sna1l3 years ago
I don't understand why this is causation vs correlation?
I have to do a lot of blocking but the reality is that I can now say I do enjoy Facebook.
My timeline is filled with content I meticulously have curated:Woodworking, Baking, Canoeing, Startups, Beekeeping, Jeeps.
But... it shouldn't take all this work to enjoy it.
I couldn't agree more.
At least now we have some control over our poison, though few seem to bother exercising that control.
It's like the same as channel flipping and getting ads blasted at you but now the ads are smarter/more targeted.
The problem I find is that it is basically mindless engagement, everything is really too short to get into it, the comments are garbage, and it's extremely entertaining and therefore addictive and a waste of my free time.
Facebook is singled out because they are the largest practitioner of surveillance capitalism. The entire idea of “optimizing for engagement,” where Facebook has been a pioneer and the largest player, is increasingly being shown to be a primary driver of political polarization, anxiety, bigotry, and hate crimes.
Thus Facebook is the new Big Tobacco.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confession_(religion)#Catholicism
Heh. The religious were the only group to see improved mental health during 2020.
Also, you are right that it should be social media. Nothing special about Facebook.
Real life isn't without its own flaws, but the research shows an increase in mental health issues when social media is a factor. That increase is interesting, and worth studying, even if it is not the only place one can develop mental health issues.
Numerous studies over a long period of time indicate the opposite.
The relentless Skinner Boxing which Facebook and similar platforms engage in has no parallel in broadcast media, which can't be algorithmically tuned to harm the victim as much as possible.
Lol, it is. :)
> Strawman argument then?
How about I rephrase, "Does 24-hour news have similar effects on viewers as this study shows social media has on kids, despite not being interactive?"
Yeah, I see your point. Apples and oranges. Still interested in that study.
So it's more continuous a transition i suspect than people consider.
You own the recording... I know there's still 5-15-30sec skip.
Hulu, Roku, et al do of course insert their own ads because they're ad supported.
Social media pushes the illusion that you are not engaging with professionals but peers, and the dominant signals (how many views, likes, comments, etc.) of this day and age were not present with TV. This seriously messes with the innate reasoning of most humans, because for all our individualism we are norm conforming herd animals.
Show a kid a celebrity pushing something and they can tell it's fake. If the same thing is pushed by all of their friends, now we're in the territory of peer pressure which is a different ball game!
Not "some sort of willful ignorance". It just requires "ignorance". I think most of us know someone who thinks that reality TV is ... well, reality. "It says it in the name".
> Show a kid a celebrity pushing something and they can tell it's fake
Perhaps you have very bright kids. My kid will ask me to buy two of whatever that person is pushing. He's simply not equipped to handle marketing at any level, yet.
I know adults who voted for Trump because they believed the apprentice gave them an unvarnished view of his character and decision making prowess in the real world. My own grandmother would cite episodes of the show.
I know he needs to be exposed to some marketing while I'm watching along to talk about it so he isn't completely defenseless against it later, but I don't think that time is quite yet. So far, I'm going with his being able to separate "real" from "pretend" as a minimum.
Show them how it is done. How one can cut, edit and change the sound.
Ask who did it, for what reason, for which audience, to what end?
Equip them with the tools to question the things they see. Then they have the means to engage with marketing.
It’s a long road. There will be glitter and cheap plastic toys along the way.
> Show a kid a celebrity pushing something and they can tell it's fake
This does not explain the Alex Jones show.
Ha I actually read this as enragement, which I don't think is even a real word.
I do believe that the Rush style radio talk show lays the foundation for Tucker Carlson and all of the conservative pundit TV programming. Which is the basis for the problems we see with Facebook / Fake News etc.
Love that the Catholic Church burned him at the stake for being too conservative. Really! Go Renaissance Popery!!
This is really basic bio stuff about Limbaugh, and it doesn't speak well of your other assertions if you got this part so wrong.
