The FDA Takes Its Turn Burying Studies Showing The Safety Of COVID, Shingles Vaccines

Failures

from the government-by-ostrich dept

The fuckery that is going on across HHS and vaccine programs is just plain incredible. As the Trump administration continues to provide whatever cover it can so that RFK Jr. can wreck shop on the health of Americans, the damage Kennedy is doing to our inoculation programs is going to take years, if not decades, to unwind. Led by a man who doesn’t believe in the foundational theory of modern medicine, America’s health agencies have begun to engage in direct misinformation campaigns via the censorship of real scientific information. Warnings about bogus autism treatments were removed from FDA websites. The CDC buried a report demonstrating how effective COVID vaccines are under dubious justifications.

And now it seems that it’s the FDA’s turn to likewise hide studies about the safety of COVID and shingles vaccines from the public.

The Food and Drug Administration blocked the publication of several studies supporting the safety of vaccines against Covid and shingles in recent months, a Health and Human Services Department spokesperson confirmed Tuesday. FDA scientists worked with data firms to analyze millions of patient records for the studies, which found side effects of the shots to be rare, The New York Times first reported on Tuesday. 

In October, the scientists were directed to withdraw two Covid shot studies that had been accepted for publication in medical journals, the Times reported. In February, top FDA officials did not sign off on submitting study abstracts on Shingrix, a shingles vaccine, to a drug safety conference, the paper added.

Now, spokespeople for HHS have stated that the studies were withdrawn because either they drew conclusions not supported by the data, or that the designs of the studies were done “outside of the agency’s purview.”

That’s bullshit. We all know it’s bullshit. And they know that we know it’s bullshit. And they simply don’t care, because this is not about medicine, or health, or even traditional politics. This is about the ego of one man, Kennedy, and his cohort of tinfoil hat wearing bumblefucks.

As the New York Times article itself quotes knowledgeable professors of medicine, this is censorship.

Dr. Aaron S. Kesselheim, a Harvard University medical professor who studies F.D.A. regulation, said he had worked with the agency on a number of research papers and found its work to meet “the highest standards of scientific investigation.” He suggested that the request to pull the papers was an act of “censorship.”

He added: “At any other time in history, this would be a major scandal that would lead to congressional hearings and resignations of leadership, and I hope that’s what happens next.”

These studies were seen by people who know what they’re talking about in the pre-publication stage. It’s not just Kesselheim who is pointing out that these studies seem both perfectly valid and very useful for evaluating the safety and efficacy of these vaccines. And the conclusions they draw are as full-throated as they are at odds with Kennedy’s anti-vaxxer nonsense.

Take one study, which worked to examine millions of health records for those who received a COVID shot at anywhere from 6 months old to 64 years old.

That study examined the records of 4.2 million Covid vaccine recipients and examined their later experience with 17 conditions, including swelling of the brain, major blood clots, stroke and heart attacks. The study found rare cases of fever-related seizures and myocarditis, or inflammation of the heart muscle, known to be associated with Covid vaccines.

“Given the available evidence, F.D.A. continues to conclude the benefits of vaccination outweigh the risks,” the study said.

Angela Rasmussen, an editor in chief of the journal Vaccine, said the paper had been withdrawn by the authors.

Dr. Caleb Alexander, a drug safety and methodology expert at Johns Hopkins University, reviewed both studies at the request of The Times and said that “no study answers every question” but “there is nothing inherently problematic regarding these reports.”

The point earlier was a good one: this is god damned scandal. Or, rather, it should be, except the talking heads on our televisions are far too busy covering every other scandal or ginned up controversy the administration creates, and more than half of our elected officials can’t be bothered to do real political combat out of fear of who knows what. And so the health of Americans is put at risk instead, because our government is made up of an unholy combination of crackpots and cowards.

At this point, I could be convinced that Kennedy and some portion of the government is actually attempting to cause people to die. I can’t understand another coherent motivation for this kind of censorship of scientific information, other than pure ego.

And if one man’s ego really is standing in the way of getting us back on track on matters of life and death, then impeach Kennedy and let’s get back to sanity. This really isn’t that complicated.

Filed Under: covid vaccines, fda, health & human services, rfk jr., science, shingles, shingles vaccine, studies, vaccines

Clown Show: CDC Website Changed To Suggest Vaccines May Indeed Cause Autism

Failures

from the fucking-maniacs dept

I knew this was coming but this still is absolutely maddening. In all of our coverage of RFK Jr., particularly since his vile appointment and confirmation as head of Health and Human Services, it’s been abundantly clear that he’s an anti-vaxxer. While that may seem obvious to most of our readers, it’s important to note that there are a great many Kennedy fans out there who will tell you he’s not that and that he instead is merely seeking more science on the effects of vaccines. Some say this in genuine fashion, while most say it knowing precisely how full of shit they are. The man’s time at DHS has made any debate over this point academic, of course. Every action he’s taking is the action an anti-vaxxer would make, no matter what he may admit to or otherwise. Still, there was enough nuance and subtlety in all of this to give some folks the cover needed to claim that Kennedy isn’t what he plainly is.

Well, that time is now past. The CDC recently updated its webpage meant to educate the public on the lack of a link between autism and vaccines to indicate that, hey, there might just be a link after all.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has updated its website to promote the widely debunked claim that vaccines may cause autism. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has repeatedly linked vaccines to autism, and now the public health agency he oversees is publicly reversing its position to reflect that belief.

The CDC site previously said studies showed there was no connection between receiving vaccines and developing autism. HHS communications director Andrew Nixon said the agency updated the site to reflect “gold standard, evidence-based science.”

Okay, I’m not going to mince words on this: this change to this publicly facing webpage is unscientific, dangerous, and fucking evil. It’s one man and his cadre of handpicked anti-vaxxer cronies foisting upon the public guidance that is not built on science or medicine. And it’s patently obvious that the approach here is an unscientific one.

There is going to be some nuance here, but this is really important. Here is the banner at the top of the page after the changes:

Let’s go one by one. The first bullet point is by far the stupidest. Scientists simply don’t talk like this. If the CDC would like to have a webpage for every single potential cause of autism that studies haven’t “ruled out”, well, that is going to require a hell of a lot of webpages. Has science ruled out that ghosts don’t cause autism? Or that the hand of god isn’t directly involved? How about, oh I don’t know… turtles? Have there been enough studies done, peer reviewed of course, that specifically rule out the possibility that proximity to turtles doesn’t have some causative link to autism? I can promise you there hasn’t, because that would be insane.

