Social media bans for teenagers lack evidence and pose risks, scientists say
frontiersin.org
frontiersin.org
[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/developmental-psycholog...
ML has an equity interest in Ksana Health Inc. No Ksana Health services or products were used in the current project. SS serves on the scientific advisory board for Headspace, for which he receives compensation. He has received consulting fees from Boehringer Ingelheim and Otsuka Pharmaceuticals. CO serves on the Youth and Families Advisory Committee for YouTube.
I agree that this could be a conflict worth noting but I don't know the structure of that board to say how big. The link to the board is here [1] and implies independence and doesn't mention that youtube does or doesn't give funding/other support. (at least I didn't see any)
Always good to look into potential conflicts of interest though.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/howyoutubeworks/kids-and-teens/advis...
Too much social media in young years?
This lady says you should let your children get hooked on YouTube, who knows what could happen if you don't!
Looks like biased research, fake coverage amplifies it, it's all manufacturing consent.
I've also never tested my ability to survive a 100ft fall. Maybe I can! We have no way of knowing!
> Virtually all schools in the United States report that they use social media for communications, including for key announcements such as making families aware of upcoming opportunities, educational programming, and key deadlines. The reliance on social media for communication and resource sharing, while banning youth from these same platforms, sends mixed messages to young people and limits their access to health promoting information and resources.
That's a good point. There's no other way that schools could communicate such things. My childhood in the 80s and 90s certainly didn't include Scouts, 4-H, Band, Drama, Cross-Country, etc! I'm sure with social media bans for youth, schools will just continue to use social media to try to communicate to kids rather than adapting.
I have to assume the authors of this paper know how dumb it is and just don't care since most people will only read the headline.
Email lists work great for the type of comms schools need to make. And/or an RSS feed on the schools homepage.
Really grasping the straws with this argument...
And there won't be, because the safest, cheapest, and most easily implemented solution is a moderated Kindernet they can't monetize and won't have access to.
So every conversation becomes a list of corner cases that look bizarre from a parenting point of view because these platforms are in no way essential. The answer to your quote is that the schools and clubs that aren't also handing out flyers would hand out flyers again. There's no scenario where scanning my preteen improves this process.
We have lots of rules that just arnt being enforced. instead, we do think that won't make a dent and are draconian dystopian surveillance state because we refuse to curtail the grift economy.
An invasion of privacy is similarly a particularly vapid argument. Youth are not being invited to participate in social media once it is banned, there is no reach into their private realm and where face age estimation is being used that is data which is being provided willingly and with an understanding of its intended purpose. That in and of itself is not an invasion of privacy.
I will be quite surprised if these claims every make it past peer review and withstand scrutiny by the other social scientists who recommended social media onboarding delays.
"Not a single social media restriction experiment has included people under the age of 16. We do not know how social media bans will affect the young people being targeted by them because we have never tested this with them!"
I know anecdotally my own experience restricting social media has been more of a positive association, but that is because I am not attracted to it anymore. I have been on it for several years and it is no longer novel. To a teenager, it may be the way they relate to their peers and being unable to have access to it could have a negative consequence.
Maybe with all these countries and states that have banned social media, we should see evidence of increased mental health wellness as a proof that banning it was the right thing to do.
Chemically addictive drugs that directly alter wanting could be argued to require use of force to prevent people from being coerced. But screens have no such justification for using force against people who look at screens. It is use of force in a situation without any coercion. And that's unethical.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant You are right that the children I see around my region aren't like you describe. I don't eat out. But I am often outside biking around and see people outside (kids included) biking around. My siblings and friends' kids read books in addition to being technically competent with desktop (or at least laptop) computers. I'm not sure which of us is seeing the smaller part of the elephant but to me the kids seem alright.
Concerns about age gating etc are true but as we’re already experiencing that nonsense without social media bans it’s kind of a moot point.
EDIT: See e.g. https://www.nationalacademies.org/read/27396/chapter/6#93, and if you think this is what constitutes "clear evidence", well, you have some very questionable epistemological standards.
EDIT2: Also, limit yourself to proper longitudinal studies and then look at the actual effect sizes reported. You will find, yes, there is broad evidence that social media is likely slightly more harmful to adolescents than beneficial / not harmful, but the actual effect size is so tiny broad interventions are unlikely to have practical consequences. I.e. the most plausible explanation is that the vast majority people are not meaningfully affected, and small subgroups benefit and/or are negatively affected.