What's really funny is that during the 90s the "Greatest Threat To Democracy Ever" WAS talk radio, more or less solely because the Limbaugh program was so popular. The targets may change, but the talking points never seem to.
What we are actually seeing is users going to TikTok because it is even more engaging.
People may say they want to keep up with their friends, but they will choose the more engaging activity.
There is no regulating or out-competing it.
Governments should provide identification, communication, community, payments, etc platforms for their citizens, but entertainment is always going to look like this unless stoicism is somehow engrained into our culture.
Entertainment itself is measured by engagement, so it will end with unlimited personalized ai generated content that will be almost impossible to put down.
SOME people cannot help themselves. I spend 0 minutes on social platforms. I can help myself just fine. Some people have much more addictive personality traits than others. Please, don't paint everyone with the same broad brush. It doesn't help the conversation in a meaningful manner
I also figured the “some” was implied because the world is a complicated place. I do believe we all have our weaknesses, though mindless consumption is more attractive to some than others.
The HN "algo" is user driven by fellow readers up-voting/down-voting which is much more common interests. There are no "friend" relations on HN. The other platforms are all advertising based algo driven with intentional doping to make people addicted to the platform. This isn't even apples-to-oranges comparison.
After the dust from Purdue Pharma and the Sacklers settles and everything gets evaluated, I sincerly hope that Meta/Zuck,et.al gets investigated in the same line as Purdue.
Also, I just never have liked Reddit.
You're spending time on HN.
No, they cant.
How many kids believe the photoshop pics they see?
Not to single her out, but Kim K is now selling headphones and her pic in her ad makes her look like a character from the sims. This is NOT how a normal human being looks without hours of photoshop work.
There is a reason we use to have laws around advertising to children.. they are too young to understand things.. this is also why you cant legally enter into a contract with a minor.
A progression of machines for interacting with dreams more deeply. A progreassion of better and better dream amplifiers.
Dreams becoming a bigger part of our life
Expert dreamers making the big bucks
A whole population with one foot in dreamland.
You ever noticed how fiction is everywhere? And advertising. And propaganda.
If there's a hell I hope there is a special place for 24-hour news channels and folks who feed fear and skewed garbage to people and hurt them.
I sometimes wish I could run a 24 hour news channel that tried to do more of a mix of content / etc. It might not be popular, or profitable, but it wouldn't be doom and gloom and conflict and bait all day. Maybe some stories about rando people's lives and other things?
I'm not dismissing malice or opportunism in the media, but it is also important to appreciate the situation mass news media is in. Mass media are extremely dependent on things like advertising and that's always been the case for as long mass media have existed. The price of subscription or buying a paper is simply too meager to cover the costs of running a paper, for example. Advertising introduces its own perverse incentives and limitations (you can't bite the hand that feeds you, for example).
24 hour news are, for the most part, useless, so they've got to fill the air time with sensationalized garbage, and because there's an arms race, the sensantionalism escalates.
We some how think this would be six hours replaced with "improving our minds", visiting museums and working on our calculus or oil painting.
I mean we could all do that. we more or less force our children to do that at school.
If there was a "improve my mind" button on facebook, do you think we would all press it?
I am torn between my pessimism and optimism
I'm in my 50's and am literally doing the latter two on weekends. Have I become a trope?!? lol.
Back in the early 80s I was living in LA and I'd grab some food on the way home from work and the "News" on an independent station. They had 3 half hour News show back to back. They started out with "Local News", then moved on to "National News", and finally "World News".
At first it didn't seem much different than the big 3 Networks. Everyday I'd come home from work feeling fine but after a few months of doing that I realized by the end of the last broadcast I was very depressed.
It finally occurred to me, after a few months, that the station was gathering every tragedy they could find, rapes, robberies, murders, wars, airplane and auto crashes, etc. So I decided to stop watching it and immediately went back to my normal, happy, content self.
