Who is 'Candice L. Odgers'? The article's author is 'Monika Neff Lind, PhD'. 'Candice L. Odgers' isn't mentioned in the article anywhere that I see. What was your goal of implying this is a quote/this person was relevant?
Thanks for the clarification. For others, here is the full conflict of interest disclosure from the linked paper in the article:
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.
Cigarette manufacturer's research concluded smoking is a-okay for you. AI slop peddler CEO says, if you don't buy their stuff, you will be left behind. Biotech company says taking their pills can be only good for you.
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.
> First, enforcing a youth social media ban raises major ethical concerns. Enforcement efforts invade people’s privacy and are likely to hurt marginalized people more. For example, the technology that determines age based on selfie uploads makes more mistakes with young faces and people of color. Banned youth may also miss out on important resources and communications provided via social media, as schools, clubs, and most other youth-serving organizations use social media as a main form of communication.
> 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'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.
The title of the paper this blog post is based on, https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/developmental-psycholog..., is "We don't know how social media bans will affect youth but we're doing it anyway!" Which is a little cheeky for my taste given the seriousness of the issue these bans are trying to address.
Yeah, the "but they use the socials to communicate!" is laughable. Basically none of the parents I know want school comms to be via Meta or Tweet or whatever.
Email lists work great for the type of comms schools need to make. And/or an RSS feed on the schools homepage.
In fairness to the article, they are saying there is no evidence on how it will affect teens because all the studies excluded the audience that the ban was for.
"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.
This severely underplays the "risks" of not banning social media for teenagers. The link between social media use and mental health problems in teens is extremely well documented.
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.
You're gish-galloping a bunch of random studies, most of which appear to be cross-sectional. I've linked a broad review.
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
I'd also suggest looking at the coefficients (effect sizes) in the above (standardized regression coefficients barely approaching 0.2 - and this is one of the stronger findings), and other articles. The effects here, even if we were to pretend they were clearly established, are incredibly tiny. Examples:
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.
~Qualifying all of this with the caveat that I'm not a social scientist.~
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.
You are providing an accidental illustration of why science is under attack - because people don't like having their beliefs undermined by pesky evidence.
You should learn the difference between correlation and causation, and maybe read the summary of the study you're posting:
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.
Also your claim that "all evidence" points anything out is contradicted by the fact that "all evidence" is not contained within a single study, and the posted article points out that the evidence itself is in dispute.
Yeah, I'm sure surviving adolescence needs even more insecurities brought by comparing yourself to the ad-fueled fake happiness machinery that is social media, let's wait for the damage during a couple of decades so we can have conclusive data that satisfies you before we decide to do something, feels like not having enough people with terminal cancer to decide to do something about cigarettes.
That's an emotional statement, not a rational one, which kind of proves the point that what's going on here is a moral panic. As does a cursory glance at this thread. It's all heat and very little light.
The issue of having to prove things beyond any doubt before we do something is a systemic problem that science itself it's aware of about itself and have been discussed extensively in purely rational settings, how many lives would have been saved from lung cancer if academics had took more seriously the initial research about smoking?. So no I don't believe for a second you are discussing in good faith, instead it seems like you quite a clear agenda and wouldn't care much about any evidence against social media, maybe because you work at one of those corporations or just are ideologically attached to one, so in other words I believe you are the one here due an emotional response, specifically one against the backlash towards social media.
>instead it seems like you quite a clear agenda and wouldn't care much about any evidence against social media, maybe because you work at one of those corporations or just are ideologically attached to one.
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.
It's already impossible to even talk about Palestine in TikTok, the biggest social network used by teens, so if you think corporations will not willingly bend to distort free speech you are quite delusional, the ability to make up one's mind is also inversely related to how much propaganda you are exposed to, in other words to be free enough to think for yourself.
This exactly the issue. Anyone with common sense knows that social media have many negative effects, attention span, negative beliefs and ideas, addiction, etc. Just like inhaling smoke into your lungs can't be healthy right? 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. We need some sort of impossible proof to what was originally common sense.
“Social media” probably has good and bad subparts that could be allowed/banned independently, but I hope we don’t need to wait for signoff from a study before being cautious, when the harms are kinda frickin obvious.
I mean there is no large RCT where a bunch of teenagers were denied social media since birth whereas a different cohort were allowed access, and then they were tracked well into adulthood and mental health outcomes tracked.
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.
