No evidence social media time is correlated with teen mental health problems

Skepticism is warranted here (as is the reminder that lack of evidence isn&#x27;t definitive evidence <i>against</i>), but I think the specific takeaway is interesting:<p><pre><code> social media use does not predict mental health problems in youth </code></pre> Which could indicate any number of things:<p>- Social media use by itself doesn&#x27;t predict mental health problems because kids without mental health problems also use social media.<p>- Social media use by itself doesn&#x27;t predict mental health problems because there are benefits to certain kids that offset the equivalent problems they would have in its absence (e.g., the closeted gay kid in a rural town would be depressed without supportive online communities).<p>- Social media by itself doesn&#x27;t predict mental health problems because the <i>type</i> of social media platform is more important than the binary of using&#x2F;not using.<p>- Social media by itself doesn&#x27;t predict mental health problems because it exacerbates problems without necessarily causing new ones outright.<p>- Social media by itself doesn&#x27;t predict mental health problems because kids who <i>don&#x27;t</i> use it are (sadly) more socially isolated and suffer as a result.<p>And maybe none of those are true! But I&#x27;m curious to see if there&#x27;s something unexpected going on.

Jonathan Haidt, who&#x27;s been driving a lot of the work against social media for kids, directly refutes these findings in this post <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.afterbabel.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;fundamental-flaws-part-3" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.afterbabel.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;fundamental-flaws-part-3</a>.

Anecdata isn&#x27;t useful, but each of three children in our family experienced &quot;externally observable&quot; and self-reported improvements to their &quot;mental health&quot; each and every time they were banned from devices they used for &quot;social media time&quot;, with immediate regressions&#x2F;worsening once the bans were over.<p>You could say maybe they needed better friends, and I wouldn&#x27;t argue that, but that&#x27;s three very different teenagers with the same overall &quot;response&quot;.

&gt; Note that Ferguson had to calculate effect sizes for depression and anxiety in order to determine the composite effect size for those studies that contained these outcomes, but he did not include these results in his paper. When requested to provide the effect sizes he calculated for depression and anxiety, Ferguson replied that he is unable to do so. Furthermore, Ferguson even declined to reveal which aspects of well-being he selected for his calculation of each composite effect size (see Part 2 for details).<p>~ <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.afterbabel.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;fundamental-flaws-part-3" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.afterbabel.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;fundamental-flaws-part-3</a><p>So the author&#x27;s meta review has a black box model which provides effect sizes for each study (in an attempt to even out studies which measure different aspects of mental health), and refuses to detail how it works. That alone makes the whole study suspect, and the above link details obvious calculation errors, too.

&quot;I conducted a meta analysis of 46 studies and concluded that there is _no correlation with social media and teen mental health issues&quot;<p>What about the studies that that _do_ show a correlation, of which there are more than one. Why were those discounted?

Full title: There is no evidence that time spent on social media is correlated with adolescent mental health problems: Findings from a meta-analysis.

Given the propensity for moral panics, I&#x27;d bet there&#x27;s a whole lot of nothing in this one too.

“No evidence of X” is a more impressive claim when X is itself an extraordinary claim - but in this case, I believe “not X” to be the extraordinary claim.<p>Based on my own observations, and on my experience of being a child and of raising one, and on what other parents tell me, and on what other teens tell me in their own words, and on what we know about how addiction works and how teen brains work… I consider the burden of proof to be on those who think social media is <i>not</i> correlated with teen mental health problems - and there is no evidence for this.

Have there been studies on “time on phones” or “time on devices” rather than social media specifically? Be interested to know of anything solid. My gut says this is where the issue lies rather than with social media specifically, but I’d be interested in any evidence for &#x2F; against.

Interesting how most comments are bending over backwards to argue against the findings and support the moral panic narrative (“social media is making kids commit suicide at dramatically higher rates”). It seems a majority of people really want this to be true. That’s what makes me most skeptical that it is.<p>I’m fully open to the idea that social media is uniquely harmful to humans. But the burden of proof should be on the side claiming unique harm, not the other way around.<p>I hate big tech and social network-effects monopolies as much as the next guy. But history would suggest those shouting “this time is different” tend to be wrong when it comes to what the kids are doing these days.

I really don&#x27;t see how it&#x27;s not. I can easily track how my mood changes (for the worse) after I have fallen into a cycle of spending too much time on certain social media site. If you&#x27;re even slightly self-aware you can do this.

I think a useful framing might be to compare social media to drugs. Many people do various sorts of drugs. Some people can do some drugs and not have their lives destroyed by said drugs. Other people have their lives upended by some drugs, sometimes the same ones that other people do without such serious consequences. We recognize that not all drugs are equivalent and recognize that they need to be taken seriously, limited, or prohibited outright.<p>Many people, and clearly many teenagers are able to use social media and not be all that harmed. For some, that&#x27;s clearly not the case.