Since I've learned to monitor the "News" as opposed to consuming it and that's much easier to do when we can pick and choose what to consume and ignore it with just a click or tap. And since then I've had quite a few friends and relatives who're happy and content before and are now in a constant state of rage because they're pretty much addicted to watching FOX/CNN/MSNBC, etc.
That said, I would love to see a serious study on this because it's grown into a serious and national mental heath problem here in the U.S.
NPR and PBS are the best if you have to.
I think someone could make a few billion running a positive happy news channel.Isn't that essentially what TikTok is? A 24/7 feed of all the positive, happy, dopamine-triggering content you could ever want, tailored to you. And yeah, they have.
That’s the only kind
Wait til VR is evil
This place is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here.
I scan Facebook once every few days for updates from family members and frankly I find the experience entirely pleasant.
Cutting out Twitter and Reddit is one of the best decisions I've ever made for my mental health.
For me it's Hackernews and the Wall St. Journal.
(I know, one can often find the publication date in the HTML source, but that requires savvy, and should not be necessary.)
I still have a number of distance friends/family who share their life of facebook so there is value to remain there. Facebook is a great way to see my daughter singing "baby shark" - if you don't personally know me you don't want to see that, but if you know me you want to see it.
I unfriend and unsubscribe from everything/anyone annoying.
You pay attention. Concentrate your attention. Occasionally have your attention jerked around by distractions.
Consider what you do when you think, read, watch tv, consume facebook. Consider what you are doing with your attention. That shape.
If you do it a lot then that shape intensifies.
And that shape sticks. It becomes your normal.
And the shape of your attention dictates your reality.
It's important to take that into account.
If it's damaging to some percentage of users, having more users means it damages more people.
Is your argument that this is okay because some people also put their health at risk being salt miners?
If your rule is "we can't have things that may hurt some people" then you're going to live in a pretty bland world. Gonna be especially tough without water.
And we have people and organizations that try to reduce the amount of deaths from those things. Raising awareness, passing laws, etc.
>If your rule is "we can't have things that may hurt some people" then you're going to live in a pretty bland world.
I only asked for clarification on your argument. But, no, that's not my "rule". I just think that if we can reduce harm, it's nice to do that where possible.
>Gonna be especially tough without water.
Come on. Your whole last sentence is ridiculous. The poster questioned why someone would work at Facebook. That is not the equivalent of saying "we can't have things that may hurt some people" and it's so far removed from your water/drowning scenario that I can't tell if you're being serious.
I thought my answer was pretty easy to interpret, but I will spell it out: Because the vast majority of people who use Facebook enrich their lives with it.
Spelling it out even further: Just like Facebook employees, the people who work in salt mines, or build swimming pools, go to work each day because they think about the vast majority of people satisfied by their product, not about the small minority of people injured by it.
I don't work at Facebook, but if I did, the answer to "How do you sleep?" would be "Like a baby."
Kind of a bad excuse to be honest. I do think the damage is exaggerated and at some point users are responsible for themselves and their media consumption and many are probably happy with that.
I don't use Facebook and in my county Whatsapp is sadly very widely spread and it is noticeable that people express concern about missing something if they don't install it.
You can pick any random thing, compare it to any other random thing, and get similar or opposing results - or anything in between, because those things aren't correlated or comparable in any way. :P
- they're going to do their evil thing anyway, may as well show up and intentionally do it marginally worse
- they're going to pay someone large sums of money, may as well be me
- I increasingly believe this whole industry is net evil overall, and large sums of money mean I can leave it sooner
- also, it was their VR thing, and if it was a VR thing at literally any other company I would be excited about that because VR is at least conceptually cool
These are not particularly good arguments, and that's why I don't work there now. But statistically, I can imagine a few people who we would otherwise categorize as non-evil actually convince themselves with arguments like these, and when you're casting as wide a net as Facebook does, a few is all you need.
Here's the thing: anyone who is in IT, especially programming; is going to be well-aware of the...I don't want to say 'evil', but I will at least say questionably ethical nature of Facebook's workings.
