No evidence social media time is correlated with teen mental health problems
psycnet.apa.org
psycnet.apa.org
social media use does not predict mental health problems in youth
- Social media use by itself doesn't predict mental health problems because kids without mental health problems also use social media.
- Social media use by itself doesn't predict mental health problems because there are benefits to certain kids that offset the equivalent problems they would have in its absence (e.g., the closeted gay kid in a rural town would be depressed without supportive online communities).
- Social media by itself doesn't predict mental health problems because the type of social media platform is more important than the binary of using/not using.
- Social media by itself doesn't predict mental health problems because it exacerbates problems without necessarily causing new ones outright.
- Social media by itself doesn't predict mental health problems because kids who don't use it are (sadly) more socially isolated and suffer as a result.
And maybe none of those are true! But I'm curious to see if there's something unexpected going on.
I think the reasonable read for someone who's priors are set to believe it's true would be, "Interesting, I guess the effect size isn't as pronounced and obvious as I'd previously assumed."
Everything about this lit review (sorry, meta-analysis) gets weird in the conclusions. It's like reading anthro papers written before the 70s.
(1) This study is specifically NOT making the claim "social media is definitely fine and good for kids," so really more like skepticism at anyone trying to draw a conclusion of "...and therefore we should let Instagram off the hook :)"
and
(2) There is a reasonable case to be made that a lot of adults say that social media makes them miserable, and therefore that probably extends to kids too, if not even more so.
Like, for example, stuff about teen suicides that are linked to various happenings on social media: it's true that those happen. It's also true that teen suicide rates are higher now than they were a few decades ago. It's not definitively true that they happen in higher numbers than they would've without social media (e.g., teen bullying just has a new outlet), but it's also fair to suspect that there might possibly maybe be a connection, even an indirect one.
No single study is definitive, including this one!
This paper can be wrong, but you're clearly not open to even the possibility that it's not.
I think there's a solid chance it's true. I also think it's interesting that there's a discrepancy between studies like this and public perception of social media (i.e., that it's bad for kids). So I enjoy trying to feel out that discrepancy and what might be causing it.
That to me isn't coming at it with an open mind or with curiosity. Is it not interesting that there's maybe a different larger effect that explains people's observations?
Fixed that for you. It reads like an open mind, or at the very least an attempt at one, to me. Keep on keeping on, OP.
And maybe none of those are true! But I'm curious to see if there's something unexpected going on.> No single study is definitive, including this one!
We default to the null hypothesis of no effect. It's not good scientific practice to assume a thing is true and then assert (for any study) that because it's just one study it can't convince you otherwise. This particular paper is at any rate not a study at all, it's a meta-analysis. So what it's saying is that they reviewed a lot of research and there's no evidence.
This phenomenon is part of the reason I'm skeptical of most any study, because I doubt the researchers don't have the same problem.
So we'll never know for the time being! Unfortunate to those who wanted a definitive answer (or to confirm/deny past beliefs).
Edit: And here’s a link to their earlier free episode recorded before this new meta analysis: https://www.thestudiesshowpod.com/p/episode-25-is-it-the-pho...
I'm not old enough to remember doctors appearing in TV adverts claiming the health benefits of smoking. But I do remember those 1980s green-washing campaigns from Shell and Esso (Exxon) showing animals frolicking through the wonderful planet oil and gas were creating. I also remember all the plastic recycling campaigns that turned out to be rotten hoax.
Let's face it science gets used and tossed aside these days. Seeing research papers that flat-out contradict each other every week is tiring. All I want to say is that this utterly devalues science to see such disingenuous conflict, and to know that at least one side is making stuff up. It's going the same way as political debate and is an embarrassment to everyone who participates and believes in science.
Obviously there is emotion on all sides. And there is surely a humongous pot of money on one side. But I think where this is heading... it's classic Sirkov style full-spectrum disinformation, funding both sides and designed to undermine the very belief in scientific research itself.
It benefits the anti-rationalists and nihilists who can say, "you know what.. fuck science, I'm just going to assert what I like based on my emotion alone!" That tends to favour the might-is-right crowd and the shrill angry mob.