Maybe coming at this from the standpoint of psychological health is the wrong approach. It is understood that the product social media companies are selling is not the interaction of users -- it is the personal data those users create while interacting. The users are being farmed for their data. They are livestock. Our reasons for our even cursory protections of livestock are largely moral ones. We don&#x27;t like the idea of animals living in poor conditions. I think we, similarly, don&#x27;t like the idea of our children being milked for data. Regardless of provable harm.

Is a control group even possible in this day and age?

While, as an academic, I actually don&#x27;t see glaring flaws in the paper. (For context, the author previously wrote about videogames not increasing violence. &quot;Not correlated&quot; might be his general approach)<p>As a normal human though; when overwhelming daily evidence disagrees with scientific findings, usually its a flaw or VERY deep misunderstanding of the science.

Do the authors disclose their funding sources?

&#x27;The Phrase &quot;No Evidence&quot; Is A Red Flag For Bad Science Communication&#x27;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.astralcodexten.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;the-phrase-no-evidence-is-a-red-flag" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.astralcodexten.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;the-phrase-no-evidence-is-a...</a>

Since the full text is only available behind a paywall it&#x27;s difficult to make any substantive comment except that there sure is a lot of grant money available to study this topic. The lack of any conclusive or strong evidence given the multiplicity of the same studies over and over suggests if there is an effect it is weak at best. Also notable is that most studies pre-2019 on childrens mental health were fairly positive and most post 2019 negative. I can think of a lot of things that changed in 2019 but use of &quot;social media&quot; is not one of them.

The Surgeon General&#x27;s report [0] cited 3 studies showing 1) that limiting social media to 30 minutes per day among college students for 3 weeks significantly reduced loneliness and depression [1], 2) deactivating Facebook before the 2018 midterm elections increased subjective wellbeing and polarization,[2] and 3) that 10,904 14 year olds in the UK Millennium Cohort Study experienced an increase in depressive symptoms in association with greater daily social media use, with a stronger association for girls than boys (depressive symptoms in adolescents using social media for 3 to &lt;5 h versus 1-3 hours daily were elevated 21% in boys and 26% in girls; with 5 or more hours of use versus 1-3 hours of use daily, depressive symptom scores were elevated 35% in boys and 50% in girls) [3].<p>Fully 57% of high school aged girls--(more than half!)--experienced feelings of persistent sadness or hopelessness in 2021, up from 36% in 2011 [4]. Over the same timeframe, average time spent using social media each day among teens doubled from about 1.5 hours to more than 3 hours [5].<p>I am not waiting for a randomized controlled study. There are serious harmful effects of the environment our kids are growing up in today, and part of that is a growth in social media. Let us not forget that Mark Zuckerberg, &quot;personally and repeatedly thwarted initiatives meant to improve the well-being of teens on Facebook and Instagram...[overruling] Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri and President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg, who had asked Zuckerberg to do more to protect the more than 30 million teens who use Instagram in the United States.&quot; [6] Not enough evidence? In the words of Bob Dylan, &quot;you don&#x27;t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.&quot;<p>Sources<p>0.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hhs.gov&#x2F;sites&#x2F;default&#x2F;files&#x2F;sg-youth-mental-health-social-media-advisory.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hhs.gov&#x2F;sites&#x2F;default&#x2F;files&#x2F;sg-youth-mental-heal...</a><p>1.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;guilfordjournals.com&#x2F;doi&#x2F;10.1521&#x2F;jscp.2018.37.10.751" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;guilfordjournals.com&#x2F;doi&#x2F;10.1521&#x2F;jscp.2018.37.10.751</a><p>2.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aeaweb.org&#x2F;articles?id=10.1257&#x2F;aer.20190658" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aeaweb.org&#x2F;articles?id=10.1257&#x2F;aer.20190658</a><p>3. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thelancet.com&#x2F;journals&#x2F;eclinm&#x2F;article&#x2F;PIIS2589-5370(18)30060-9&#x2F;fulltext#t0010" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thelancet.com&#x2F;journals&#x2F;eclinm&#x2F;article&#x2F;PIIS2589-5...</a><p>4. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cdc.gov&#x2F;healthyyouth&#x2F;data&#x2F;yrbs&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;YRBS_Data-Summary-Trends_Report2023_508.pdf#page=64" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cdc.gov&#x2F;healthyyouth&#x2F;data&#x2F;yrbs&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;YRBS_Data-Sum...</a><p>5. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;images.nature.com&#x2F;lw1200&#x2F;magazine-assets&#x2F;d41586-023-00402-9&#x2F;d41586-023-00402-9_24014506.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;images.nature.com&#x2F;lw1200&#x2F;magazine-assets&#x2F;d41586-023-...</a><p>6. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cbsnews.com&#x2F;sacramento&#x2F;news&#x2F;zuckerberg-rejected-meta-proposals-to-improve-teen-mental-health-court-documents-allege&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cbsnews.com&#x2F;sacramento&#x2F;news&#x2F;zuckerberg-rejected-...</a>