It is universal that authoritarians want to characterize audio-visual screens as if they directly altered incentive salicence like addictive drugs do. They do this because the false comparison, the inaccurate social memes (dopamine hit, etc), all invoke the coercion of actual drugs. But the fact is that audio-visual screens do not alter incentive salience directly. They are just like any other part of our world and sometimes present enjoyable stimuli. That is vastly unlike how addictive drugs addict people. There no need for enjoyment in the first place even exists.
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.
Why? If asbestos is killing us we ban it, if hipotericllly some new form of asbestos is more harmful to young people than the rest we ban it too, why put the pressure of that responsibility in already stressed out population. Corporations know this very well, that's why they love when people have the opinion you just shared here.
From what I know, asbestos is bad when it gets airborne. If it's installed correctly, if workers wear PPE when handling it and if there are periodic checks for cracks, leaks and so on, it's safe. From what I've read, at least - I'm not an expert by any means. I've removed asbestos from a few old buildings but wore PPE. It was very uncomfortable to have the masks and suit on. I even threw away the cloth bags I had to my tools in, just to be safe. We disposed of the asbestos as per regulation. I feel safe and would do it again.
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.
The average person interacting with social media doesn't have a bunny suit that protects them from its ills, like you did with asbestos. This is doubly true for children.
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.
The bunny suit for a child is the parents, teachers and social workers.
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.
I get what you're saying but installing asbestos correctly is much easier than writing an app that could have security implications in C, is more easily detectable where things go wrong and it affects less people if things go wrong.
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?
But the people in each house would suffer from from asbestos in their own house. [0] If I bought a house in such a neighborhood, I'd have it checked from cracks or deterioration. If the results show a risk, I'd inform the neighboring houses, too.
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.
Parenting has never been the sole answer. We need a general sense of social responsibility to not expose children to risks of harm that they are not developmentally ready to deal with. Companies producing the harmful things have never been able to resist this temptation (see how tobacco companies had strategies to advertise to children while denying they were doing it) so often times regulations are needed.
Yeah, tell that to those parents with 3 jobs and can barely make any time with their kids that they have to keep an eye on even more things, things that weren't even a thing in their childhood or their predecessors.
Wouldn't the correct solution be to empower those parents with subsidies or free child care? If you have to work 3 jobs, parent or not, there is something wrong with how we've structured our society. Banning social media in your example seems like a bandaid put on a person with external and internal bleeding. You'll stop some of the bleeding but the person will still suffer and die.
Yeah, there is almost always better solutions to all problems than the one society goes to, but history has taught us that that a lot of times if we wait for the "better solution" we end up years and even decades without either solution.
But this solution has several negatives that likely make it net negative.
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.
Did you know the DOJ is starting to use subpoenas to unmask reddit users that criticize ICE? if you really care about free communication that's the kind of stuff you should be worrying about, not shilling for corpos trying to convince your daughter that she looks ugly so she ask her parents to buy more beauty products.
I am worried about this and completely oppose these subpoenas. In an ideal world all communications would be over a censorship/subpoena-resistant protocol and the government wouldn't try to infiltrate or stop any kind of online communication. I wish we can collectively ditch Meta, Google, Twitter, reddit and all the other centralized crap for something better. I don't have accounts there and if I had a company I wouldn't even make a company account there even it would mean I'd lose visibility and potential customers.
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.
not to sound callous, but that's not good parenting.
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.
Formally the same as stating "Everyone should get off the addiction driven drug cartel, but the government shouldn't have a single thing to do with it."
Yes. They don't actually care about the drug part anyway, beyond the excuse it gives them to operate outside their jurisdiction. We already have sane laws to cover the other crimes a "cartel" might do.
To be fair for the literal example prohibition is what creates the drug cartels in the first place so it is more coherent than it sounds at first blush. Enforcement is effectively a subsidy to those who don’t get caught.
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.
I take a very large grain of salt if a researcher is literally based in California and they produce "findings" in support of a California-based megacorp such as Facebook. And then the headline is "lacks evidence" and "pose risks".
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.
> Candice L. Odgers serves on the Youth and Families Advisory Committee for YouTube.
Who is 'Candice L. Odgers'? The article's author is 'Monika Neff Lind, PhD'. 'Candice L. Odgers' isn't mentioned in the article anywhere that I see. What was your goal of implying this is a quote/this person was relevant?
The link is only to the marketing fluff piece, the paper is here and has three authors [1]
[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/developmental-psycholog...
Thanks for the clarification. For others, here is the full conflict of interest disclosure from the linked paper in the article:
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...
Read and download the original paper: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/developmental-psycholog...
Too much social media in young years?
Cigarette manufacturer's research concluded smoking is a-okay for you. AI slop peddler CEO says, if you don't buy their stuff, you will be left behind. Biotech company says taking their pills can be only good for you.