In science, the burden of proof is on those who make a claim. In absence of that proof, the proper course of belief is in the null. In other words, scientifically, making a scientific claim puts the onus to prove it on the claimant and puts zero onus on anyone else. If I want to argue that turtles cause autism, I have to prove it. Otherwise, you assume no link exists. And that’s what the CDC’s page used to do. It used to say that there is no link, which is shorthand for the fact that no link has been proven to exist, which is precisely the right way to describe this.

As for the claim that studies proving a link have been ignored, they very much have not. They’ve either been exposed for their poor methodology or they’ve been debunked. That’s it. And the rest of the research out there indicates, again, there is no link between autism and vaccines.

“The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website has been changed to promote false information suggesting vaccines cause autism,” said Dr. Susan J. Kressly, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, in a statement. “Since 1998, independent researchers across seven countries have conducted more than 40 high-quality studies involving over 5.6 million people. The conclusion is clear and unambiguous: There’s no link between vaccines and autism.”

She went on to say, “Anyone repeating this harmful myth is misinformed or intentionally trying to mislead parents. We call on the CDC to stop wasting government resources to amplify false claims that sow doubt in one of the best tools we have to keep children healthy and thriving: routine immunizations.”

As for CDC’s new assessment of causes of autism, who the actual fuck knows what that means. So far, out of Kennedy at least, we’ve heard that the causes of autism are maybe vaccines, definitely Tylenol (except maybe not), and male circumcision. They’re all over the damned place and there is zero trust from anyone with a couple of brain cells to rub together that any new analysis coming out of this bullshit iteration of the CDC is at all trustworthy.

And, people, this matters. We are, right now, on the verge of losing our measles elimination status and it’s because of exactly this kind of bullshit from exactly these assclowns. That has happened because vaccination rates have been steadily falling for two decades and this is going to make it much, much worse. Kennedy should be dragged before Congress for hearings to explain why this change was made, on what scientific basis the change was made, and why in the world impeachment efforts to oust him ought not to begin immediately.

Anything less is Congress abdicating its responsibility.

Filed Under: anti-vaxxers, autism, cdc, conspiracy theories, rfk jr., science, studies, vaccines

Trump Admin Tells Expecting Mothers To Avoid Tylenol Due To Unproven Link To Autism

Failures

from the facepalm dept

Back in April, RFK Jr. committed publicly to firmly knowing the cause of autism by September of this year. In May, Donald Trump himself weighed in with the already baked conclusion that autism doesn’t “occur naturally” and therefore must have some environmental cause. Both statements were absurd at the time. Autism causes have been studied for decades and RFK Jr. has no magic wand to make the answer more knowable to him than the collective medical community. Donald Trump is not a doctor, nor a medical researcher, and unless he has actual evidence and research to back up his claim, it is fit for being ignored and nothing else. Meanwhile, Kennedy also shut down the research that was actually being done to find causes of autism.

But it’s now September and a promise was made, so the Trump administration had to at least pretend to make it a promise kept. To that end, reporting came out last week that Kennedy and HHS would be pointing the finger at prenatal use of Tylenol as a major cause of autism. And just this week, that’s exactly what Trump and Kennedy did.

“Don’t take Tylenol,” Trump instructed pregnant women around a dozen times during the unwieldy White House news conference, also urging mothers not to give their infants the drug, known by the generic name acetaminophen in the U.S. or paracetamol in most other countries. He also fueled long-debunked claims that ingredients in vaccines or timing shots close together could contribute to rising rates of autism in the U.S., without providing any medical evidence.

The rambling announcement, which appeared to rely on existing studies rather than significant new research, comes as the Make America Healthy Again movement has been pushing for answers on the causes of autism. The diverse coalition of supporters of Health Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. includes several anti-vaccine activists who have long spread debunked claims that immunizations are responsible.

Okay, so where is this coming from, you might be asking? Well, to start, studies do exist that point to correlational data between use of Tylenol and autism rates. That’s just the truth. So, if you hear any opponent of this administration tell you that there is zero data or studies indicating that this might be a concern, that is simply not true. It’s important that we be really precise about this sort of thing.

One such Harvard study, for example, did find that there was an uptick in rates of autism diagnoses among children who’s mothers took Tylenol while pregnant, primarily to reduce a high fever in the mother. The problem is that even those who performed that very study don’t agree with Trump’s message to pregnant women, which was, again, “Don’t take Tylenol.”

One of the researchers on that study was Ann Bauer, an epidemiologist at the University of Massachusetts. Bauer said she thinks pregnant women should be told about a possible risk from acetaminophen. But the researcher also was worried that it might be too soon to have the federal government offering guidance on its use.

“I’m a little concerned about how this message is going to come because I think they may be jumping the gun,” Bauer said before the announcement was made. “I think those of us in the research community would like to see stronger evidence.”

This is how scientists talk when the evidence is, at best, inconclusive. We’re talking about one study, with a relatively small sample size and for which all kinds of externalities that could impact an outcome of autism were not accounted for. “We need more data” is exactly the right conclusion of such a study, as opposed to “Don’t take Tylenol.” Again, precision here matters very much.

Trump and Kennedy didn’t bother being precise. They advised the nation on a health matter that they can’t possibly understand, since the current researchers of it don’t understand it. And they even took it further than studies like the Harvard study would suggest even if we wanted to draw conclusions based on it.

One challenge is that it’s hard to disentangle the effects of Tylenol use from the effects of high fevers during pregnancy. Fevers, especially in the first trimester, can increase the risk for miscarriages, preterm birth and other problems, according to the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine.

Trump also urged not giving Tylenol to young children, but scientists say that research indicates autism develops in the fetal brain.

Responding to Trump’s warnings, the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine said they still recommend Tylenol as an appropriate option to treat fever and pain during pregnancy. The president of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists said Monday that suggestions that Tylenol use in pregnancy causes autism are “irresponsible when considering the harmful and confusing message they send to pregnant patients.”

Ironically, high fevers in pregnant women have also been suggested as a potential cause of autism diagnoses in children, among many other negative healthcare outcomes for the unborn child. This is the same flavor of medical advice that Kennedy had on COVID vaccines: the cure is worse than the disease. That’s bullshit, of course, but it’s the kind of bullshit you get when you believe that those who suffer negative health outcomes are at fault for those same outcomes.

And, despite the plain advisory language from definitely-not-a-doctor Donald Trump, he also threw out the repeatedly debunked claims about vaccines being linked to autism in the same announcement. Perhaps he did so because he really believes in such a link, but I doubt it. Instead, this was red meat to Kennedy’s base of supporters, because they were fucking furious when the news first broke about the announcement of the link to Tylenol.