It is the usual pseudoscientific / social science attempts to launder "statistical significance" (which you get trivially with enough samples) into practical significance, in order to justify sweeping societal changes.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5...
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/...
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/...
Can you please explain how I'm wrong?
Even the longitudinal studies are poor here. See, for example, as this Nature article notes:
"The study has multiple limitations that need to be considered. First, to interpret the parameters from our analyses as estimates of causal effects one would need to adopt the following assumptions: (a) there are no time-varying unobserved confounders that impact the relation between social media use and life satisfaction; (b) the model adequately accounts for unobserved time-invariant confounding through the inclusion of a random intercept; (c) there is no measurement error in the variables; (d) the time interval between studies (one year) is the right length to capture the effects of interest; and (e) the bidirectional links estimated by our longitudinal model are linear in nature. Only if these assumptions are met can this observational study be said to capture the causal effects between social media and life satisfaction. Second, the data are self-report and therefore only allow inferences about the impact of self-estimated time on social media, rather than objectively measured social media use." https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-29296-3#Sec2
- social media explaining only 0.4% of variance (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30944443/)
- social-media/mental-health effect around β = .061 (https://christopherjferguson.com/Social%20Media%20Meta.pdf)
These are basically nothing, and yet you have such absolute confidence from people that social media is this big harmful thing. The evidence just isn't there.
I really appreciate your response, which made me realize this is more nuanced than I thought at first blush. (I wrote that reply before you linked the National Academies review, which was quite helpful.)
Maybe I am truly morally panicked, but I'm really hesitant to brush aside the evidence as "basically nothing." Small effects are worth paying attention to (https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2022-26026-014). And quantifying the harms of social media use is less like quantifying the harms of, say, smoking cigarettes, because social media has (indeed, is built on) network effects. You could plop a kid from the 50's into a modern American neighborhood and their mental health might decline even if they don't use social media because of the way it has changed childhood. When the social life of an entire generation is transformed by technology, it stops making sense to ask "How much does one hour of Instagram hurt mental health?" Yet that is essentially the question all the studies are designed to answer, and even still, we see an effect.
Anyway, thanks for taking to time to explain your perspective.
IMO the correct framing most supported by the evidence is that a few vulnerable populations (most likely within a certain age bracket, and already dealing with other significant life issues) are definitely at risk of nontrivial harm from social media. Otherwise, for the majority, it is likely a wash. And since the bias in studies is to look for negatives (much like drug studies don't properly measure negative side effects until much later), we also can't say if there aren't subgroups benefiting hugely as well (e.g. autistic people that can connect online, or other people with unusual interests that before would have remained isolated and disconnected, feel crazy, etc).
So, yes, small effects can be important. The observed effects for social media are quite small and consistent with being driven solely by a small, vulnerable population, however, and this make broad social injunctions and moral panic less defensible.
Also, these are effects on self-report or other psychological instruments, where in general you need to find something like a minimal clinically important difference before you can determine if you care practically about these things. E.g. if a standardized regression coefficient of 0.1 translates to a 1-point shift on a 20-point life-satisfaction scale, is this even something I (or anyone) can even notice? Does it even rise above measurement error?
Since no one is doing that kind of research here, we just get these (relatively meaningless) standardized effect sizes, and it is really basically impossible to know if we should care at all about the observed effects. This is mainly what I mean by the evidence being flimsy / weak, it is really too inconclusive to drive decisions at this point.
No shit sherlock, it lacks evidence because Facebook gatekeeps all the scientifically interesting data and they also don't share their findings from internal studies and human trials where they psychologically manipulatated minors.
There is a reason social media apps spam you with notification popups if you have not been active for the last 23 hours. They employ every trick in the book to keep you hooked and monetize your attention.
It is clear scientific misconduct by people working for Facebook who do numerous human trials on minors in order to increase their metrics and monetization. The fact they have crossed this red line should stop the discussion for every credible researcher in that field, because human trials on minors without consent are not ethical and there is no excuse for such behavior.
There is an independent association between problematic use of social media/internet and suicide attempts in young people. However, the direction of causality, if any, remains unclear. Further evaluation through longitudinal studies is needed.
And there it is. I don't agree with you so I must be a shill or a disinfo agent. No, I'm not. I just disagree with you.
No one is actually arguing that things have to be proven beyond any doubt. Nor is anyone arguing that nothing at all can or should be done about the negative effects of social media exposure or the use of ALGORITHMS. There are ways to mitigate the harms of social media that don't involve the government's monopoly on violence.