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.
> First, enforcing a youth social media ban raises major ethical concerns. Enforcement efforts invade people’s privacy and are likely to hurt marginalized people more. For example, the technology that determines age based on selfie uploads makes more mistakes with young faces and people of color. Banned youth may also miss out on important resources and communications provided via social media, as schools, clubs, and most other youth-serving organizations use social media as a main form of communication.
Really grasping the straws with this argument...
> 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'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.
The title of the paper this blog post is based on, https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/developmental-psycholog..., is "We don't know how social media bans will affect youth but we're doing it anyway!" Which is a little cheeky for my taste given the seriousness of the issue these bans are trying to address.
Yeah, the "but they use the socials to communicate!" is laughable. Basically none of the parents I know want school comms to be via Meta or Tweet or whatever.
Email lists work great for the type of comms schools need to make. And/or an RSS feed on the schools homepage.
In fairness to the article, they are saying there is no evidence on how it will affect teens because all the studies excluded the audience that the ban was for.
"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.
Strangely enough kids did fine before social media, and I would say as an adult I also do fine without it.
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.
This severely underplays the "risks" of not banning social media for teenagers. The link between social media use and mental health problems in teens is extremely well documented.
No, the evidence is quite flimsy and correlational, and this is clearly a moral panic.
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.
I'm not an expert in this area, but this seems far from flimsy.
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?
You're gish-galloping a bunch of random studies, most of which appear to be cross-sectional. I've linked a broad review.
Even the longitudinal studies are poor here. See, for example, as this Nature article notes:
I'd also suggest looking at the coefficients (effect sizes) in the above (standardized regression coefficients barely approaching 0.2 - and this is one of the stronger findings), and other articles. The effects here, even if we were to pretend they were clearly established, are incredibly tiny. Examples:- 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.
~Qualifying all of this with the caveat that I'm not a social scientist.~
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.
Yes, sorry about the edits.
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.
this is why science credibility is going down, what we call science is abused. This is like saying smoking has no evidence it causes harm.
You are providing an accidental illustration of why science is under attack - because people don't like having their beliefs undermined by pesky evidence.
All evidence points out that social media has increased suicide rates in teens https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6791504/
You should learn the difference between correlation and causation, and maybe read the summary of the study you're posting:
Also your claim that "all evidence" points anything out is contradicted by the fact that "all evidence" is not contained within a single study, and the posted article points out that the evidence itself is in dispute.Yeah, I'm sure surviving adolescence needs even more insecurities brought by comparing yourself to the ad-fueled fake happiness machinery that is social media, let's wait for the damage during a couple of decades so we can have conclusive data that satisfies you before we decide to do something, feels like not having enough people with terminal cancer to decide to do something about cigarettes.
That's an emotional statement, not a rational one, which kind of proves the point that what's going on here is a moral panic. As does a cursory glance at this thread. It's all heat and very little light.
The issue of having to prove things beyond any doubt before we do something is a systemic problem that science itself it's aware of about itself and have been discussed extensively in purely rational settings, how many lives would have been saved from lung cancer if academics had took more seriously the initial research about smoking?. So no I don't believe for a second you are discussing in good faith, instead it seems like you quite a clear agenda and wouldn't care much about any evidence against social media, maybe because you work at one of those corporations or just are ideologically attached to one, so in other words I believe you are the one here due an emotional response, specifically one against the backlash towards social media.
>instead it seems like you quite a clear agenda and wouldn't care much about any evidence against social media, maybe because you work at one of those corporations or just are ideologically attached to one.
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.
It's already impossible to even talk about Palestine in TikTok, the biggest social network used by teens, so if you think corporations will not willingly bend to distort free speech you are quite delusional, the ability to make up one's mind is also inversely related to how much propaganda you are exposed to, in other words to be free enough to think for yourself.
This exactly the issue. Anyone with common sense knows that social media have many negative effects, attention span, negative beliefs and ideas, addiction, etc. Just like inhaling smoke into your lungs can't be healthy right? 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. We need some sort of impossible proof to what was originally common sense.
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“Social media” probably has good and bad subparts that could be allowed/banned independently, but I hope we don’t need to wait for signoff from a study before being cautious, when the harms are kinda frickin obvious.
I mean there is no large RCT where a bunch of teenagers were denied social media since birth whereas a different cohort were allowed access, and then they were tracked well into adulthood and mental health outcomes tracked.
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.