Maybe it also helps to immunize people to those same contagions as well: that seems less obvious that would happen, to me at least...
The summary is this:
The uptick is adequately explained by changes to mandatory reporting requirements for screening questions of mental health for teenagers from Obamacare and increased access to healthcare for those teenagers.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/187478/death-rate-from-s...
The number of suicides now is little different for men to 1990, and is significantly lower than it was in the 1970s.
Even a simple sentence like, "Ferguson did both of these things and his findings thus do not “undermine” our causal claims; he failed to accurately test our causal claims," comes across as scathing compared to the paper.
This tendency of people nowadays to focus on tone and other irrelevant characteristics of an argument (as it is made) is dumb.
Wordplay is another, and there is plenty of it in this HN thread.
Boy that Einstein fellow's paper sure had a gruff tone I'm sticking with Newton!
Science uses a watered down but more ~practical form of epistemology, for example equating the knowledge of scientists with all of reality (There is no evidence [that I know of]). Some disciplines (military) use special language to circumvent this problem, at least sometimes.
There is what is true, and then there is the human experience of it, and scientists like most other humans mix the two up regularly. Doing otherwise is "pedantic", and is strongly culturally discouraged.
I'm not sure how tone would be irrelevant; similar to what a sibling commenter said, tone conveys quite a bit of information. It seems unwise or "dumb" to ignore that, because we're still humans talking to each other, even if it's bits over a wire, and we're working together in good faith to learn and solve problems, aren't we?
And yes a posited fact is also known as a claim.
That's an extremely poor way to determine truth.
You could say maybe they needed better friends, and I wouldn't argue that, but that's three very different teenagers with the same overall "response".
As in my own anecdote, our kids probably need better friends. It may not be their social media time that causes problems, but their friend groups coupled with their current state of neurological/psychological development.
ex: I don't have enough information to reliably conclude that "social media" causes their problems. If they had better friends, "social media time" might have improved their "mental health".
So, jump off a 10-story building with no means of breaking your fall and see how it goes for you.
~ https://www.afterbabel.com/p/fundamental-flaws-part-3
So the author's meta review has a black box model which provides effect sizes for each study (in an attempt to even out studies which measure different aspects of mental health), and refuses to detail how it works. That alone makes the whole study suspect, and the above link details obvious calculation errors, too.
What about the studies that that _do_ show a correlation, of which there are more than one. Why were those discounted?
Based on my own observations, and on my experience of being a child and of raising one, and on what other parents tell me, and on what other teens tell me in their own words, and on what we know about how addiction works and how teen brains work… I consider the burden of proof to be on those who think social media is not correlated with teen mental health problems - and there is no evidence for this.
I’m fully open to the idea that social media is uniquely harmful to humans. But the burden of proof should be on the side claiming unique harm, not the other way around.
I hate big tech and social network-effects monopolies as much as the next guy. But history would suggest those shouting “this time is different” tend to be wrong when it comes to what the kids are doing these days.
Moral panics are usually baseless, but this doesn't fit the usual mould. This is rather coming from the other direction, where parents and teachers are observing children change for the worse in real time. They also observe how they get better when internet devices are taken away (usually as punishment for poor behaviour).
The only two demographics that are hard bent on denying these effects are sub-groups of childless young adults, and parents who don't parent ("I have work to do, here's an iPad").
Yet, both time spent playing videos games per young male and school shootings have risen dramatically over the last two decades.
So you would think that particular moral panic would be at its peak, given how much moral panickers claim to care about "the data" (basically correlation = causation fallacies, but still).
Which basically suggests these are just memetic hysterias that run their course. Once all the eyeballs and ad dollars have been squeezed out of the narrative, the narrative dies. Nobody actually cares about looking too closely at the supposed "data" or whether said correlation is actually true. I'd bet a large sum of money this is where the smartphones/social media/etc. panics will end up as well.
Many people, and clearly many teenagers are able to use social media and not be all that harmed. For some, that's clearly not the case.