“We didn’t wait 20 years for Bobby to finally speak and then get served Tylenol as an answer,” anti-vaccine group Georgia Coalition for Vaccine Choice wrote in an unhinged Facebook post on Monday morning. “If that’s all we hear – is that the end? Not thimerosal. Not aluminum. Not MMR. Not Hep B. Not the insane schedule pushed after pharma got liability protection. Are we supposed to just forget?”

Children’s Health Defense (CHD)—the anti-vaccine group founded by Kennedy—even got in on the backlash, retweeting a post on Monday about parents who falsely blame vaccines for their children’s neurological condition, with the statement: “THIS WAS NOT CAUSED BY TYLENOL.”

And if that’s not good enough for you, here’s Steve Bannon and a guest on the matter.

In an interview on Steve Bannon’s podcast War Room Monday, CHD President Mary Holland downplayed the link, telling Bannon: “Today may be something of a sideshow—Tylenol is not the primary cause. Vaccines are the primary cause [of autism],” Holland said. (The claim that vaccines cause autism has been thoroughly and repeatedly debunked.)

Bannon, for his part, slammed Kennedy’s effectiveness as health secretary, calling his efforts to implement an anti-vaccine agenda unserious and amateurish. “This Tylenol thing stinks to high heaven,” he said.

Again, precision in how we talk about this matters when we’re talking about science and healthcare. I am unwilling to say that vaccines definitely do not cause autism. Instead, I say that there is no scientific evidence that has gone through a rigorous process to suggest that it does, so there’s no reason to operate as if there were. I will not say that there is zero link between Tylenol use in pregnant women and autism. But I can sure as shit say that here too there is certainly no conclusive causal link of significance between them, only correlational data that doesn’t account for a zillion other factors, and therefore we don’t put too much weight on this claim until more studies and data shows otherwise.

Many medical experts, instead, point to a novel 2024 study conducted in Sweden. The study, published in JAMA, used data from a population of 2.5 million children and was also able to compare differences among (full) siblings. This provided a simple way to skirt confounding variables, such as genetics and environmental factors, to which siblings would have similar exposure.

In the entire population, children exposed to acetaminophen during pregnancy were slightly more likely to be diagnosed with autism than those who weren’t—echoing some earlier studies. But, in the sibling analysis, which compared siblings who were exposed to acetaminophen to siblings who were not, the association vanished. In all, the data suggests that acetaminophen was not causing an uptick in autism diagnoses; rather, there were other confounding factors behind the link.

Meanwhile, the President tells the public “Don’t take Tylenol.”

There is so, so much damage being done by these halfwits looking for a headline rather than real answers. It seems obvious to me that some non-zero number of pregnant women out there will adhere to Trump’s message and their unborn children will either suffer the consequences of high fevers in life, or miscarry and never have that life to begin with. Some will even refuse to give their already-born children Tylenol as Trump instructed and some, almost certainly, will die. On who’s ledger will we place those deaths? The answer must be on Kennedy and Trump.

And beyond that, this cavalier attitude towards healthcare pronouncements will do no favors when it comes to getting the public to trust doctors and researchers on matters of health and medicine. And that is of paramount importance, as the American people today trust both their leaders and medical institutions in particular less than perhaps they ever have in the past.

On matters of life and death, that will literally kill people.

Filed Under: acetaminophen, autism, bad science, donald trump, junk science, rfk jr., science, studies, tylenol, vaccines

Social Media’s Electoral Power: More Hype Than Reality?

Studies

from the destroying-all-your-priors dept

It’s been almost an article of faith among many (especially since 2016) that social media has been a leading cause of our collective dumbening and the resulting situation in which a bunch of fascist-adjacent wannabe dictators getting elected all over the place.

But, we’ve always found that argument to feel massively, if not totally overblown. And, the data we’ve seen has highlighted how little impact social media has actually had on elections (cable news might be a bit different).

Now there’s a new study out of NYU’s Center for Social Media & Politics, which has been working through a ton of fascinating social media data over the past few years. This latest study suggests that the impact of social media on the 2020 election appears to have been minimal.

This is based on looking at the behavior of people who deactivated their Facebook and Instagram accounts in the runup to the election, and how that changed (or didn’t change) their behavior.

We use a randomized experiment to measure the effects of access to Facebook and Instagram on individual-level political outcomes during the 2020 election. We recruited 19,857 Facebook users and 15,585 Instagram users who used the platform for more than 15 min per day at baseline. We randomly assigned 27% to a treatment group that was paid to deactivate their Facebook or Instagram accounts for the 6 wk before election day, and the remainder to a control group that was paid to deactivate for just 1 wk. We estimate effects of deactivation on consumption of other apps and news sources, factual knowledge, political polarization, perceived legitimacy of the election, political participation, and candidate preferences.

There were a few interesting findings, though I’m not sure any are particularly surprising. They found that users without social media lessened their knowledge of news events, but increased their ability to recognize disinformation.

The study also found that the deactivation had effectively no impact on “issue polarization.” This result is different than when a similar study was done in 2018, which the authors chalk up, potentially, to the differences between a mid-term election and a general election.

The issue polarization variable is an index of eight political opinions (on immigration, repeal of Obamacare, unemployment benefits, mask requirements, foreign policy, policing, racial justice, and gender relations), with the signs of the variables adjusted so that the difference between the own-party and other-party averages is positive. These questions were chosen to focus on issues that were prominent during the study period. Neither Facebook nor Instagram deactivation significantly affected issue polarization, and the 95% CI bounds rule out effects of ±0.04 SD.

As a point of comparison for these magnitudes, ref. 5 find that Facebook deactivation reduced an overall index of political polarization prior to the 2018 midterm elections. This includes a statistically insignificant reduction of 0.06 SD in a measure of affective polarization, and a significant reduction of 0.10 SD in a measure of issue polarization. One possible explanation for the difference in effects on issue polarization is that our study took place during a presidential election, where the environment was saturated with political information and opinion from many sources outside of social media. Another possible explanation is that the set of specific issues on which we focus here may have produced different responses. As another comparison point, ref. 26 estimate that affective polarization has grown by an average of 0.021 SD per year since 1978.