Anyone working there had to compromise some level of ethics for the profit they acquire from it.
In this way, the poor choices people make is not the responsibility of the person offering the choice, it's the responsibility of the chooser. You can sell heroine this way and sleep like a baby.
It's not totally crazy if you think what you're offering is not coercive and that people can and should look out for their best interests. This doesn't work for my ethics because I think, basically, that some people aren't so great at looking out for their own best interests and can be tricked or seduced into hurting themselves. If someone is weak in whatever way that they can be tricked into hurting themselves, this is a soft form of coercion.
Ethically though it's not totally cut and dried. Pretty much everyone engaged in behavior where they might come out ahead relative to another (e.g., buying/selling a car, aiming for a promotion or raise, etc). I work for a company that sells shiny baubles and people buy stuff they can't really afford partly because of our slick marketing. I feel this is better than working for Meta, but is it? I don't know. Being ethical while living under an unethical system is almost impossible and requires significant sacrifice. If I'm being honest, I'm not willing to make that sacrifice, so I'm already compromising my ethics to _some_ level too. I guess we all just pick our levels.
edit: I mean nothing wrong in terms of the product it delivers
"Hey, there are crack dealers, people selling cigarettes, etc. Why are you singling out Facebook?"
It's almost like they know the issue, but think that somehow the existence of even worse scumbags provides them with ethics aircover.
Frankly, how does anyone continue to work in any job? They all bring undesirable externalities of some sort. As a farmer, I'm one of the most evil people on the planet, or so they say, due to the externalities created by agriculture. Working for Facebook would be a huge moral improvement. But, what are you going to do?
Oh God, I write software that helps farmers do a better job!
https://www.verywellmind.com/video-games-could-treat-mental-illness-study-shows-5190213
https://www.webmd.com/mental-health/mental-health-benefits-of-video-games
EDIT: formatting
On the other hand I recently deleted Twitter from my phone. I love twitter for getting interesting infromation and staying up to date with news, but the whole culture there has just turned into cheap dunking on one another, and its just guaranteed to leave you feeling angry about something. Extremely disruptive to mental state.
I spend some time on the TikTok-like products as well (youtube shorts / fb reels) and have found them to be just a really easy way to completely waste an hour for no reason whatsoever. Less disruptive to mental state than twitter though.
In particular, I do not friend or follow any family, neighbors, current co-workers, etc.
Agreed.
I enjoy my time on Facebook. I think most of the complaints about Facebook (aside from privacy issues) are self-inflicted.
Your feed is what you make it. You have an uncle that's a rabid Trump supporter that posts racist shit? Delete him. Or at least unfollow him so his bullshit doesn't show up in your feed.
I recently discovered the term "hate-follow" and I'm just flabbergasted that anybody would ever follow someone on social media that they despise.
I've also heard that some people are very prone to envy and seeing someone's vacation photos fills them with depression, but eh...not sure what can be done about that.
I stopped using social media for many years, recently came back to have access to local cycling/running groups and my experience is largely positive. All I see is cool people doing cool things, fun events, some local cycling related trade etc. I managed to make some connections and keep them going thanks to social media it's just positive experience all around.
I think Instagram can be like that if you filter out politics/celebrities and "I have money/am attractive" influencers. It takes some work for that to stop showing in your feed and to learn to ignore whatever is left though.
Google News has become a trash heap, full of gossip and propaganda, and changes constantly in relation to what I last searched. It's converging with the Facebook feed
This occurred to me because I more and more think of social media use in terms of addiction. For more typical addictive behavior with drugs, we are more likely to think people who are depressed are more likely to develop addictive relationship to alcohol (or other drugs), than we are to think using alcohol (or other drugs) too much will makes you depressed. Although I suppose it can be somewhat circular and complex.
Seems clear facebook had negative impact on mental health on campus.
Facebook then was also likely very different from Facebook now. So not exactly sure what recommendations for today can be drawn from it.
