[lovingCranberry]

> Using Facebook has been scientifically demonstrated to cause depression

Not to say that this line is wrong, but that the evidence for this claim is far from conclusive. The findings from such studies are mixed, partly due to differences in how variables are operationalised.

I believe your interaction with digital technology can be a main driver of depression, but not in the way it's being framed. My psychologist (back when I was suicidal and in a strong depressive episode) told me, that I should have at least 20 minutes of face-to-face conversation to day. That I should go outside and find meaningful contacts, goals, and sense in life. I believe that a lot of people, who sit in front of their computer the whole day are missing this. It doesn't matter what medium you consume as much as what you're actually missing. The few girls which I met during therapy were mainly on tumblr, discord, instagram. I didn't use fb either. Welp, even HN didn't keep depression away!

Having at least a 20 minute long face-to-face convo per day was honestly a great helper, besides the full-time therapy to stop my head thinking, and pills, of course.

Just my two cents to this line. I agree with the other comments about non-chronological feeds being lousy. The article is really trying to push negative emotion towards facebook.

[alex_young]

The "it's inconclusive" line is being pushed by FB pretty hard right now, and it feels pretty similar to the smoking industry telling people there's no proof cigarettes cause cancer 20 years ago.

Obviously something is causing marked increases in teen depression and suicide attempts over the same period as the move to 24/7 social media. Sure, it's possible there are other factors, but isn't it obvious that social media is at least playing a significant role?

https://www.npr.org/2021/05/18/990234501/facebook-calls-link...

[knaik94]

I don't know how fair it is to say facebook is playing a major role when most of the content consumed on facebook is no longer what your immediate friends post from their personal lives. At one point in time, I would agree that the culture of comparing yourself to others' success lead to dark thoughts. But now there's so much on facebook, it's hard to pin down a specific cause. Is it the fake news, the fear of missing out, the articles about global warming, the economic depression, or seeing posts about covid deaths?

I would argue facebook is not even the main demographic of teenagers anymore. Facebook is full of millenial+. Younger generations are on tiktok and youtube.

Facebook is not social media, instagram and whatsapp and facebook together could arguably be a larger influence but those three still don't make up a majority of social media.

Facebook and social media and the internet itself can be used to escape real life problems. Certain psychologist have already generalized an addiction to encompass all of internet and computer use. The reality is that internet and computer and social media are all tools. The actual issue is some people's unhealthy mechanisms for coping with difficult struggles in life.

This generation happened to live in the time great technological advancements. It's not obvious when you dig deeper into the relationship.

[thaumasiotes]

> Obviously something is causing marked increases in teen depression and suicide attempts over the same period as the move to 24/7 social media.

When in-person school was suspended over covid, the teen suicide rate dropped dramatically.

[germinalphrase]

My quick searching seems to indicate that rates were flat or somewhat decreased, but not dramatically.

As a high school teacher, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that though. My students who struggle the hardest often find school to be a significant, additional source of stress. The thinking can also become circular: I’m struggling, and don’t have the capacity to perform (even if I want to do well and have in the past), and that means I’m incapable of performing well, and so I’m struggling more, and so I lack the capacity to…

[thaumasiotes]

Rates were flat in a sense of temporal continuity - they stayed around a level that is normal some of the time.

They were very far down in a sense of seasonality. Teen suicide rates are -- normally -- much higher during the school year than they are during the summer.

https://nitter.net/tylerblack32/status/1470785708394754052#m

> The first school year of the pandemic (with full lockdowns) also represents the FIRST TIME IN 21 YEARS that March-June (school months) had the same low suicide rate as July (non school month). Typically, school months associated with 36-55% increase [in suicide] in HS kids.

So about a 30% decrease in suicide rate from shutting down school. I would argue that a 30% decrease qualifies as "dramatic".

[purpleblue]

You mean suicide rates skyrocketed during the Pandemic.

[watwut]

They did not. That is something that simply did not happened.

[pessimizer]

But school has other important benefits.

[thaumasiotes]

That's not obvious. If children's opinions counted, it might well be a minority position.

And if we're willing to assume that school has important benefits, the same is obviously true of Facebook.

[thrown_22]

Just because something is doesn't mean it's facebook. Especially since basically no teens use facebook.

Your other example also dates you pretty hard. The surgeon general report of 1964 said conclusively that cigarettes cause lung cancer and other diseases. 1964 is somewhat longer ago than 20 years.

In short: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGrfhsxxmdE

[2muchcoffeeman]

Can’t you just replace Facebook with “social media”? There’s very few good uses of social media and the entire thing is free, so there’s no way they are making money doing things in your interest.

[thrown_22]

Sure, we can then talk about the impact of hn on mental health.

