There are a lot of studies that claim the opposite, as a layperson I have a hard time separating them out and determining the quality of these studies other than to compare the relative ranking of the universities where the study was performed, the size of the study, demographics of the study subjects (if provided) and the reputation of the people performing the study.
That gives some handholds but it clearly isn't enough to determine anything that you could act on. From personal observation - which I trust more than any single random study - social media seems to be a net negative or a net positive dependent on social background and on whether or not the participant was socially active or isolated before they started using it. If they were socially active they tend to become less so, and if they were not then they tend to become more so. But that's a super limited sample and it still lumps together people that are from very different backgrounds.
I think in general making blanket statements such as TFA title does here about things where personal interaction is a major factor is fraught with peril and error. These things differ substantially from person to person and even if true in the average case that leaves a lot of room for outliers for whom the experience can be extremely negative (plenty of examples for that) or extremely positive (also plenty of examples).
Father of five with the last two in high school and middle school. We took away the phones after four years of mental health issues. After 4 months of the cutoff: were now backing down the meds and the kids are doing much better. Sorry, but I have to call bs on this study.
So let's talk about what this study says and doesn't say.
First off it's a quite high quality longitudinal study with 4 waves (different birth years) and several thousand participants, where screen time was used to quantify social media use, and mental health outcomes were quantified through interviews with mental health professionals.
It finds that "use of social media is not correlated with developing depression or anxiety".
It also finds "developing depression or anxiety is not correlated with change in use of social media".
It specifically does not say anything about whether using social media while having a mental health disorder is good or bad.
Let's suppose you swap out "using social media" with "drinking alcohol", and "10-16 year olds" with "18-25 year olds". Nobody would be surprised if you found both a) that whether a person drinks alcohol or not isn't a good predictor for mental health issues, but also b) that if you have mental health issues, reducing alcohol consumption is very good for your mental health. Both of those can be true at the same time.
Your anecdotal experience doesn't really trump this study, especially seeing how your kids have also been receiving psychiatric treatment, which is likely the bigger impact than you taking their phones.
There's so much stuff online that's so obviously going to be harmful if kids/teens are constantly exposed to it - porn, violence, fake/catastrophised news, angry/hateful tribalism, bullying/harassment, dangerous stunts performed for likes, etc. And social media algorithms can bring a lot of more outrageous content together into one endless feed.
It shouldn't really require a scientific study to know that the longer you can keep kids away from that stuff, the better. Yes, there's also amazing educational resources online, but they can be accessed via a filtered internet connection on a home PC, where parents can have some idea of what their kids are doing online.
If kids need phones for communication, maybe an old dumb Nokia that can make calls+texts, has no internet access, is practically indestructible, and isn't a theft magnet might be a better option than a smartphone?
"the results were the same regardless of whether the children published posts and pictures via their own social media pages or whether they liked and commented on posts published by others." - so basically the study compared people that use social media actively and passively. It's harder to compare children that use social media with the ones that don't.
It seems to me that building expectations based on social media (e.g. just by browsing) is the real problem, not posting or not.
How do people fairly evaluate the science behind social media? It seems like a topic that thoroughly infected by personal bias. It reminds me of arguments about violent video games and the rise of school violence; two events that are definitely correlated but have no direct evidence linking them to each other.
My answer is simply to ignore the science. Unless the experimenters have done a robust randomised clinical trial (or equivalent) the conclusions are no better than an editorial. Social media is confounded by human social factors: factors which are hard to measure, poorly understood, and every bit as complex as cell signalling pathways.
Never forget that scientists are under strong pressures to present results favourable to them getting future funding. This works out in the wash, but individual studies are inevitably biased.
I think what we can establish is that social media has some negative and positive effects but its hard to know if social media is just a conduit or if it is the root cause.
You may as well look to personal experience; if you have a bad time on social media then stop using it. If it helps you build community and joy, keep using it.
Look an "natural control groups". Violent games where also played in JP, but only in the US kids started bringing guns to school. Seems to me like a case closed.
With social media usage we see also a strong rise in asian societies wrt mental health problems especially in girls. Good to investigate further.
Also, the NRA tried to put the blame on anything except for prevalence of guns: there's money behind that narrative.
Yeah not buying this bullshit and half-assed study at best, you just need to look around you how negatively these things and smart phones in general affect kids when they are introduced to them too early, unsupervised, in typical leave-me-alone-for-some-time failed parenting manner.
I am not claiming it outright immediately causes depression (it probably does in same vein girls' magazines set unhealthy standards on looks for example but that's nothing new), but it definitely causes some hard damage in their long term happiness. For every success story there are 10 or 100 quiet failures. Many apps, be it social or games, also cause outright addictions and kids are very vulnerable to those and designers aim exactly at that. Does addiction create depression? I think everybody can answer for themselves.