They also found no change in the “perceived legitimacy of the election” which is interesting given how prevalent that issue has been (especially among the Trumpist contingent). If you thought people only falsely believed the election was stolen because of Facebook, the data just doesn’t support that:

The perceived legitimacy variable is an index of agreement with six statements: i) Elections are free from foreign influence, ii) all adult citizens have equal opportunity to vote, iii) elections are conducted without fraud, iv) government does not interfere with journalists, v) government protects individuals’ right to engage in unpopular speech, and vi) voters are knowledgeable about candidates and issues. Neither Facebook nor Instagram deactivation had a significant effect, and the 95% CI bounds rule out effects of ±0.04 SD.

There’s more in the study as well, but it’s good to see more actual data and research along these lines. As a first pass, it again looks like the rush to blame social media for all the ills in the world might just be a bit overblown.

Filed Under: disinformation, elections, politics, studies
Companies: facebook, instagram, meta, nyu

We Looked At All The Recent Evidence On Mobile Phone Bans In Schools – This Is What We Found

Studies

from the looking-at-the-actual-data dept

Mobile phones are currently banned in all Australian state schools and many Catholic and independent schools around the country. This is part of a global trend over more than a decade to restrict phone use in schools.

Australian governments say banning mobile phones will reduce distractions in class, allow students to focus on learning, improve student wellbeing and reduce cyberbullying.

But previous research has shown there is little evidence on whether the bans actually achieve these aims.

Many places that restricted phones in schools before Australia did have now reversed their decisions. For example, several school districts in Canada implemented outright bans then revoked them as they were too hard to maintain. They now allow teachers to make decisions that suit their own classrooms.

A ban was similarly revoked in New York City, partly because bans made it harder for parents to stay in contact with their children.

What does recent research say about phone bans in schools?

Our study

We conducted a “scoping review” of all published and unpublished global evidence for and against banning mobile phones in schools.

Our review, which is pending publication, aims to shed light on whether mobile phones in schools impact academic achievement (including paying attention and distraction), students’ mental health and wellbeing, and the incidence of cyberbullying.

A scoping review is done when researchers know there aren’t many studies on a particular topic. This means researchers cast a very inclusive net, to gather as much evidence as possible.

Our team screened 1,317 articles and reports as well as dissertations from masters and PhD students. We identified 22 studies that examined schools before and after phone bans. There was a mix of study types. Some looked at multiple schools and jurisdictions, some looked at a small number of schools, some collected quantitative data, others sought qualitative views.

In a sign of just how little research there is on this topic, 12 of the studies we identified were done by masters and doctoral students. This means they are not peer-reviewed but done by research students under supervision by an academic in the field.

But in a sign of how fresh this evidence is, almost half the studies we identified were published or completed since 2020.

The studies looked at schools in Bermuda, China, the Czech Republic, Ghana, Malawi, Norway, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Thailand, the United Kingdom and the United States. None of them looked at schools in Australia.

Academic achievement

Our research found four studies that identified a slight improvement in academic achievement when phones were banned in schools. However, two of these studies found this improvement only applied to disadvantaged or low-achieving students.

Some studies compared schools where there were partial bans against schools with complete bans. This is a problem because it confuses the issue.

But three studies found no differences in academic achievement, whether there were mobile phone bans or not. Two of these studies used very large samples. This masters thesis looked at 30% of all schools in Norway. Another study used a nationwide cohort in Sweden. This means we can be reasonably confident in these results.

Mental health and wellbeing

Two studies in our review, including this doctoral thesis, reported mobile phone bans had positive effects on students’ mental health. However, both studies used teachers’ and parents’ perceptions of students’ wellbeing (the students were not asked themselves).

Two other studies showed no differences in psychological wellbeing following mobile phone bans. However, three studies reported more harm to students’ mental health and wellbeing when they were subjected to phone bans.

The students reported they felt more anxious without being able to use their phone. This was especially evident in one doctoral thesis carried out when students were returning to school after the pandemic, having been very reliant on their devices during lockdown.

So the evidence for banning mobile phones for the mental health and wellbeing of student is inconclusive and based only on anecdotes or perceptions, rather than the recorded incidence of mental illness.

Bullying and cyberbullying

Four studies reported a small reduction in bullying in schools following phone bans, especially among older students. However, the studies did not specify whether or not they were talking about cyberbullying.

Teachers in two other studies, including this doctoral thesis, reported they believed having mobile phones in schools increased cyberbullying.

But two other studies showed the number of incidents of online victimisation and harassment was greater in schools with mobile phone bans compared with those without bans. The study didn’t collect data on whether the online harassment was happening inside or outside school hours.

The authors suggested this might be because students saw the phone bans as punitive, which made the school climate less egalitarian and less positive. Other research has linked a positive school climate with fewer incidents of bullying.

There is no research evidence that students do or don’t use other devices to bully each other if there are phone bans. But it is of course possible for students to use laptops, tablets, smartwatches or library computers to conduct cyberbullying.

Even if phone bans were effective, they would not address the bulk of school bullying. A 2019 Australian study found 99% of students who were cyberbullied were also bullied face-to-face.

What does this tell us?

Overall, our study suggests the evidence for banning mobile phones in schools is weak and inconclusive.

As Australian education academic Neil Selwyn argued in 2021, the impetus for mobile phone bans says more about MPs responding to community concerns rather than research evidence.

Politicians should leave this decision to individual schools, which have direct experience of the pros or cons of a ban in their particular community. For example, a community in remote Queensland could have different needs and priorities from a school in central Brisbane.

Mobile phones are an integral part of our lives. We need to be teaching children about appropriate use of phones, rather than simply banning them. This will help students learn how to use their phones safely and responsibly at school, at home and beyond.

Marilyn Campbell, Professor, School of Early Childhood & Inclusive Education, Queensland University of Technology and Elizabeth J Edwards, Associate Professor in Education, The University of Queensland

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Filed Under: cyberbullying, kids, mobile phone bans, mobile phones, schools, social media, studies

No, The Internet Hasn’t Gotten Worse: Just Your Outlook

Studies

from the scientifically-proven-godwin dept

Ah, the good old days of the internet – a utopian paradise where everyone was kind, respectful, and definitely not arguing about Hitler. Or was it? A recent study published in Nature has some surprising findings that might just shatter your rose-tinted glasses about this past internet that never actually existed. Brace yourself for a shocking revelation: the internet has always been a bit of a dumpster fire.

The study in question has the compelling title of “persistent interaction patterns across social media platforms and over time.” Caitlin Dewey summarizes it more simply as “actually, the internet’s always been this bad.”

