[chillage]

I'm concerned that WSJ cherry picked only the worst bits of information from the slides and did not give a balanced discussion or quote the more positive results. They intentionally only included the most negative results and intentionally avoided publishing the root slides so as not to show their hand that there were also mitigating stats as well. In my view this kind of cherry picking of information from the source material, then hiding the source material in order to spin the result in a specific way, is a breach of journalistic integrity.

[hwillis]

1. Totally disagree- these slides should be treated like a hostile witness. This is one of the largest companies in the world on the back of advertiser and investment faith. Facebooks public image is paramount to its continued success and data like this should come from a third party. The points that are good for FB should be treated with heavy skepticism, and the points that are bad for FB should be treated as the absolute floor of the negative impact.

2. Facebook themselves are cherry picking:

> WSJ said: “Among teens who reported suicidal thoughts, 13% of British users and 6% of American users traced the desire to kill themselves to Instagram"

> What the data shows: When we take a step back and look at the full data set, about 1% of the entire group of teens who took the survey said they had suicidal thoughts that they felt started on Instagram.

Suicide is the second leading cause of death from 13-19. 6-13% of teens saying instagram made them suicidal is a huge deal. Trying to detract from that delta by showcasing that not that 99% of teens don't want to kill themselves is repulsive and dishonest.

[chillage]

It's absolutely fair that this type of data is better off coming from a third party, peer reviewed, and with a larger sample size. However, the slides here were never intended as any sort of definitive review, or especially not for PR consumption, they're kind of like an internal memo looked over by a few internal teams. So their data is not cherry picked - it shows the good and the bad uncovered about Instagram's effects, intended for internal discussion. Where I feel WSJ was dishonest is that it did not show all of the data uncovered in these slides, but only the most negative points, in order to get clicks and provide a nice loud framing for their article.

Any large scale phenomenon like Instagram or Reddit or pizza or video games has both upsides and downsides. So I don't think it's fair that just because we've uncovered links to heart disease for pizza or depression/anxiety/social withdrawal/suicide to excessive video gaming or suicide to Instagram, that we should ban any of these things. They all have extremely positive effects as well. I love pizza. If we only harp on negative aspects of every large scale phenomenon we're going to think everything is terrible, ban everything, then live in a box.

That is the sensationalist vibe which WSJ intentionally curated for their article by intentionally hiding any positive information found in Facebook's memos and selectively exposing only the bits which make people go "WOW NO" and make for nice clickbait. If they had included both positive and negative results contained in Facebook's slides, then I don't believe there would be a problem. I personally did not expect this kind of spin from WSJ and am disappointed.

[ramraj07]

That might be true but in the end the study itself is a load of B, I mean you asked 40 kids if they like instagram and many said yes so this trillion dollar company is justified in their evil deeds?