It's interesting to note that the data shows facebook was damaging mental health at the same time that many readers of this comment were most enthusiastic about Facebook.
First, if the conclusions are counterintuitive or unexpected, then when you look closer, you will find that the methodology is garbage and that it does not support the conclusions given.
Second, if the conclusions reflect things that you believe are true, when you look closer, you will find that the methodology is garbage and that it does not support the conclusions given.
If you have specific criticism regarding the methodology of this study - which doesn't, prima facie, appear unsound - please let the rest of us participate.
"The have used a correlational model, not a causal model. There are several confounding variables the paper doesn't consider, hence it is not proven from the evidence that Facebook has a negative impact "
The article discusses how the study looked at different universities during the same time period, some of which had access to facebook and some of which didn't, and discovered that in the first case there was an increase in mental health issues over that period. There could still be confounders, sure, (or the sample size could be too small etc.), but at a first glance, that's not an unreasonable approach, as it tries to isolate the variable "facebook yes/no".
That said, if you haven't read the article, I'm not sure why you even felt the need to comment? This is exactly the same kind of shallow dismissal I was calling out.
Some were surely acting in their own personal financial interests but I'm also certain that a lot of it was more nuanced and personal. People need to think of themselves as, for the most part, good people who do mostly good things. Knowingly contributing to something that makes life much worse for many people doesn't align with that and they will need to deny it. I know if you polled phillip morris employees about cancer in the late 60s after the link was confirmed you'd hear a lot about correlation and uncertainty.
HN isn't a random slice of the population. A lot of us here work in this domain or on similar products. There are certainly people in this comment section who directly worked on the core facebook product being discussed. They need to think of themselves as good still, too.
These 2 are vastly different situations.
To give an example. Establishing causal effect between nicotine and lung cancer is an open question, even as the causal effect of smoking on cancer is very clear.
Going back to your specific comments. Clearly the universities were not randomly assigned the treatment and control. And the actual number of independent sample sizes is extremely unlikely to give stat sig results at the single percentage digit impact shown. And no matter what they do, for something as complex as mental health, listing out all the confounding factors is hopeless - unlike lung cancer where you are literally sucking tar into your lungs and the sample sizes and effects are huge. Its a useful observational study, but it is ridiculous to call it a proof.
> We know that smoking is linked to cancer through decades of correlational studies and careful analysis of confounding factors, for example.
Yes, it took decades, when there is no proper control set. There are work arounds like backdoor and front door criteria, but yeah - it will take decades of work and looking inside the "black box".
Proofs are for mathematics, not for science. (I share your distaste for science journalism that throws big words like "prove" around without much care, but that's probably not something you can fault the study authors for.)
This is evidence in favour of a theory. It is to be understood within a larger body of evidence. Eventually, hopefully, there is enough evidence in one direction or another that we may draw more or less definitive conclusions.
> I made it a point to not read it, because virtually all social science papers are like these. It's really not worth my time
Nobody is forcing you to read this study, but somehow you seem to assume that your shallow dismissals (to which you are of course entitled privately) are worth anyone's time.
I agree it's not unreasonable, but you have to account for the fact that back then, most of the colleges that had it were top tier/high stress/highly selective colleges. Facebook started at Harvard, then went to Yale and Princeton, and then on to basically most of the US News top 50.
> While many studies have found a correlation between the use of social media and various symptoms related to mental health, so far, it has been challenging to ascertain whether social media was actually the cause of poor mental health. By applying a novel research method, researchers have now succeeded in establishing such a causality
But doesn't elaborate on the new method. We'll have to wait for the study to be published I guess.
They looked at the mental health (as measured by self-reported surveys) among schools over time and cross-referenced that with the rollout of Facebook over time. So they could compare the change in mental health at schools the received Facebook access and compare it to the change in mental health at schools that did not receive Facebook access at the same time.