Its failure of both parents and regulators to not see this harm, or see but ignore/give up on it. I have plenty of examples around me, seeing say 10 year old kids or younger playing hard mental games with their parents to get more time on phone is not much better than seeing some heroin addict craving for his next kick.
I think we generally lack some serious education step about current parenting, what are challenges faced, how to cope with them, and assist at least some form of actual help (not meaning some generic call helpline). I see more than not utter shock of people conceiving a kid or 2 and only later realizing how fucked they are in terms of free time, hobbies, passions, lack of sleep and overall sacrifices required, not for a year but much more. And no, you can't effectively outsource these to grand parents or nannies and call yourself a good parent, kids development will suffer in various ways, to be seen mostly later in life.
> Yeah not buying this bullshit and half-assed study at best, you just need to look around you
However half-assed this study is, it's less half-assed than making any conclusion based on your anecdotal evidence. You saw 10 children, you say? Do you think that's statistically relevant?
> However half-assed this study is, it's less half-assed
Without commenting on specifics, studies aren't necessarily better than anecdotal evidence. We live in an age of reproductivity crisis - most studies can't be reliably replicated. It's almost trivial to cheat with statistics - so it's not true at all that a study is infallible and must be deferred to at all times.
When people say "believe the science", I think about issues like this, where you can pretty much pick the study that supports your position and call the matter settled.
Double blind randomized controlled trial or it didn't happen.
Can I add preregistered? And big? And published in a serious peer review journal?
And check it was made in human. And check the exclusion list near the bottom of the paper. (I still remember the hidroxicloroquine paper where they get a better results in the treatment group after excluding the dead guy and other 5 bad cases. The control group has no exclusions (nor death), and was not even a real control group, juts an unrelated bunch of guys in another city.)
Anyway, for comparison, the claims that the vaccines are useful and safe come form people that was forced to dot all the i's and cross all the t's, and make a preregistered double blind randomized controlled trial in humans published in a serious peer review journal and with a lot of additional checking and paperwork to ensure it's reliable.
Once you start removing each of the check in that list, the confidence in the result start to diminish.
Maybe I can believe teens there can use social media responsibly but I don’t see anyone not damaged by social media in my own social circles in the USA, regardless of age, from old to young.
> Everything in here runs completely contradictory to the body of science from the past decade.
I'd say it doesn't so much contradict the existing science as it suggests the possibility that the population-level correlations we see are not explained by direct effects of social media use on individuals.
Just as an illustrative example, suppose Alice has an higher-than-average need for in-person social interaction in order to remain mentally healthy, and so has decided not to use social media. If the people around Alice start spending more than some critical percentage of time on social media instead of in-person socializing, then her mental health might decline even though she doesn't use social media.
Great example! Its hard to think of a topic more complex and obtruse than social interactions. There are going to be no straightforward answers here because social media is a conduit. Its like arguing whether home telephones are bad; its not really the phone’s fault if some arsehole keeps calling you or if it helps you stay in touch with loved ones - its merely the tech facilitating social interaction.
Yup, anecdotal evidence: I'm pretty much Alice. I avoid social media, but I can't avoid its effects - since everyone else doesn't, what social media does also indirectly affects me. It definitely affects me negatively how people around me have goldfish attention spans, it definitely affects me when they try to drag me into nonsensical trends, etc...
I can't find any study looking for a direct link between social media use in children and depression. Most articles I can find can only find correlations, but there's no indicator of if depressed kids start to use social media more or if kids using social media become depressed.
I have found articles linking social media to worse sleep quality (and sleep quality and depression are well known to influence each other) but still no direct link.
Do you happen to know what papers prove the link between depression and social media use in children? The theory makes sense but I can't find studies that prove more than mete correlation.
Biased sample size as well. Most of the individuals in this study made well over 100k.
An important factor to note:
"Children spend most of their waking hours in day care or in school; therefore it is important to study how aspects of these environments can affect children’s development and functioning. "
This is not the average case scenario as the majority of children on social media and the longest amount of screen use are of children who are often not in after school programs or daycares. The reality is that this study is not a good measure of if social media causes depression or not.
Readit News
That gives some handholds but it clearly isn't enough to determine anything that you could act on. From personal observation - which I trust more than any single random study - social media seems to be a net negative or a net positive dependent on social background and on whether or not the participant was socially active or isolated before they started using it. If they were socially active they tend to become less so, and if they were not then they tend to become more so. But that's a super limited sample and it still lumps together people that are from very different backgrounds.
I think in general making blanket statements such as TFA title does here about things where personal interaction is a major factor is fraught with peril and error. These things differ substantially from person to person and even if true in the average case that leaves a lot of room for outliers for whom the experience can be extremely negative (plenty of examples for that) or extremely positive (also plenty of examples).
First off it's a quite high quality longitudinal study with 4 waves (different birth years) and several thousand participants, where screen time was used to quantify social media use, and mental health outcomes were quantified through interviews with mental health professionals.
