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Comment by slibhb | Hacker News Reader

It's been eye-opening to watch people fall for the "social media is hurting the children" scam.

The best and largest observational studies don't show a strong correlation. Studies with an intervention are mixed/the effect isn't large. Extreme and compulsive social media use is bad, but it's almost maybe always a symptom rather than a cause.

I saw the trailer for the new Facebook movie last weekend. It's comical really; first people blamed Facebook for the 2016 election and now for their kids being depressed. It's classic scapegoating.

What makes this worse is the irony: in the name of protecting children, we're going to further reduce their freedom. And if there is single largest cause of children being depressed, I'd bet on "lack of freedom" over "social media use".

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I think you are conflating "the best data we have" with "sufficient data to prove something".

I agree with you that the best data we have is inconclusive. Which doesn't mean social media is totally safe. Also it doesn't mean it's totally dangerous.

It means there just isn't enough data to let science guide the decision. Science is very slow and very expensive.

So since I can't wait another century for their to finally be good science about social media, I have no choice but to go with my gut.

Which means, IMO: (1) regulation should be limited to what the general public's gut on average agrees with, since science won't be the neutral arbiter we want it to be for the foreseeable future. (2) I personally want to severely limit my kids access to social media because my gut says it's addictive and harmful. But I don't expect society as a whole to agree with me on that.

> Which means, IMO: (1) regulation should be limited to what the general public's gut on average agrees with, since science won't be the neutral arbiter we want it to be for the foreseeable future. (2) I personally want to severely limit my kids access to social media because my gut says it's addictive and harmful. But I don't expect society as a whole to agree with me on that.

Well:

(1) there is no "the general public's gut" -- the general public is millions of separate guts that don't agree with each other;

(2) our political system defines explicit boundaries for the reach of regulatory power, especially where communication, expression, and social interaction are concerned, regardless of anyone's gut feeling on these issues;

(3) science can't be the arbiter here at all, since science only answers "is" questions, but this is an "ought" question; which leads us to

(4) as you alluded to in your final remark, this is a purely cultural issue which families/parents must address according to their own normative values, independently of each other, and there is no legitimate political or legal question here.

Something like 82% of parents and 70% of people want social media to be banned for under-16s. How much more agreement do you want?

See point (2) above.

In your view should it be legal to distribute child porn if you didn't make it?

Ah, an outlier edge case! I'll go ahead and address this one while taking note that using extreme outlier examples is not a good method for testing general-case principles.

In the case of child porn, the legal theory behind suppressing its distribution, not just its creation, is that distributing it reinforces the incentive structures that motivate its creation, which is where the actual harm inheres. So suppression is justified as a means of stopping assaults against children, not merely because the thing itself is regarded as harmful to the user.

This might be a rationalization for suppressing something that the vast majority of us find disgusting per se, but if so, then the motivation to rationalize it in relation to a more concrete harm means that we are rejecting the notion that most of us finding it disgusting is a sufficient justification in its own right to suppress things.

In other words, it's still something that, even if the motivation to suppress it originates from the "gut feeling" of a large number of people, acting on that gut feeling must still be gated by legal/constitutional norms that set the bounds for the assertion of power. So even as an outlier edge case, this one still conforms to the general principle, respecting boundaries even as it tries to go as far as possible within then.

So in the child porn case you're willing to concede that limits on power don't matter, shouldn't exist, or should be overridden, in order to reduce harm. Why not also in the social media case?

> So in the child porn case you're willing to concede that limits on power don't matter, shouldn't exist, or should be overridden, in order to reduce harm.

No, I'm not. I'm not certain as to whether I didn't explain my position well, or you misunderstood it, but I definitely was saying the exact opposite of this.

For the sake of clarity, I'll attempt to reiterate my point here: the child porn example demonstrates that even if the "gut feeling" motivation to restrict something comes from an underlying disgust at the thing itself, the legal mechanisms used to restrict it are still gated by limitations on the use of power.

In this case, the strength of the motivations pushed the restrictions further than they go in other cases, but not beyond the bounds of the strict limits, because those limits absolutely still hold, do matter, should exist, and should not be overridden.

> Why not also in the social media case?

The position you articulated here is valid in neither case.