There is a tendency in all things to assume that everything is progressively getting worse and everything is falling apart in a way that is uniquely new. And yet, history keeps telling us that it’s not true. Violent crime rates? They’re hitting historic lows, despite what you may have heard. The wave of shoplifting? Probably didn’t happen.

And how about the internet? Is the internet awash in hate, disinfo, and toxicity way more than in the good old days?

Well, nope.

Not according to the study. It exists, certainly, but it’s no worse than in the past.

The researchers went deep:

To obtain a comprehensive picture of online social media conversations, we analysed a dataset of about 500 million comments from Facebook, Gab, Reddit, Telegram, Twitter, Usenet, Voat and YouTube, covering diverse topics and spanning over three decades

Three decades, 500 million comments, eight platforms. Seems like a good place to start.

The team used Google’s Perspective API for classifying toxicity. Some may quibble with this, but the Perspective API has a history of being pretty reliable. Nothing is perfect, but when dealing with this much data, it seems like a reasonable approach. On top of that, they spot checked the results as well.

The researchers found: Godwin’s Law is legit. If you’ll recall, the original formulation is: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.” Godwin himself admits it was written in the form of statistical language as a joke to make it seem more scientific. And the researchers determined that, well, yeah, pretty much:

The toxicity of threads follows a similar pattern. To understand the association between the size and toxicity of a conversation, we start by grouping conversations according to their length to analyse their structural differences. The grouping is implemented by means of logarithmic binning (see the ‘Logarithmic binning and conversation size’ section of the Methods) and the evolution of the average fraction of toxic comments in threads versus the thread size intervals is reported in Fig. 2. Notably, the resulting trends are almost all increasing, showing that, independently of the platform and topic, the longer the conversation, the more toxic it tends to be.

That said, the research also shows that when a thread gets toxic, that doesn’t necessarily stop the conversation.

The common beliefs that (1) online interactions inevitably devolve into toxic exchanges over time and (2) once a conversation reaches a certain toxicity threshold, it would naturally conclude, are not modern notions but they were also prevalent in the early days of the World Wide Web. Assumption 2 aligns with the Perspective API’s definition of toxic language, suggesting that increased toxicity reduces the likelihood of continued participation in a conversation. However, this observation should be reconsidered, as it is not only the peak levels of toxicity that might influence a conversation but, for example, also a consistent rate of toxic content. To test these common assumptions, we used a method similar to that used for measuring participation; we select sufficiently long threads, divide each of them into a fixed number of equal intervals, compute the fraction of toxic comments for each of these intervals, average it over all threads and plot the toxicity trend through the unfolding of the conversations. We find that the average toxicity level remains mostly stable throughout, without showing a distinctive increase around the final part of threads

I would suggest that seems consistent with Techdirt’s experience…

But, the study also found that there’s no particular evidence that conversations today are particularly more toxic than in the past when looking over this historical data. The key factor, as always, is just the length of the conversation. Average toxicity over time remains pretty constant. However, toxicity increases with the length of any conversation (though at different rates on different platforms).

As Dewey’s report notes, the approaches of different platforms can matter, but it doesn’t appear as if the world is somehow getting worse. It’s just people suck. And some platforms maybe attract more of the worst people.

That finding held true across seven of the eight platforms the team researched. By and large, those platforms also exhibited similar shares of toxic comments. On Facebook, for instance, roughly 4 to 6% of the sampled comments failed Perspective AI’s toxicity test, depending on the community/subject matter. On YouTube, by comparison, it’s 4 to 7%. On Usenet, 5 to 9%.

Even infamously lawless, undermoderated communities like Gab and Voat didn’t fall so far from the norm for more mainstream platforms: About 13% of Gab’s comments were toxic, the researchers found, and between 10 and 19% were toxic on Voat.

There’s something deeply unfashionable and counterintuitive about all of this. The suggestion that online platforms have not single-handedly poisoned public life is entirely out of step with the very political discourse the internet is said to have polluted.

Dewey also quotes one of the study’s authors, Walter Quattrociocchi, pointing out that this isn’t an argument for giving up moderating.

Quattrociocchi said it would be a mistake to assume his team’s findings suggest that moderation policies or other platform dynamics don’t matter — they absolutely “influence the visibility and spread of toxic content,” he said. But if “the root behaviors driving toxicity are more deeply ingrained in human interaction,” than effective moderation might involve both removing toxic content and implementing larger strategies to “encourage positive discourse,” he added. 

Interventions do matter, but the internet isn’t inherently making people terrible. And, I guess that’s a bit of good news these days?

Filed Under: research, studies, toxicity

Studies Show Flock’s ALPRs Reduce Crime… So Long As Flock Controls The Inputs And The Methodology

Overhype

from the our-stats-say-otherwise dept

404 Media, the new news outlet formed by excellent journalists kicked to the curb by the successive brunchlord regimes overseeing Vice Media, continues to stake its claim as the best investigative media outlet in the country.

Their latest effort digs deep into dubious claims made by up-and-coming surveillance tech company, Flock. Flock made its entry into the market by pitching its automatic license plate readers to the biggest assholes in the private sector: homeowners associations and gated communities.

Pitching to private individuals and firms made it easy to dodge constitutional concerns. And it made it very easy for their customers to regulate traffic in their neighborhoods by engaging in always-on surveillance of everyone traveling “their” streets.

Flock then moved on to the next biggest set of assholes in the nation: law enforcement. Citing its success in the private surveillance market, Flock started partnering with cops shops to place ALPR cameras wherever law enforcement felt they might be useful. Generally speaking, this worked out the way it has for any surveillance tech product pitched to cops: neighborhoods with large minority presences were the ones immediately blanketed by this tech.

Flock is a business. Therefore, it makes sense it might play a little fast and loose with facts to secure sales. But once you become a preferred government contractor, you’re expected to adhere to the truth a bit better because it’s the public’s money that’s being spent.

No problem, said Flock. Here’s a study that says our ALPRs are helping drive crime down.

• In a typical agency, one additional Flock Safety License Plate Recognition (LPR) camera per sworn officer correlates with a 9.1% increase in clearance rate.
• 20 additional Flock customers within 50 kilometers of the original agency leads to a 1% increase in clearance rates.
• Broad access to Flock technology within an agency leads to improved case clearance outcomes. 

That’s what Flock says its tech can do. To buttress its claims, Flock claims the study is based on input from “independent criminology research experts” from Texas Christian University (TCU) and the Tyler campus of the University of Texas.

