There is a growing scientific controversy about the negative impact of social media on teenagers mental health, and even adults. Social media companies deny these claims. Billions of dollars are at stake.
A study from the University of Pennsylvania found using social media increases depression and loneliness:
https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/social-media-use-increases-depression-and-loneliness
But a recent scientific study from Manchester University found that social media has no negative impact on mental health:
https://www.manchester.ac.uk/about/news/time-spent-on-gaming-and-social-media/
This contradicts another study from Harvard University that found a social media detox improves well-being and reduces anxiety:
What’s your opinion on this matter?
I think social media probably isn’t great, but the data also isn’t particularly conclusive, and much of it is very broad and unhelpful. For example, in the first study you linked, it had a sample of 143 University students accross three different social media sites, measured only using app battery usage. While it isn’t to be completely discounted, esspecially alongside the larger body of work, it’s sample size is tiny, and the data collected isn’t esspecially representitve of what is supposed to be measured, as it includes non-social-media tools like Facebook Marketplace while excluding social media accessed via the browser (among other flaws). The vast majority of studies on the topic, regardless of findings, have similar flaws.
IMO, social media as a whole is too varied to meaningfully lump together, and a lot of the impacts that are commonly attributed to social media are better attributed to deeper causes regarding lack of sociatal trust and support. Tracking the impacts of social media is hard enough, nonetheless the impacts of something like the lack of third places, and impacts of economic inequality on mental health.
On top of that, there are also a variety of ways you can use the same platform. What if you’re exclusively focusing on doomscrolling or actively avoiding anything that produces negative emotions? You could spend all day following everyone who spreads doom and gloom, or just pop in for a little bit of #bloomscrolling, and get back to real-world stuff when you’re done.
Even outside of the content being viewed, there may be a huge difference in effect depending on who is viewing it. Almost all of the current studies are on University students, probably western demographic most able to socialize with others due to need, proximity, and free time. Debatably, they’re also among the most impressionable groups as well, given that they’re still not fully grown and are in the middle of trying to figure out and plan their lives. Intuitively, this would mean they’re more able to take advantage of their time off social media, and more impacted by their time on it.
This begs the question of if the effects will be the same in other populations. For example, in populations that are less able to socialize, does social media help reduce the burden, and if so, what platforms or elements have this effect versus more negative effects.
Yeah. It’s a pretty complicated topic to study. You would have to narrow it down really hard to be able to say anything meaningful about it. If you’re talking about a specific group using Facebook in a specific way, that’s when you can actually start talking about effects.
Just based on my personal vibes, I think social media is harmful if you’re doing it wrong. Most people are. If you allow Meta to manipulate your emotions with fear and hate, while developing an addiction at the same time, you’re not going to have a great time. Quitting that kind of toxic relationship will improve your life.
Mastodon was designed to be less addictive, and that’s why it’s a bit boring to most people. It takes special kind of dedication to get addicted to Mastodon, and I think the same applies to Lemmy as well.
Social media takes hundreds of different forms (including e.g. Lemmy) and any study pretending that they’re all the same is useless — unless you can simply replace “social media” with “Facebook”, “TikTok”, or whatever they’re actually about.
For example the first of the studies linked above finds that using “Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram” more than they normally would makes people depressed, and the second finds that an unspecified mix of whatever people normally do that they think of as “social media” did not. Those findings do not contradict each other and do not represent a meaningful controversy.
Politically it’s a controversy, or a tangled mess of controversies. Scientifically it’s just a complete mystery that will — at the speed of science — take decades to unravel. With any luck all the findings about fucking Facebook and Twitter will be obsolete much sooner than that because at some point the enshittification will finally get so bad that people come to their senses and stop using them. The free-world versions of social media, such as the fediverse, continue to get better and will win in the long run.
