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Comment by thesausageking | Hacker News Reader

The data is well established that social media use by teens leads to worse mental health outcomes. I'm a parent and as my kids near the age in which social media becomes a thing, I started digging into. I had assumed it would be vague and filled with underpowered studies, but it's not. Social media is bad for kids and the data is very clear on it.

This post has a list of the some of the better studies and gives a good synthesis of the results:

https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/sapien-smartphone-repor...

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This article was a good rebuttal to Haidt's post: https://reason.com/2023/03/29/the-statistically-flawed-evide...

That's a good analysis, but I don't find it convincing. He's trying really hard to disprove Haidt's post by poking holes in many of the studies. If you look at 386 studies in the social sciences, of course you'll find issues with the analysis or design of many of them.

The larger trends ("most of the effect is driven by teen who use no social media", etc.) aren't supported by the data he presents (look at the table of "social media time" -> Depression for example).

Are the researchers who look into this problem predisposed to finding a connection? Probably. But I do think the open, community based analysis Haidt led was done well and if you look at what they found digging through 386 studies, it's compelling.

> He's trying really hard to disprove Haidt's post by poking holes in many of the studies.

Because this is how evidence based reasoning works. If the evidence that is supposed to support the hypothesis is fundamentally flawed, then our hypothesis doesn't actually have any support.

The fact that we can apparently so easily find flaws in what is supposed to be empirical evidence should make us more cautious about drawing firm conclusions. In fact, low quality literature is something of a plague in many social sciences at the moment (e.g. the replication crisis in social psychology).

This post presents a decent discussion of this sort of issue https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/beware-the-man-of-many-studies

I can prove the same correlation with the rise of

a) Broadband Internet

b) Transgenderism

c) iMessage

So, why Meta?

No you can't. Read the linked studies. "correlation doesn't equal causation" isn't a magic spell that disproves all research.

For more, here's an open, collaborative review of 386 studies: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1w-HOfseF2wF9YIpXwUUtP65-...

Thank you! It is well established that teenage girls’ attempted suicide rates rose with the advent of social media.

I dont think there are any smoking-gun causal studies, but the correlation evidence is very strong.

Isn't this largely a US phenomenon?

It has been studied mostly on US adolescents. There is some research on Dutch teens too.

I would say more that this effect is more well studied on US teens so we can say more conclusive things on US teens. In addition, there is some indication that the effect could also be present in non-US teens and should be further studied.

Thanks. Most things I have seen have the US/perhaps Anglo-Saxon countries stand stand out (e.g., https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-resistance-hypot...), but could indeed by evolving.

That makes putting it on social media alone much more tenuous, though.

A lot of the research says that social media isn't a cause, but more of a catalyst in the presence of other factors like cyber bullying

This reminds me of similar effects where people attributed misinformation online to mostly right wing people, but it was actually right wing was only a catalyst when a predisponsity for chaos was also present OR when de-policing and federal investigations were blamed for rise in crime when it was only also when a particular district had a "viral" event.

I don't think social media is a causal factor in itself, but it is definitely a catalyst factor in the presence of other things like wealth inequality, clout chasing, and cyberbullying.

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