Sounds great. But it isn’t. As Jason Koebler’s extensive debunking for 404 Media notes, Flock’s claims were immediately criticized by others in the criminology field, which apparently only extends Flock’s streak of dubious law enforcement effectiveness claims.

Flock’s most recent research has been widely criticized by academics in reporting by Forbes, and the validity of its case studies more broadly has been questioned over the years. 

The most outrageous claim is that Flock’s ALPRs are “instrumental in solving 10 percent of reported crime in America.” Whoa if true but it definitely isn’t. And Flock’s willingness to massage stats and reject findings it doesn’t care for has resulted in TCU’s Johnny Nhan — one of the TCU researchers involved in the latest Flock study — to publicly state he would have handled things very differently if he had known how Flock was abusing his research and preventing him from finding facts that didn’t support Flock’s marketing narrative.

Communications between Flock, researchers, and law enforcement agencies obtained by 404 Media — along with Nhan’s own statements — make it clear Flock chose to go to press as soon as it had the data it wanted, even if the data did not meaningfully depict Flock’s contribution to public safety.

In an email exchange with 404 Media, Nhan said that he and Helfers were brought into the study late in the process, that he has concerns with how the research was framed, and that he and Helfers are working on future research with Flock that is more qualitative in nature and will focus on case studies rather than quantitative analysis.

“Dr. Helfers and I are working on a paper that is still in the development stages and is still evolving as we’re looking at what data is available to us,” Nhan said. “As of right now, the plan is a peer-reviewed paper that looks at the uses of flock ALPR technologies, how agencies are ensuring privacy, and what policies they have in place for that. The information that is collected by the police departments are too varied and incomplete for us to do any type of meaningful statistical analysis on them so we’re pivoting to interviews with a sample of agencies.”

Nhan was told by Flock that the data collected so far was only meant to be a “starting point” for further research. But it liked what it saw enough to push forward with press releases selectively quoting Nhan and his research — claims that included its supposed “ten percent” contribution to the nation’s case clearance rates.

404 Media’s Koebler didn’t find any of this believable and went searching for background info. Flock is a private company but it’s in contact with plenty of public entities, including the two universities whose services it engaged to give its sales pitch a science-y backdrop. Most of these requests were denied, mainly due to Flock’s interference in the public records process.

But Koebler did come across some interesting communications, which suggest even researchers have been compromised by Flock’s insistence the research its funding deliver the results it’s seeking.

[T]he records I did get back show that Flock has been recommending which specific police departments Nhan and Helfers should talk to for a future research paper, and an email Nhan sent to one police department states that he would like to see data that shows a “big swing” in the data from before Flock’s adoption to after Flock’s adoption. 

While it’s great to see Nhan distancing himself from this study, it also shows researchers feel at least some pressure to deliver the results Flock clearly wants. Other emails show Flock — via Andrea Korb (Flock’s director of policy) — informing the researchers that the company will provide a list of agencies they can approach for data. That included Flock steering researchers towards small towns with already-low crime rates, where any reduction would produce the “big swing” so clearly sought by the company for its “research.”

The entire article is worth a read. The communications Koebler managed to secure show a company willing to toss a lab coat on top of sensationalist stats gleaned from its preferred law enforcement agencies in order to sell its products to other law enforcement agencies. It also shows the company is willing to place itself between researchers and their research, as well as between public entities and the public by crafting contracts that give it the “right” to redact information and withhold documents requested by records requesters.

If Flock’s tech was really that shit hot, it wouldn’t need to do this. But it’s apparently no better than anything else on the market. Not that Flock is the first — or only — surveillance tech firm to engage in this sort of chicanery. Just because you read it at a site created for the sole purpose of reprinting press releases doesn’t mean it’s true. If only law enforcement agencies were willing to perform the sort of due diligence being done by this very small journalistic outfit before spending public money, we might all be a whole lot better off.

Filed Under: alpr, crime, license plate readers, studies
Companies: flock

New Study In The Journal Of Pediatrics Says Maybe It’s Not Social Media, But Helicopter Parenting That’s Making Kids Depressed

Studies

from the correlation-and-causation dept

We’ve been covering, at great length, the moral panic around the claims that social media is what’s making kids depressed. The problem with this narrative is that there’s basically no real evidence to support it. As the American Psychological Association found when it reviewed all the literature, despite many, many dozens of studies done on the impact of social media on kids, no one was able to establish a causal relationship.

As that report noted, the research seemed to show no inherent benefit or harm for most kids. For some, it showed a real benefit (often around kids being able to find like-minded people online to communicate with). For a very small percentage, it appeared to potentially exacerbate existing issues. And those are really the cases that we should be focused on.

But, instead, the narrative that continues to make the rounds is that social media is inherently bad for kids. That leads to various bills around age verification and age gating to keep kids off of social media.

Supporters of these bills will point to charts like this one, regarding teen suicide rates, noting the uptick correlates with the rise of social media.

Of course, they seem to cherry pick the start date of that chart, because if you go back further, you realize that while the uptick is a concern, it’s still way below what it had been in the 1990s (pre-social media).

In case that embed isn’t working, here’s an image of it:

Obviously, the increase in suicides is a concern. But, considering that every single study that tries to link it to social media ends up failing to do so, that suggests that there might be some other factor at play here.

A recent study in the Journal of Pediatrics suggests a compelling alternative. It’s not social media, but the rise of helicopter parenting, in which kids no longer have spaces to just hang out with each other and be kids. It’s titled: Decline in Independent Activity as a Cause of Decline in Children’s Mental Well-being: Summary of the Evidence. If you can’t see the full version, there’s a preprint version here.

The research summarizes the decline in “independent mobility” for kids over the last few decades:

Considerable research, mostly in Europe, has focused on children’s independent mobility (CIM), defined as children’s freedom to travel in their neighborhood or city without adult accompaniment. That research has revealed significant declines in CIM, especially between 1970 and 1990, but also some large national differences. For example, surveys regarding the “licenses” (permissions) parents grant to their elementary school children revealed that in England, license to walk home alone from school dropped from 86% in 1971 to 35% in 1990 and 25% in 2010; and license to use public buses alone dropped from 48% in 1971 to 15% in 1990 to 12% in 2010.11 In another study, comparing CIM in 16 different countries (US not included), conducted from 2010 to 2012, Finland stood out as allowing children the greatest freedom of movement. The authors wrote: “At age 7, a majority of Finnish children can already travel to places within walking distance or cycle to places alone; by age 8 a majority can cross main roads, travel home from school and go out after dark alone, by age 9 a majority can cycle on main roads alone, and by age 10 a majority can travel on local buses alone.” Although we have found no similar studies of parental permissions for US children, other data indicate that the US is more like the UK concerning children’s independent mobility than like Finland. For example, National Personal Transportation Surveys revealed that only 12.7% walked or biked to school in 2009 compared with 47.7% in 1969.