And no physical products (no more marginal profits) nor pesky FDA approvals to go through either.
What a time to be alive! /s
As a normal human though; when overwhelming daily evidence disagrees with scientific findings, usually its a flaw or VERY deep misunderstanding of the science.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-phrase-no-evidence-is-a...
https://www.christopherjferguson.com/Social%20Media%20Experi...
Edit: the authors look different so probably just related
Fully 57% of high school aged girls--(more than half!)--experienced feelings of persistent sadness or hopelessness in 2021, up from 36% in 2011 [4]. Over the same timeframe, average time spent using social media each day among teens doubled from about 1.5 hours to more than 3 hours [5].
I am not waiting for a randomized controlled study. There are serious harmful effects of the environment our kids are growing up in today, and part of that is a growth in social media. Let us not forget that Mark Zuckerberg, "personally and repeatedly thwarted initiatives meant to improve the well-being of teens on Facebook and Instagram...[overruling] Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri and President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg, who had asked Zuckerberg to do more to protect the more than 30 million teens who use Instagram in the United States." [6] Not enough evidence? In the words of Bob Dylan, "you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows."
Sources
0.https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/sg-youth-mental-heal...
1.https://guilfordjournals.com/doi/10.1521/jscp.2018.37.10.751
2.https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20190658
3. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5...
4. https://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/data/yrbs/pdf/YRBS_Data-Sum...
5. https://images.nature.com/lw1200/magazine-assets/d41586-023-...
6. https://www.cbsnews.com/sacramento/news/zuckerberg-rejected-...
When you're that stuck with something, you kind of have to ignore the negative consequences. Does it matter how bad it is for my mental health? Or my kids mental health.
But this lets us go wild in our heads: "Maybe it's really bad, like tobacco bad! Or worse! Maybe we'll all be killed by apathy and a rouge AI trained on our social media feed!"
Walking around in a society were some people live in 3 million euro mansions and others in ghettos. Kids aren't stupid I'm amazed suicide rates aren't higher.
I quit it and my mental health improved. Many others in a controlled study found the same effect.
Alcott and colleagues (2020) randomly assigned 2743 adults to either deactivate their Facebook accounts for one month or not. This study also found that deactivation significantly improved subjective well-being and that “80% of the treatment group agreed that deactivation was good for them.” The treatment group was also more likely to report using Facebook less and having uninstalled the app from their phones post-experiment.
Source: https://www.afterbabel.com/p/phone-based-childhood-cause-epi...
Finally, this strikes me as the same playbook that big tobacco used in the 90s. "Doubt is our product," Michaels quotes a cigarette executive as saying, "since it is the best means of competing with the 'body of fact' that exists in the minds of the general public.
Social media is for old people still trying to re-live what the internet was like 20 years ago. And, I expect, that is the tree you actually want to bark up. Does parental social media use impact their children negatively? That answer to that is probably yes.
Instagram, being quite old at this point, still has some vestiges of social media to keep the older people who started using it decades ago happy, but it too is moving towards the cable TV model as much as it can.
I understand how it can be confusing, though. Many services that were built to foster community originally, and given the social media moniker at that time, are transitioning (if not fully transitioned already) into being cable TV providers to try and remain relevant with the slow death of social media, so it can be easy to forget that times are a changing and still think of them as being social media even when they are no longer. Indeed, people tend to be quite susceptible to getting an idea in their head and then holding onto that idea forevermore, not looking again to see if anything has changed.
(Cue the downvotes!)
Also, if putative negative effects from social media exposure were as strong and unambiguous as lung cancer in smokers, we wouldn't be having this discussion.
This is not necessarily true. Lung cancer was rare before cigarettes. Research had already revealed cigarettes to cause lung cancer in the 1940s and 1950s. Even so, in 1960, only 1/3 of doctors believed that cigarettes caused cancer. This was largely due to the tobacco industry's denialist propaganda. Even as late as 1972, the tobacco industry was putting out propaganda that was having a noticeable effect on teens and young adults. So, even with the "strong and unambiguous" negative effects of cigarettes, it still took 25+ years for most of the US population to accept that cigarettes are bad.