Plenty has already been written about how young people are caught in a Catch-22: being on social media sucks, but being off of social media has major social penalties. Given that this is already well known, this study seems intentionally, even maliciously, naive.

In my country we screen people at age 12 and if your testscores are bad your dreams are over.<p>Walking around in a society were some people live in 3 million euro mansions and others in ghettos. Kids aren&#x27;t stupid I&#x27;m amazed suicide rates aren&#x27;t higher.

am reminded of: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=38909735">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=38909735</a>

There’s plenty of evidence in the real world

Weirdly, many of the posts expressing skepticism about this paper&#x27;s findings are being downvoted (someone&#x27;s not happy)

Ok, now let&#x27;s see the study that shows it is beneficial to teen mental health.<p>I quit it and my mental health improved. Many others in a controlled study found the same effect.<p>Alcott and colleagues (2020) randomly assigned 2743 adults to either deactivate their Facebook accounts for one month or not. This study also found that deactivation significantly improved subjective well-being and that “80% of the treatment group agreed that deactivation was good for them.” The treatment group was also more likely to report using Facebook less and having uninstalled the app from their phones post-experiment.<p>Source: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.afterbabel.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;phone-based-childhood-cause-epidemic" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.afterbabel.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;phone-based-childhood-cause-epi...</a><p>Finally, this strikes me as the same playbook that big tobacco used in the 90s. &quot;Doubt is our product,&quot; Michaels quotes a cigarette executive as saying, &quot;since it is the best means of competing with the &#x27;body of fact&#x27; that exists in the minds of the general public.

Memories of tobacco &quot;researchers&quot; claiming the science linking smoking to cancer is inconclusive.

&quot;drugs r bad m&#x27;kay&quot;<p>it&#x27;s painfuly obvious the opposite is true. either mental health problems is boxed in too narrow, or the title is misleading to what the actual findings are. for example &#x27; following a methodology of xyz there is no direct scinetific evidence of abc&#x27;.<p>many people say their mental health improved a lot when quitting social media. less anxiety, self-image issues, lack of confidence etc.<p>also ots relatively obvious more social media time is less being mindful and attentive to ones surroundings, less time outside etc. absorbing and experiencing the real world.<p>many things untested in an experiment or research doesnt mean evidence is not there... it was just omitted due to a narrow scoped experiment trying to draw way to broad and general conclusions.<p>especially in social studies this has to stop. &#x27;we polled 1k people and now draw a conclusion about a billion or more people&#x27;. no thanks.

I almost, ALMOST thought we would go an entire week without a Haidt post. And I don’t know whether to be relieved or not.

Meta analysis because scraping a bunch of studies about mental health is a robust way of understanding risk? This is really shameless and implies the writers have no connection with children who use social media.

Not so sure about this; would need to read the whole paper. &quot;No evidence&quot; could just mean that causality could not be proved (admittedly very difficult to prove), which doesn&#x27;t mean that there is indeed no causality. I&#x27;m not sure I&#x27;d trust this researcher any more than I&#x27;d trust any other single paper on the topic; and the preponderance of papers has shown there is a link though the details may be in dispute.<p>What is not in doubt is that there has been a sharp increase in teen mental health difficulties in recent years: look at this 30% increase from 2017 to 2021[0]. This also coincides with a significant increase in social media use among young people. Correlation is not causation, but there haven&#x27;t been many other theories as to what might be driving this change.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cdc.gov&#x2F;healthyyouth&#x2F;mental-health&#x2F;mental-health-numbers.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cdc.gov&#x2F;healthyyouth&#x2F;mental-health&#x2F;mental-health...</a><p>I&#x27;d also want to know where the funding for this meta study came from.

The APA has lost it&#x27;s credibility some time ago with it&#x27;s political stances. It doesn&#x27;t take a researcher to see a correlation between phone time and youth issues.

I don&#x27;t want to sound unscientific, but when a paper is directly in conflict with what is obviously true, it&#x27;s OK to use common sense.

That sounds odd considering pretty clear statistics correlating teen girls suicide rates with the rise of Instagram. Can someone who understands the subject matter more than I do comment on this further?