And then it notes the general decline in mental health as well, which they highlight started long before social media existed:

Perhaps the most compelling and disturbing evidence comes from studies of suicide and suicidal thoughts. Data compiled by the CDC indicate that the rate of suicide among children under age 15 rose 3.5-fold between 1950 and 2005 and by another 2.4-fold between 2005 and 2020. No other age group showed increases nearly this large. By 2019, suicide was the second leading cause of death for children from age 10 through 15, behind only unintentional injury. Moreover, the 2019 YRBS survey revealed that during the previous year 18.8% of US high school students seriously considered attempting suicide, 15.7% made a suicide plan, 8.9% attempted suicide one or more times, and 2.5% made a suicide attempt requiring medical treatment. We are clearly experiencing an epidemic of psychopathology among young people.

But, unlike those who assume correlation is causation with regards to social media, the researchers here admit there needs to be more. And they bring the goods, pointing to multiple studies that suggest a pretty clear causal relationship, rather than just correlation.

Several studies have examined relationships between the amount of time young children have for self-directed activities at home and psychological characteristics predictive of future wellbeing. These have revealed significant positive correlations between amount of self-structured time (largely involving free play) and (a) scores on two different measures of executive functioning; (b) indices of emotional control and social ability; and (c) scores, two years later, on a measure of self-regulation. There is also evidence that risky play, where children deliberately put themselves in moderately frightening situations (such as climbing high into a tree) helps protect against the development of phobias and reduces future anxiety by increasing the person’s confidence that they can deal effectively with emergencies.

Studies with adults involving retrospections about their childhood experiences provide another avenue of support for the idea that early independent activity promotes later wellbeing. In one such study, those who reported much free and adventurous play in their elementary school years were assessed as having more social success, higher self-esteem, and better overall psychological and physical health in adulthood than those who reported less such play. In another very similar study, amount of reported free play in childhood correlated positively with measures of social success and goal flexibility (ability to adapt successfully to changes in life conditions) in adulthood. Also relevant here are studies in which adults (usually college students) rated the degree to which their parents were overprotective and overcontrolling (a style that would reduce opportunity for independent activity) and were also assessed for their current levels of anxiety and depression. A systematic review of such studies revealed, overall, positive correlations between the controlling, overprotective parenting style and the measures of anxiety and depression.

They also note that they are not claiming (of course) that this is the sole reason for the declines in mental health. Just that there is strong evidence that it is a key component. They explore a few other options that may contribute, including increased pressure at schools and societal changes. They also consider the impact of social media and digital technologies and note (as we have many times) that there just is no real evidence to support the claims:

Much recent discussion of young people’s mental health has focused on the role of increased use of digital technologies, especially involvement with social media. However, systematic reviews of research into this have provided little support for the contention that either total screen time or time involved with social media is a major cause of, or even correlate of, declining mental health. One systematic review concluded that research on links between digital technology use and teens’ mental health “has generated a mix of often conflicting small positive, negative and null associations” (Odgers & Jensen, 2020). Another, a “review of reviews” concluded that “the association between digital technology use, or social media use in particular, and psychological well-being is, on average, negative but very small” and noted some evidence, from longitudinal research, that negative correlations may result from declining mental health leading to more social media use rather than the reverse (Orben, 2020)

Indeed, if this theory is true, that the lack of spaces for kids to explore and play and experiment without adult supervision is a leading cause of mental health decline, you could easily see how those who are depressed are more likely to seek out those private spaces, and turn to social media, given the lack of any such spaces they can go to physically.

And, if that’s the case, then all of these efforts to ban social media for kids, or to make social media more like Disneyland, could likely end up doing a lot more harm than good by cutting off one of the last remaining places where kids can communicate with their peers without adults watching over their every move. Indeed, the various proposals to give parents more access to what their kids are doing online could worsen the problem as well, taking away yet another independent space for kids.

Over the last few years, there’s been a push to bring back more “dangerous” play for kids, as people have begun to realize that things may have gone too far in the other direction. Perhaps it’s time we realize that social media fits into that category as well.

Filed Under: age appropriate design, age verification, depression, independent spaces, mental health, social media, studies, suicide, teens

Yet Another Study Shows No Link At All Between Social Media And Teen Anxiety And Depression

Studies

from the how-much-more-evidence-do-we-need? dept

I know that we’ve already pointed to a whole bunch of studies, using a variety of different methods that all show no evidence of any link at all between social media and teen depression, but it’s time to highlight another one.

I mean, we just interviewed Professor Andy Przybylski, who published a study showing no evidence that Facebook and Facebook Messenger increase depression. That one comes four years after another study by him that showed no evidence that social media was making kids unhappy. In between then there have been a bunch of other studies. By 2020, the academic consensus appeared to be that social media wasn’t actually bad for kids. More recently, the American Psychological Association did a meta analysis of all the studies on this topic and said there was no evidence of a harmful link between social media and teen depression. Pew Research did a study showing that most kids found social media to be tremendously beneficial.

Even the Surgeon General’s recent report on social media — which has been widely reported by the media to say that social media was bad for kids — actually admitted that studies could find no link between mental health problems and social media. It still recommended acting as if there was a link just in case, but that seemed at odds with what the report admitted the science actually said.

Anyway, now we have yet another study on this subject, looking specifically at children in Norway, where (yet again) they can find no link between social media and depression. You can read the whole study if you’d like the details. The results are clear:

Within-person changes in self- and other oriented social media behavior were unrelated to within-person changes in symptoms of depression or anxiety two years later, and vice versa. This null finding was evident across all timepoints and for both sexes. Conclusions: The frequency of posting, liking, and commenting is unrelated to future symptoms of depression and anxiety. This is true also when gold standard measures of depression and anxiety are applied.

As the authors of the paper note, many other papers trying to make this link have used perhaps questionable proxies for mental health:

A major shortcoming of existing research is that studies have conceptualized mental health problems in a variety of ways (e.g., reduced well-being, psychological distress, poor self-esteem, depressive symptoms). Because social media use may relate differently to different mental health problems (e.g., social anxiety versus overall well-being), these inconsistent findings may be due to studies not assessing the same phenomenon. Studies have also typically relied on self-reports of both social media use and mental health, thereby running the risk of inflating relations due to a common methods bias. Studies assessing more strictly defined mental health problems and measuring such problems by other means than self-report are needed.