What's being argued is that the arguments being made to justify having governments regulate and ban social media (and by extension, free speech on the web) haven't been justified by the science. "something must be done before it's too late" isn't a valid argument. It's the same "but what if there's a bomb" argument used to justify normalizing torture after 9/11, and the abusive policing of the Satanic panic before that, and literally every other ratcheting up of authoritarianism in the face of a moral panic.
But since I know you aren't willing or able to approach me in good faith on this topic, I'm done now. I apologize for triggering you with wrongthink.
This is common sense.
> Just like inhaling smoke into your lungs can't be healthy right?
You're asserting that social media is as dangerous and deadly and smoking. That isn't common sense.
> But then comes so called scientist who say well since we thought the the universe was Euclidean but now we see it is non-Euclidean what is common sense is not common sense, there is no common sense.
Now you're trying to discredit any scientist who disagrees with your premise with a ridiculous straw argument that doesn't at all describe any claim being made. This is what's called "motte and bailey." You started with an actually uncontroversial premise but then started arguing for something far more controversial, drawing the false equivalence between the two.
You keep saying "common sense" and even try to imply that "common sense" should take precedence over science, and that is exactly the issue.
For social media it is a whole different problem from it being entangled with protected speech. We don't want 'arrested for spreading misinformation defined as anything which contradicts the offical line' to be a thing.
To my mind greed and will to monopolize resources by virtual scarcity is what create a cartel.
Prohibition might help such a scenario, yes. but gouvernement don't need to regulate with extrem policies like prohibition which indeed often prove counterproductive. Permitting legal sell under certain quality control, honest information and education on known outcomes, regulation on who can produce, sell, buy and use in which proportions.
It normalizes age verification online which will likely lead to a less free internet. We could wait for decades until a really privacy-preserving way of age verification will come but what will happen is we'll have to give up our privacy and anonymity to a few large governments and companies.
It opens to door for regulating any kind of communication channels amongst the people. It will start with big social media but it will likely expand to any kind of forums, chats and even open protocols like AT. It will normalize the government interfering in all kinds of online activities.
These may seem distant and abstract to most people but the people in power want or will want to get power over every kind of communication. We should oppose this now, not when it's normalized and has happened for "platforms bigger than X users".
The people should be able to form any kind of group where they communicate freely. If you want to regulate commercial addictive algorithmic content suggestions... OK, maybe, sure. Do it. Don't regulate where people communicate, how they do it, what they talk about and what they share. People who can use the internet, even children, need a way to share their ideas and concerns. They need to be able to belong to whatever community they please.
I hate those companies with a passion. I know most of us here do even if some of us work there (I don't and will not; I'm not even in IT right now). Yet I see how easily regulations against these centralized platforms will expand to regulations on communication in general, whether it's commercial centralized ones or an FOSS decentralized E2EE ones.
my partner and i have reasonably good jobs, but we work 12-14hrs. we make mortgage and have some extra money. we are currently debating whether or not it is financially, morally, or ethically responsible to bring a child into this world and be able to provide them with the attention that they need and deserve.
So maybe banning asbestos altogether is overkill.
I'd love to be proven wrong. I don't have any financial interest in asbestos besides the few jobs I've done over the years removing it.
And the people using asbestos in their homes, or buying homes with asbestos, are endangering themselves. How likely is that an improperly installed or maintained asbestos is going to affect a whole neighborhood?
Similar to how if you're using a insecure program written in C, whoever finds the bug should tell you immediately - don't use that program.
[0] You might say that asbestos from 1 house would affect the whole neighborhood but that would be similar to how a smoker smoking in the streets would affect the neighborhood. Second-hand smoking and second-hand asbestos are bad but they're negligible compared to living with a smoker who smokes indoors with the windows closed or smoking yourself.
Your example thus kind of shows the opposite: dangerous things can be made safe, with a solid understanding of their risks and techniques that are proven to make them safe. We have neither the former nor the the latter for social media.
Like I said in another comment - if a parent is working 3 jobs and doesn't have time for their children, change the subsidies given to the parent for having children. Make child care free or really accessible.
A child needs a parent or at least a role model. If you ban social media, the children will still see random crap on the internet, whether it's YouTube videos or content from random sites too small or shady to be regulated. Do you want 100% of the internet regulated or do you want the government to empower the children and their parents? We have the resources, we just haven't allocated them correctly. Otherwise a parent would have time to spend with their children.
But phronesis is a thing. It's obviously bad.
My one caveat - the current excuse we have for a UK government are likely to try and use the ban as a reason to force through digital IDs.