I agree with you that nothing has been proven either way. But I would say that, because people hate social media so much, we should perhaps be a little skeptical of claims that it causes harms. It's very easy to believe "X thing I hate" causes harm, even when the evidence is not solid.

> So since I can't wait another century for their to finally be good science about social media, I have no choice but to go with my gut.

Doing nothing seems fine!

I agree. Whenever everyone thinks something is true, we should be skeptical that it's true. Since everyone hates Putin so much, we should be skeptical that he is actually bad. Since everyone thinks the sky is blue, it must actually be green.

That seems like a very lame claim, given that Social Media is data in abundance by design, and for at least 2 decades now.

Having seen the increase in suicide rates for girls and young women [1], and having read the arguments for why no other explanation fits that data, I am convinced social media is indeed to blame.

But as someone else put it once regarding global warming, what's the worst case if we reign in social media anyway? That we make the Internet a less addictive place for nothing?

[1] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2023/05/03/suicide-.... Archive version: https://archive.is/wY1OH

I'm confident kids before Facebook did not somehow have a "lack of freedom". Also screw social media, it's bloat on society.

Of course they did? What do you think school is? Just because it's useful to society doesn't mean it isn't also a reduction in freedom.

Are you sending kids to Facebook as an alternative to school?

Please don't try to derail the discussion. I'm clearly responding to:

>I'm confident kids before Facebook did not somehow have a "lack of freedom".

If you have an argument to make then do so.

I'm responding to:

> Of course they did? What do you think school is? Just because it's useful to society doesn't mean it isn't also a reduction in freedom.

where you compare the loss of freedom from school to the loss of freedom from Facebook

But I'm not making a comparison. The parent I'm responding to is asserting that kids before Facebook did not have a lack of freedom.

I am saying that school is a lack of freedom, therefore his assertion is wrong.

This is quite relevant when we're talking about depression in children. Eg from looking at South Korea we can see that the education system itself can be a cause of depression in kids, meaning that it's likely depressive in our countries too (just less than in SK).

This is completely different to my experience and my reading of the research. Please link me to any of this research you are talking about.

Meta-analysis, very large, shows small correlation between unhappiness and social media use: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/...

Large AU observational study. Moderate social media use correlates to the happiest kids, high use and no use correlates to unhappiness: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/article-abst...

Swedish obervational study, after adjusting the data there was no correlation: https://www.jahonline.org/article/S1054-139X(26)00162-X/full...

I can't find the specific inverventional study I mentioned. As I recall, it was mixed but possibly I remembered wrongly.

Some studies do show a significant correlation between unhappiness and social media use, but causation has not been established and the bigger, better done studies have weaker correlations. People believe in causation because it suits their bias against social media.

I dislike social media but I doubt it's harmful. This substack summarizes my view on what really makes children unhappy: https://substack.com/home/post/p-186087964 (school). I'd guess that lack of freedom is what makes school so awful; modern schools are like little totalitarian states, where every minute of your day is accounted for and there is no privacy.

“There are studies that do not line up with my opinion but they aren’t as good as the studies that do” lol

This is a pretty unimpeachable causal identification strategy finding Facebook's rollout caused worse mental health issues https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20211218

It's hard to do similarly high quality studies today because no one rolls social media out gradually anymore.

I know that it's hurting me. Hard to imagine that children are any less affected by it.

Anything to shift blame from parents, I guess.

Everyone is just such a 'big tech bad' sheep now. Pitchforks out.

> Anything to shift blame from parents, I guess.

Shifting blame from parents presumes there is a problem to blame on them, but isn't the determination of whether anything here constitutes a problem in the first place up to the parents themselves?

society just decided for them that there's a problem, I guess

This "society" guy sure has a lot of opinions about other people's affairs.

You're doing the exact same pitchfork thing but against the diffuse group of "parents".

Just seems odd to me that expecting parents to be held responsible for how their children spend their time is a "pitchfork" type of idea...

Well it is one. Also known as a thought-stopping cliche. Once you've found someone to be angry at - in this case "parents" - thought ends there.

uh yeah, parents are responsible for monitoring and... parenting their children.

Society is not some science experiment that you can run for 20 years and hit the reset button.

ODB understood this dynamic years ago - "Wu Tang is for the children"

That's definitely why they chose to settle.

Would you like to link to these studies?

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