There's an ongoing debate about whether social media has a causal negative impact on mental health. The latest iteration of this debate was triggered by the release of Jonathan Haidt's book The Anxious Generation. I wrote briefly about the debate between Haidt and Candice Odgers last month. Around the same time, Mike Masnick wrote a long article on the Daily Beast clearly against Haidt's perspective. Here's one important part of the article:
Reading Haidt’s book, you might think the evidence supports his viewpoint, as he presents a lot of it. The problem is that he’s cherry-picking his evidence and often relying on flawed studies. Many other studies by those who have studied this field for many years (unlike Haidt), find little to no support for Haidt’s analysis. The American Psychological Association, which is often quick to blame new technologies for harms (it did this with video games), admitted recently that in a review of all the research, social media could not be deemed as “inherently beneficial or harmful to young people.”
Two recent studies from the Internet Institute at Oxford used access it had obtained to huge amounts of data that showed no direct connection between screen time and mental health or social media and mental health. The latter study there involved data on nearly 1 million people across 72 countries, comparing the introduction of Facebook with widely collected data on mental health, finding little to support a claim that social media diminishes mental health.
To get around this unfortunate situation, Haidt seems to carefully pick which data he uses to support his argument. For example, Haidt mentions the increase in depression and suicide among teen girls from 2000 to the present. The numbers started rising around 2010, though they are still relatively low.
What’s left out if you start in 2000 is what happened earlier. Prior to 2000, the numbers were on par with what they were today in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when no social media existed. Across the decades, we see that the late ’90s and early 2000s were a time when depression and suicide rates significantly dipped from previous highs, before returning recently to similar levels from the ’80s and ’90s.
It’s worth studying why it dropped and then why it went up again, but by starting the data in 2000, Haidt ignores that story, focusing only on the increase, and leading readers to the false conclusion that we are in a unique and therefore alarming period that can only be blamed on social media.
Masnick also highlights that suicide rates (which are indicative of extreme negative mental health) have not seen an uptick in all countries since 2010, or even in all Western countries, pointing to these data:
I felt a bit obliged to include the figure, since it shown the overall downward trend in youth suicide rates in New Zealand. It doesn't break the data down by gender, and part of Haidt's argument is that the negative effects are concentrated among young women. However, if you look at data for young women for those same countries, you would have to squint really hard to see any uptick in suicide rates starting around 2010:
Masnick concludes that:
In the end, neither the data nor reality support his position, and neither should you. Kids and mental health is a very complex issue, and Haidt’s solution appears to be, in the words of H.L. Mencken: clear, simple, and wrong.
Clearly, there is more to come in this debate. I remain agnostic, but very cautious about claims on both sides that are not supported by clearly causal evidence.
[HT: Marginal Revolution]
Read more:
- Quitting Facebook might make you happier
- The more you use Facebook, the worse you feel
- Does the Internet make people happier?
- What happens when you disconnect from Facebook?
- The latest NZ research on social media and mental health is nothing special
- Online social networks, social capital, and wellbeing
- Jonathan Haidt and Candice Odgers debate the relationship between social media and mental health
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