The methodology appears to be fairly novel and does isolate them from several reverse-causation biases, as it is difficult to imagine that the rollout of Facebook was influenced by factors that led to the decline of mental health in student bodies.
I assume to do that you have to establish the complete pathway and mechanism from someone using facebook to an increase in depression, like showing observations of changes in neurotransmitters or brain structure that have been proven to cause changes in mental health, and then proving that facebook caused the changes in those levels. (FWIW I assume this could be done and that we may see those kinds of results if it were done, but I haven't actually seen a study like that. I also assume the hypothesis in general.)
For instance, using the example of smoking from another commenter, from the CDC website [0]:
> - Poisons in cigarette smoke can weaken the body’s immune system, making it harder to kill cancer cells. When this happens, cancer cells keep growing without being stopped.
> - Poisons in tobacco smoke can damage or change a cell’s DNA. DNA is the cell’s “instruction manual” that controls a cell’s normal growth and function. When DNA is damaged, a cell can begin growing out of control and create a cancer tumor.
These seem more like things that can be tested in laboratory settings that are easily reproducible and rely on more objective observations than self-reporting.
I'm neither a neuroscientist or social scientist so I'm just trying to understand, not saying they're wrong or that the research is even flawed.
[0]: https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/campaign/tips/diseases/cancer.html#how-related
First I'll say that without preregistration of the methodology, there's a lot that is immediately suspicious.
> The researchers built an index based on 15 relevant questions in the NCHA, in which students were asked about their mental health in the past year
Why these 15? What was the "relevance" criteria?
To their credit, they don't just look at a summary metric of "mental health" which would be kind of absurd since the relative weighting is also arbitrary (although that appears to be the main conclusion). The article here notes several axes on which significant differences were found. Why these axes? What about other "mental health" metrics? Did they get better or stay neutral or just have no detectable effect?
Without preregistration it's almost impossible to determine exactly how cherry-picked these differences were, as with a large enough set of potential questions to choose from, you're going to find statistically significant trends on some of them by random chance.
The core methodology is to track the spread of Facebook to different colleges and compare mental health between schools that had Facebook and schools that did not yet have Facebook. This is surprisingly not terrible, but without insight into how the study controlled for the time axis and potential confounding variables about the non-random selection of schools for the rollout, it's difficult to say more.
Nonetheless I remain blithely confident that this study is not going to be the one to break the mold.
[1] https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/256787/1/1801812535.pdf
(Also, please consider this friendly piece of advice: check yourself!)
Not sure why OP considers themselves to have been "baited" when the conversation IMHO has been greatly improved by them substantiating their criticism (which may have its merit).
The comment I responded to was seeming to attribute those to OP's later comments, which would be unfair. The dismissal of the dismissal still comes across as low-effort and shallow.
As always, it's better to go to another thread if a topic doesn't interest you, rather than disrespect people's time & energy by attacking the validity of the topic itself.
I do not take offense to the response calling out OP's first comment as low-effort and shallow because it was both of those things. I just can't see the comment I responded to as defensible with such a strong combination of irony and infelicity.
It is hard to credibly preregister studies that use observational data. It also seems hard to design an experiment around the roll-out of a social-media service that we know ahead of time to be successful.
Instead, what is usually done on observational data is (1) making clear what the statistical assumptions are that are required to establish causality, (2) testing possible violations of the assumptions, and (3) testing whether the data is consistent with alternative explanations.
So in such papers, results don't come for free. We need to think seriously about what reasonable theories we can have, and whether the data matches each theory.
> without insight into how the study controlled for the time axis and potential confounding variables about the non-random selection of schools for the rollout, it's difficult to say more.
The paper does also use alternative assumptions that lead to alternative statistical specifications. They also look at various intermediate outcomes to see if they are consistent with their proposed narrative. Such defensive writing is what blows the PDF up to almost 80 pages.
Of course, it'd be nice to see if the difference in increased rates of depression & anxiety are themselves abnormal in the first place... Not sure if the study goes into that depth.