Tobacco was exported to the rest of the world, became a hot commodity for vast plantations, creating a huge labor market (which was filled with enslaved people), and built wealth for many Americans.
Tobacco shaped the Americas as we know them today, and our history would be completely different if it weren't for that industry. And bringing up lung cancer, and expanded diagnoses, and expanded detection, is miniscule in the scope of things, because everyone knew it was a psychoactive drug, everyone knew that smoke makes you cough and clogs everything with gunk, but it had been worth its weight in gold. (Not to mention its gradual adulteration and dilution into something unrecognizable from 500 years ago.)
There's another term of art: "social communication", which encompasses radio, television, and Internet modes such as email and instant message. So we can discuss 'social media' as a specific phenomenon, or we can discuss its niche in the longer history of social communications. It is a morally neutral thing for humans to communicate with one another, but, if the medium is the m[ae]ssage, then the mode of communication will shape how it's composed, sent, received and absorbed.
Picture e.g. social media exposure having a long-term negative effect on ability to focus, motivation to learn/work/self-improve and general satisfaction/self-image/outlook-- these are all somewhat plausible, and could be extremely difficult to isolate in studies.
Regarding smoking in particular: Imagine there being absolutely zero cancer/physical health effects, everything else being exactly equal. Would that make it okay to you? Because to me, it absolutely would NOT-- a society that allows under-age persons to become strongly addicted to something, handing corporations a convenient metaphorical straw to suck money out of them for the rest of their lives-- that is a society that has failed their offspring, to me. And social media (give its addictiveness and value extraction via ads etc.), is basically in exactly that situation already.
it's painfuly obvious the opposite is true. either mental health problems is boxed in too narrow, or the title is misleading to what the actual findings are. for example ' following a methodology of xyz there is no direct scinetific evidence of abc'.
many people say their mental health improved a lot when quitting social media. less anxiety, self-image issues, lack of confidence etc.
also ots relatively obvious more social media time is less being mindful and attentive to ones surroundings, less time outside etc. absorbing and experiencing the real world.
many things untested in an experiment or research doesnt mean evidence is not there... it was just omitted due to a narrow scoped experiment trying to draw way to broad and general conclusions.
especially in social studies this has to stop. 'we polled 1k people and now draw a conclusion about a billion or more people'. no thanks.
Maybe it's because I hate fish, I don't know.
What is not in doubt is that there has been a sharp increase in teen mental health difficulties in recent years: look at this 30% increase from 2017 to 2021[0]. This also coincides with a significant increase in social media use among young people. Correlation is not causation, but there haven't been many other theories as to what might be driving this change.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/mental-health/mental-health...
I'd also want to know where the funding for this meta study came from.
I don't see funding or conflict of interest mentioned, but the author has previous publications about videogames not causing increased violence.
> Clean Language
Ah, lost their credibility since 1960? Isn't there entire point of the APA "Council of Representatives" to issue policy statements on things like abortion, the rights of mentally ill, human trafficking and such?
I thought that was a big part of the entire purpose. What changed "some time ago"?
In all seriousness, this is a great listen: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/204/81-words
In the same way that you can trust laws, but not most lawyers. Medicine, but not certain doctors. It's not the scientific method that's at fault, it's its abuse.
If it's "obviously true", then it should be easy to author your own paper that proves whatever is "obviously true". Or maybe reality isn't so easy?
Yes, this is my point. It's very easy to publish papers which say anything, if you don't mind that the results are junk or fraudulent. This is why most science is un-replicable, and you should have low confidence in a randomly selected paper, especially if the results conflict with bayesian expectations.
It's actually very hard to perform and publish good science.
The scientific method is so easily abused, that it's only really valuable if the scientist is sincere.
In other words, the scientific method doesn't protect against deceit, it only helps against deceiving yourself, as a scientist.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_differences_in_suicid...
Females are far more likely than males to attempt suicide, and males are far more likely than females to die by suicide (be successful in their attempt).
I have seen statistics but none that have clearly shown a link which is why the possible link is in dispute.