It finds that "use of social media is not correlated with developing depression or anxiety".
It also finds "developing depression or anxiety is not correlated with change in use of social media".
It specifically does not say anything about whether using social media while having a mental health disorder is good or bad.
Let's suppose you swap out "using social media" with "drinking alcohol", and "10-16 year olds" with "18-25 year olds". Nobody would be surprised if you found both a) that whether a person drinks alcohol or not isn't a good predictor for mental health issues, but also b) that if you have mental health issues, reducing alcohol consumption is very good for your mental health. Both of those can be true at the same time.
It shouldn't really require a scientific study to know that the longer you can keep kids away from that stuff, the better. Yes, there's also amazing educational resources online, but they can be accessed via a filtered internet connection on a home PC, where parents can have some idea of what their kids are doing online.
If kids need phones for communication, maybe an old dumb Nokia that can make calls+texts, has no internet access, is practically indestructible, and isn't a theft magnet might be a better option than a smartphone?
It seems to me that building expectations based on social media (e.g. just by browsing) is the real problem, not posting or not.
Never forget that scientists are under strong pressures to present results favourable to them getting future funding. This works out in the wash, but individual studies are inevitably biased.
I think what we can establish is that social media has some negative and positive effects but its hard to know if social media is just a conduit or if it is the root cause.
You may as well look to personal experience; if you have a bad time on social media then stop using it. If it helps you build community and joy, keep using it.
With social media usage we see also a strong rise in asian societies wrt mental health problems especially in girls. Good to investigate further.
Also, the NRA tried to put the blame on anything except for prevalence of guns: there's money behind that narrative.
I am not claiming it outright immediately causes depression (it probably does in same vein girls' magazines set unhealthy standards on looks for example but that's nothing new), but it definitely causes some hard damage in their long term happiness. For every success story there are 10 or 100 quiet failures. Many apps, be it social or games, also cause outright addictions and kids are very vulnerable to those and designers aim exactly at that. Does addiction create depression? I think everybody can answer for themselves.
Its failure of both parents and regulators to not see this harm, or see but ignore/give up on it. I have plenty of examples around me, seeing say 10 year old kids or younger playing hard mental games with their parents to get more time on phone is not much better than seeing some heroin addict craving for his next kick.
I think we generally lack some serious education step about current parenting, what are challenges faced, how to cope with them, and assist at least some form of actual help (not meaning some generic call helpline). I see more than not utter shock of people conceiving a kid or 2 and only later realizing how fucked they are in terms of free time, hobbies, passions, lack of sleep and overall sacrifices required, not for a year but much more. And no, you can't effectively outsource these to grand parents or nannies and call yourself a good parent, kids development will suffer in various ways, to be seen mostly later in life.
However half-assed this study is, it's less half-assed than making any conclusion based on your anecdotal evidence. You saw 10 children, you say? Do you think that's statistically relevant?
Without commenting on specifics, studies aren't necessarily better than anecdotal evidence. We live in an age of reproductivity crisis - most studies can't be reliably replicated. It's almost trivial to cheat with statistics - so it's not true at all that a study is infallible and must be deferred to at all times.
Double blind randomized controlled trial or it didn't happen.
Can I add preregistered? And big? And published in a serious peer review journal?
And check it was made in human. And check the exclusion list near the bottom of the paper. (I still remember the hidroxicloroquine paper where they get a better results in the treatment group after excluding the dead guy and other 5 bad cases. The control group has no exclusions (nor death), and was not even a real control group, juts an unrelated bunch of guys in another city.)
Anyway, for comparison, the claims that the vaccines are useful and safe come form people that was forced to dot all the i's and cross all the t's, and make a preregistered double blind randomized controlled trial in humans published in a serious peer review journal and with a lot of additional checking and paperwork to ensure it's reliable.
Once you start removing each of the check in that list, the confidence in the result start to diminish.
This website seems legit, even though the domain sounds like it's some kind of blogspam website.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...
Maybe I can believe teens there can use social media responsibly but I don’t see anyone not damaged by social media in my own social circles in the USA, regardless of age, from old to young.
I'd say it doesn't so much contradict the existing science as it suggests the possibility that the population-level correlations we see are not explained by direct effects of social media use on individuals.
Just as an illustrative example, suppose Alice has an higher-than-average need for in-person social interaction in order to remain mentally healthy, and so has decided not to use social media. If the people around Alice start spending more than some critical percentage of time on social media instead of in-person socializing, then her mental health might decline even though she doesn't use social media.
I have found articles linking social media to worse sleep quality (and sleep quality and depression are well known to influence each other) but still no direct link.
Do you happen to know what papers prove the link between depression and social media use in children? The theory makes sense but I can't find studies that prove more than mete correlation.
This is not the average case scenario as the majority of children on social media and the longest amount of screen use are of children who are often not in after school programs or daycares. The reality is that this study is not a good measure of if social media causes depression or not.