The paper goes through a number of earlier papers that attempt to explore this subject, and notes that it’s trying to add to the literature with more concrete information regarding mental health. They did so by making use of a dataset which explored the mental health of children in Norway in great detail over an extended period of time:

The present inquiry is based on data from the Trondheim Early Secure Study (TESS), a longitudinal study of children’s mental health and psychosocial development starting at age 4 years. In 2007/2008, all children born four years earlier in Trondheim, Norway (N = 3,456) were invited to participate in the study. Their parents received an invitation letter together with the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) version 4–16) (Goodman, 1997), a mental health screening assessment, which they brought to the child’s 4-year health check at a community health center. At the check up, they were informed about the study by the health care nurse and gave their written consent to participate. Nearly all children attended the check-up (97.2%) and 82.2% of those who were asked to participate consented. To increase variance and thus statistical power, participants with higher scores on the SDQ were oversampled, which is accounted for in the analyses (i.e., weighting back to the population estimates). More specifically, children were allocated to four strata according to their SDQ scores (cut-offs: 0–4, 5–8, 9–11, and 12–40), and the probability of selection increased with increasing SDQ scores (0.37, 0.48, 0.70, and 0.89 in the four strata, respectively). Based on this procedure, 1,250 were selected to participate, and among these, 1007 (79.8%) met at the first assessment at the university clinic. Since then, biennial assessments have been conducted.

While covering just Norway, that’s still a pretty detailed and useful data set. The researchers note that the data set also included social media usage making it even more useful and relevant.

With all that data, it would be a great dataset to explore if greater usage of social media resulted in greater incidents of mental health issues. But the data… does not show that:

As can be seen, changes in self- and other oriented social media use did not predict changes in participants’ level of symptoms for depression, social anxiety, or generalized anxiety. There were also no significant effects in the opposite direction: changes in depression and anxiety symptoms did not forecast future levels of self- and other oriented social media behavior.

The researchers point to other research to suggest that, hey, maybe social media is just one form of communication, and that doesn’t change anything having to do with mental health:

Given the presumed mechanisms linking social media use and symptoms of depression and anxiety presented above, how come no within-person relations are revealed? As noted, according to the displacement theory (Kraut et al., 1998), increased social media use may decrease face-to-face interactions, potentially impairing mental health. However, a recent review concludes that social media is more likely to replace time spent on other media activities, rather than off-line interaction (Hall & Liu, 2022). In many cases, social media seems to complement rather than displace in-person interactions (Hall & Liu, 2022; Kushlev & Leitao, 2020; Requena & Ayuso, 2019); prospectively predicting more face-to-face interactions (Dienlin, Masur, & Trepte, 2017) and social capital (Hooghe & Oser, 2015). Adolescents even report feeling closer to their friends after using social media (Dredge & Schreurs, 2020; Pouwels, Valkenburg, Beyens, van Driel, & Keijsers, 2021).

Of course, this study got almost no press at all, as compared to the Surgeon General’s report, which got a ridiculous amount of press, almost all of it falsely reporting that the Surgeon General had found that social media is linked to depression.

And, this matters. We already have politicians repeating over and over again that it’s “proven beyond a doubt” that social media causes depression and that they have to regulate it. Even worse, you have a bunch of lawsuits from school districts, claiming that social media has destroyed the brains of kids in their schools.

It would be nice, just once, for any of the media or politicians to admit that the data doesn’t support these moral panic claims.

Filed Under: depression, norway, social media, studies, teens

Massive New Study, Covering 72 Countries, Nearly 1 Million People, Finds Zero Evidence That Facebook Leads To Psychological Harm

Studies

from the the-data-says...-we're-in-a-moral-panic dept

Professor Andrew Przybylski from the Oxford Internet Institute is one of the best, most important researchers out there providing thorough, comprehensive, empirical evidence that every tech moral panic is not supported by the data. We’ve covered his work before, including the complete lack of evidence that social media makes kids unhappy, how there’s actually some positive correlation between people playing video games and feeling better (the opposite of what most seemed to believe), and how mandatory internet filters to stop porn don’t work.

He’s now back with a new study (with Professor Matti Vuorre), and the scale of it is astounding:

The independent Oxford study used well-being data from nearly a million people across 72 countries over 12 years and harnessed actual individual usage data from millions of Facebook users worldwide to investigate the impact of Facebook on well-being.

I don’t think we’re going to have a small sample-size issue with this study. Indeed, the global nature of the study is useful as it gets beyond what many studies do, just looking at western college students who are readily accessible to academic researchers.

You can look at the full paper, which is interesting.

Overall, a country’s per capita daily active Facebook users predicted that nation’s demography-aggregated levels of positive experiences positively, and negative experiences negatively. In addition, the associations between countries were similar, but the uncertainty cutoff of 97.5% for posterior probabilities of direction was strictly only met for positive experiences (table 1). Associations between Facebook adoption and life satisfaction were less certain within countries, but stronger when comparing countries to each other. While these descriptive results do not speak to causal effects, they align with other findings suggesting that technology use has not become increasingly associated with negative psychological outcomes over time [8], and that the increased adoption of Internet technologies in general is not, overall, associated with widespread psychological harms [24]. We also found that Facebook adoption predicted young demographics’ positive well-being more strongly than it did older demographics’, and that sex differences in this dataset were very small and not credibly different from zero. These demography-based differences, and lack therein, were notable in light of previous literature that has reported young girls to be more at-risk of screen- and technology-based effects than young males (e.g. [27]; but see [28]). However, those studies focused on younger individuals (from 10 to 15 years old), which likely partly explains the different findings.

The authors are clear not to overstate what their paper is saying. They’re not arguing that “Facebook makes you happy” or anything like that. But they are saying that the evidence does not support the common refrain that it makes people unhappy.

And, in case you’re wondering, the authors are also clear that while they did get data from Facebook, it was not funded in any way by Facebook, nor did Facebook have any idea what their report would show until it was published.

Again, I know that the narrative that you hear about all the time insists otherwise, but it’s nice to see more data that again suggests we’re living through quite a ridiculous moral panic about the new new thing, which in all likelihood we’ll look back on as a silly thing, as ridiculous as moral panics about comic books, or pinball, or rock n’ roll, or radio, or chess, or the waltz (all of which faced moral panics).

Filed Under: andrew przybylski, matti vuorre, mental health, mental well being, social media, studies
Companies: facebook