that they are just a stronger version of being chronically sad or chronically scared. It's not so.
And given that 1 of 3 girls considers attempting suicide, perhaps we need to have a conversation about whether this diagnosis fits them, and whether it is a helpful distinction, because that is a real huge measurable statistic
“Well you considered attempting suicide, but you aren’t clinically depressed, so…”
They're also symptoms of other things. It's not only depressed people who kill themselves.
That seems odd when compared to the American experience at least.
I wonder if Norwegian kids are provided with access to high quality mental health care around the ages of 14-16. Or if there is something about the culture that’s able to identify kids with depression in the teen years and provide ways to help reduce/eliminate it.
The research is useful to influence policy…but not really sure what else.
Not everyone worships at the altar of science.
They might be right, but the data will be so incredibly biased that it's useless and you can't really build off it.
Just a few years ago the established opinion in that field that smart device use was not particularly affecting their minds.
This is as if climate scientists would look at global temperatures and the co2 amounts and then claim that it's just the sun going warmer.
But it's understandble in a way: this situation brewed up pretty fast and took everybody by surprise. We tge parents were the first line to fail since we got the kids their devices abd did not pay enough attention what they were doing with them.
You now can create unrealistic standards via machine and earn hard cash doing so. Monetize all the things, everything has to go.
PS: Psychology is mostly studies on pschology students or other students, which prefilters the result pretty hard. So ever study is basically: "And how does the local well-off elite feel about that?"
There will almost never be one (or The) problem.
I know it’s semantic, but I think particular thing matters, even in casual discussions that don’t demand rigor. It’s lazy of us to delude ourselves that something like this is only one issue. Particularly when it’s used in response to tear down someone else’s hypothesis—this just needlessly stifles more conversation.