[2muchcoffeeman]

Sure. I know I’ve sometimes I’ve gotten unfocused at work and just reload HN every 10minutes. HN is probably net negative on mental health for many.

But I think you’re trying to “gotcha” me.

But HN doesn’t send me notifications, or have ads, or collect data about me, or sell my data, or have curated pictures that forces me to compare my life to others and make me feel bad.

So on a priority list, HN is waaaaaaaaaaay at the bottom.

[dhosek]

But the tobacco companies insisted to the contrary and funded their own “studies” to the contrary well after 1964.

[thrown_22]

They did not. The studies which cast doubt on smoking cancer link were all done in the 1950s: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3490543/

The next 30 years to the 1990s were a fight to muddy the science over second hand smoke which was a different issue.

[switchbak]

> In a 1971 television interview, the president of Philip Morris denied the health risks that pregnant women and their babies face, saying that “It’s true that babies born from women who smoke are smaller, but they are just as healthy as the babies born to women who do not smoke. Some women would prefer to have smaller babies.” [1]

The tobacco industry is well known to have distorted the truth for many years after the 50's, and the above quote is just one of many that are very easy to find. Yours seems a tough position to defend.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Cullman

[pdimitar]

Your nitpicking doesn't further the discussion.

It's a fact that they did their best to mislead the public for the longest possible time. Does it truly matter how exactly? You can have more than one gun to shoot with, you know.

[fshbbdssbbgdd]

I’d be interested in hearing a comparison of how researching go about establishing causality for a smoking-cancer link vs. a Facebook-depression link. Obviously, it’s hard to do a proper randomized controlled trial in both cases. Anyone know more about what kinds of methods can be used? I think it would be useful to help this conversation be a little more fact-based and less ideological.

[germinalphrase]

I mean, if the answer does echo the above position that the problem is unhealthy time allotment (fb/insta/whatever is too good at causing teens to spend time on their platform rather doing other things that are healthy for them) that’s pretty terrible news for a company that will do almost anything but reduce engagement time.

[googlryas]

Even if we took it as conclusive, OP is far overstating the research by making it seem like "If you use facebook, you will become depressed". It would be like saying "Using a swimming pool has been scientifically demonstrated to cause drownings".

Yes, you can drown a swimming pool, and that is tragic, but you really need to talk about the rate that these bad things happen.

[hn_throwaway_99]

I totally agree with everything you've written, but would just point out that Facebook (and other social media companies) pay huge amounts of money to some of the smartest people in the world whose sole goal is to get you to scroll, scroll, scroll.

Yes, individuals can choose their relationship to technology, but let's not let the drug pushers off the hook.

[themacguffinman]

So what? McDonalds also pays huge amounts of money to optimize their food. McDonalds isn't liable in any way when someone ruins their life with Big Macs. Facebook, like literally every business on the planet, focuses a lot of time & money on getting people to use their product as much as possible. What hook do you not want to let them off that doesn't also apply to literally everyone else? The only exception to date has been narcotics that create physical dependencies, and even then we broadly allow alcohol and nicotine, just with age limits.

[jerojero]

Just because something is legal doesn't mean it's ethical.

I think this is more of an ethical issue than a legal one, slowly our laws tend to move towards ethical boundries we consider acceptable.

What you describe as physical dependency is nothing more but your brain changing in response to the drug that's being administered to it. Not very surprisingly a drug could also be digital or artificial for example gambling.

I think most societies have agreed that because people of the 0 to 18 (give or take a few years, 16 to 21 tends to be the upper range) are particularly vulnerable due to these being formative years that certain actions and substances need to be outlawed until these people can be legally responsible for making these actions.

And companies that deal in these industries should be liable if:

1. They know about the problem 2. They choose to continue. 3. They've got no problem targeting vulnerable individuals.

Of course this ends up being a back and forth between our legal systems and the different industries. But why should we simply accept the situation where these companies are purposefully trying to get people addicted to their services and products regardless of the consequences? Clearly there are ethical mishaps that our current societal system is not processing efficiently.

[themacguffinman]

> But why should we simply accept the situation where these companies are purposefully trying to get people addicted to their services and products regardless of the consequences?

Because in a free society you don't get to play gatekeeper for everyone and judge how good or bad the consequences are on the behalf of others. It's none of your business how other people engage with products & services. Your ethics are not the same as mine and everyone else's.

In a different era you might be a Christian whose ethical boundaries exclude alcohol, supporting a vast program of prohibition. After all, why should we simply accept the situation where these breweries are purposefully trying to get people addicted to their services and products regardless of the consequences?

[jerojero]

What do you mean I don't get to play gatekeeper. What do you think democracy and the state is for? Of course society should decide collectively where the lines are drawn. That's what we have done and will continue to do because that's the only way to meet everyone's interests in any sensible manner.