Like there's that one finding that came up while researching how scientists in the hard sciences achieved recognition. The soft science researcher discovered that every single one of the scientists insisted questions are more important than answers. But there was no margin of error, so they couldn't write a paper about that. It's not a statistic, it's just absolute. They should have by all means written a paper about it, no shame in being absolutely right.
And there's sociologists like Andrés Pascal Allende, on whom the Mandalorian is based, who was considered a counter-terrorist by the rightful president, and also a terrorist by the usurper, like the Mandalorian. I should clarify he mostly carried out sociology with machine guns and grenades, killed many carabineros, hard target, came in and out of Chile as he pleased, highly persecuted, outraced the persecutors every time, was Minister of Tourism in Cuba--that's a really good job, incredibly good, dude that's like that's a huge reward for standing up to death and torture, oh man, that's recognition, on top of the other recognition, medals and all the rest. That is all second only to being the hero of the absolute most oppressed and repressed (both) worthy victims, meaning those who wish to do what he did for them if they could like watching the Mandalorian wishing they could do that and then going back into the grind and struggle day after day of exploitation and dealing with the betrayal contest set up by the dictatorship. Nothing compares to that recognition, the recognition of the worthy victim. That is heroism definitionally. Really his heroism and those he led determined were the only thing holding up the dignity and living conditions of like 80% of Chileans, fear of the hero.
He studied sociology before becoming the Mandalorian. Must have learned something if he was determined to graduate.
My ego tells me that since I'm aware of these problems, I can do my best to keep my page from turning into a doomscrolling experience. Yet, once again, the algorithm doesn't display my posts in their natural order, only the controversial ones, so the doomscrolling happens anyway.
I often keep up at night to think about it and I feel like there is no good answer.
A better headline: "Evidence towards causal relations between mental health issues and Facebook use for some College students in 2004". If this doesn't look newsworthy, it's because it isn't. Single academic result is almost never newsworthy.
In a century, they’ll wonder how we could possibly have kept engaging knowing the harm we were doing to ourselves.
You’re forcing a direct comparison with one category, but how do I know that’s the correct comparison?
I won’t claim to follow it closely but every one of these I’ve seen shows a small impact to a small subset of vulnerable users. That’s a far cry from other things that are universally damaging.
Are they sure the mental health impact is not just senility?
/s
Unfavorable comparisons with "successful" people/projects who make it to the front page could be behind the same effects.
But I'm disappointed to see the word "proven". It isn't proven, and there are a number of problems.
One is that the hypothesis is never really tested, this is just more data analysis. I don't want to split hairs over the definition of "science" but if you don't have an experiment where you intervene in the real world and dispassionately record what happens, then it's probably not science.
The scientific method is a causation-finding machine intended to avoid all of the errors that humans are likely to make. Perhaps that leads to too few exciting results, so now we have a bunch of "scientific studies" instead.
At the very least this data analysis shows something with a trace, instead of just throwing an idea out there and hoping someone builds a complete thesis around it and starts experimenting while everyone else is still guessing and having feelings but not getting anywhere concrete.
In all seriousness though glad to see this is actually being seriously studied
You can see a lot of information
I'd also be curious to know if there's a subgroup of users whose mental health is improved by use of FB - certainly I'd suggest I had that experience personally, at a particularly low point in my life, having met somebody via FB that helped me through it (which was mutual btw, in fact they had more serious mental health issues than I did).
7% increase in number of students who reported having suffering, at least once during the preceding year, depression so severe that it was difficult for them to function
20% increase in number of students who reported anxiety disorders
2% increase in number of students expected to experience moderate to severe depression
3% increase in number of students experienced impairment to their academic performance due to depression or anxiety
> Quickly spreading to other colleges in and outside the US, the network was made available to the general public in the US and beyond in September 2006
Facebook didn't even have a news feed feature until September 2006. The students studied here were using a site that was nothing like it is today.
[1] https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/256787/1/1801812535.pdf#page=10