It is universal that authoritarians want to characterize audio-visual screens as if they directly altered incentive salicence like addictive drugs do. They do this because the false comparison, the inaccurate social memes (dopamine hit, etc), all invoke the coercion of actual drugs. But the fact is that audio-visual screens do not alter incentive salience directly. They are just like any other part of our world and sometimes present enjoyable stimuli. That is vastly unlike how addictive drugs addict people. There no need for enjoyment in the first place even exists.
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.
By your logic gambling is A-OK? I take it you never go to restaurants and see kids socially stunted by being hung up on tablets?
Everyone should get off the engagement driven platforms, but the government shouldn't have a single thing to do with it.
Why? If asbestos is killing us we ban it, if hipotericllly some new form of asbestos is more harmful to young people than the rest we ban it too, why put the pressure of that responsibility in already stressed out population. Corporations know this very well, that's why they love when people have the opinion you just shared here.
From what I know, asbestos is bad when it gets airborne. If it's installed correctly, if workers wear PPE when handling it and if there are periodic checks for cracks, leaks and so on, it's safe. From what I've read, at least - I'm not an expert by any means. I've removed asbestos from a few old buildings but wore PPE. It was very uncomfortable to have the masks and suit on. I even threw away the cloth bags I had to my tools in, just to be safe. We disposed of the asbestos as per regulation. I feel safe and would do it again.
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.
The average person interacting with social media doesn't have a bunny suit that protects them from its ills, like you did with asbestos. This is doubly true for children.
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.
The bunny suit for a child is the parents, teachers and social workers.
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.
Yeah and C yields bug free performance software when used correctly.
I get what you're saying but installing asbestos correctly is much easier than writing an app that could have security implications in C, is more easily detectable where things go wrong and it affects less people if things go wrong.
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?
If the neighborhood was all built around the same time or by the same developer, I would say high
But the people in each house would suffer from from asbestos in their own house. [0] If I bought a house in such a neighborhood, I'd have it checked from cracks or deterioration. If the results show a risk, I'd inform the neighboring houses, too.
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.
good parenting, as always, remains the best solution
Parenting has never been the sole answer. We need a general sense of social responsibility to not expose children to risks of harm that they are not developmentally ready to deal with. Companies producing the harmful things have never been able to resist this temptation (see how tobacco companies had strategies to advertise to children while denying they were doing it) so often times regulations are needed.
Yeah, tell that to those parents with 3 jobs and can barely make any time with their kids that they have to keep an eye on even more things, things that weren't even a thing in their childhood or their predecessors.
Wouldn't the correct solution be to empower those parents with subsidies or free child care? If you have to work 3 jobs, parent or not, there is something wrong with how we've structured our society. Banning social media in your example seems like a bandaid put on a person with external and internal bleeding. You'll stop some of the bleeding but the person will still suffer and die.
Yeah, there is almost always better solutions to all problems than the one society goes to, but history has taught us that that a lot of times if we wait for the "better solution" we end up years and even decades without either solution.
But this solution has several negatives that likely make it net negative.
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.
Did you know the DOJ is starting to use subpoenas to unmask reddit users that criticize ICE? if you really care about free communication that's the kind of stuff you should be worrying about, not shilling for corpos trying to convince your daughter that she looks ugly so she ask her parents to buy more beauty products.
I am worried about this and completely oppose these subpoenas. In an ideal world all communications would be over a censorship/subpoena-resistant protocol and the government wouldn't try to infiltrate or stop any kind of online communication. I wish we can collectively ditch Meta, Google, Twitter, reddit and all the other centralized crap for something better. I don't have accounts there and if I had a company I wouldn't even make a company account there even it would mean I'd lose visibility and potential customers.
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.
not to sound callous, but that's not good parenting.
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.
for those with parents yes
No. Parents cannot fight the tide if everyone else is doing it.
You have too much faith in the masses.
Formally the same as stating "Everyone should get off the addiction driven drug cartel, but the government shouldn't have a single thing to do with it."
Yes. They don't actually care about the drug part anyway, beyond the excuse it gives them to operate outside their jurisdiction. We already have sane laws to cover the other crimes a "cartel" might do.
To be fair for the literal example prohibition is what creates the drug cartels in the first place so it is more coherent than it sounds at first blush. Enforcement is effectively a subsidy to those who don’t get caught.
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.
We don't agree here.
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.
Except social media is the full opposite, you can't even mention Palestine on TikTok.
I take a very large grain of salt if a researcher is literally based in California and they produce "findings" in support of a California-based megacorp such as Facebook. And then the headline is "lacks evidence" and "pose risks".
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.
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What "scientists?” People just throw that word around now to give an article fake credibility. Total horse shit.