I don't think you really know anything about my personal ethics, my point is that these sort of products and services have been seen by society as a whole as problematic to a certain extent and so they have been regulated. Consuming alcohol as an individual is not something society considers morally questionable but giving it to people who are under-age is a problem and so we have codified that into laws. Why, as you say, in a free society we should limit businesses at all? Why don't we let people sell organs, I mean, surely there are others willing to sell their organs... but really, we know context matters and we know some people are not truly "free" to make the choices we can. Why in a free society we have stopped people from enslaving others? That is definitely an infringement on someone's rights.

In the end, we have come up with structures that aid us in making these difficult choices.

When you bring up prohibition for example, yes, at some point in history alcohol was considered problematic and there were laws that followed these thoughts and made them into law. I mean, as a homosexual of course I can see why this is problematic. I'm not saying we ought to treat these issues lightly, but you need to be able to acknowledge when there are problems and when people are acting in ways that harm others. I think Facebook most definitely knows their business model and practices causes a lot of harm to a lot of individuals but they don't care; why would they? That's not the framework we operate under.

I think one of the biggest problems in modern society is precisely that ethical discussions and responsibility is being left out of the conversation when it comes to markets because we work under the assumption that these problems will be weighted properly by the population that makes use of these services. But is that really the case? I don't think so, and I think a big part of it is that people not only don't have access to the appropriate information but also that the damage "doesn't feel real". So a lot of these externalities simply disappear from our perception yet they are still very real for the people who suffer through them. That's an ethical problem, that's a structural problem, it's a big problem.

I am not saying "we should force people to adopt what I think is right" which is what happened with prohibition. What I'm saying is "we should really define what we think is right in more democratic ways and then make decisions based on that", which is what the state apparatus is supposed to do. But it doesn't because it is systemically corrupt (if you wanna know a bit more on this I recommend reading the book "systemic corruption" by author Camila Vergara). All in all, I think we have the right ideas but not the right structures and that lets companies that prey on people to flourish at every occasion a new exploit is found.

[themacguffinman]

Democracy and the state is not designed for gatekeeping, if that's what you were implying. American democracy was especially designed to counter tyranny-of-the-majority dynamics where society just collectively decides to take away rights. America does not just concede to whatever "everyone's interests" are, its Supreme Court is empowered to strike down popular, democratically legislated laws that violate fundamental rights. There are high profile examples of this like the recent gun laws in New York that were struck down.

America's founders never fully trusted democratic institutions/structures to do the right thing and I don't either. And the problem isn't "not enough democracy", homosexuality would have been considered wrong by practically any electorate in the not-so-ancient past regardless of whatever "democratic ways" or magically corruption-free democratic structures you come up with.

No one, not you and not any democratic majority, gets to make these difficult choices on others' behalf. If people want these structures to aid them, then they can seek them out themselves, you don't get to force it upon them. If you think people aren't informed enough, then inform them, you don't get to bypass them and just assume you know better. It's disingenuous to portray this as structural "aid" when it's not optional.

Posing examples like slavery where the freedom to own slaves conflicts with individual freedom is hardly relevant. When they clash, the individual freedom wins out based on principle, not because not-owning-slaves is democratically popular. America fought a war over it, they didn't just ask for a vote. On principle, I do think anyone should be allowed to sell organs.

[manimino]

This is the same argument used to defend cigarettes in Thank You For Smoking. Quote:

Well, the real demonstrated #1 killer in America is cholesterol. And here comes Senator Finisterre whose fine state is, I regret to say, clogging the nation's arteries with Vermont cheddar cheese. If we want to talk numbers, how about the millions of people dying of heart attacks? Perhaps Vermont cheddar should come with a skull and crossbones.

[t_serpico]

There is a fundamental difference between the two examples. There are strong social pressures to join social media. Opting out of social media could lead to a less rich social life, especially for younger people. Thus, there is perceivably a large opportunity cost to abstaining from social media, unlike McDonalds. I think millenials underestimate how much social media has completely changed the social fabric for the up and coming generations.

[iepathos]

The more disturbing part of the internal studies Facebook did on this is that they found pushing content to their users' feeds that caused more depression and anxiety was good for Facebook's numbers because depressed and anxious people stay on Facebook more. So, Facebook made a calculated decision to prioritize depressing and anxiety causing content rather than more uplifting and alternative content which would make users not stay on Facebook as much.

[acrobatsunfish]

"Comparison of the theif of joy." What better way to compare then hd photos on Facebook, Instagram, etc

[rr808]

Yeah its depressing watching all the stupid political memes, less so the envy.

[pdimitar]

> It doesn't matter what medium you consume as much as what you're actually missing.

Disagreed. Both matter.

Deliberately triggering people is bad for them. You have to be very disingenuous to deny it.