by paytonjjones 7 hours ago
Yes.
The research is quite confusing. This is because the strongest version of the argument is not "your child uses social media, and that makes them depressed". The strongest version is more like "when a society mass adopts social media, this irrevocably alters the culture in ways that causes massive changes in mental health, most prominently among young girls, including those exposed to the culture who don't even use social media."
This means you get a weird effect where experimental studies of high quality - which are usually the best evidence, are expected by the strong argument to show zero effect.
Correlational studies usually show either a weak effect (stronger in young girls) or no effect (it's extremely rare to see a study showing a positive correlational effect, though).
And where you get the most juice is looking at population level introduction of social media studies like those discussed here: https://www.afterbabel.com/p/phone-based-childhood-cause-epi...
But even then it's very tricky, as those studies can't exactly be replicated, and we don't know whether changes will actually reverse the cultural artifacts
The problem is that argument is indistinguishable from the argument "the lack of proof is the proof!"
No, I don't think it's the same as an unfalsifiable or circular claim.
Network level effects are still falsifiable, it's just often really challenging to falsify them at scale.
but also, you have to distinguish from "society has separately become anti-child"
which also did happen through the nineties and 2000s before social media, but how would you measure the effects of each on their own?
As is common in social science, it's really challenging to disentangle this kind of thing. But there are ways you can get at it.
One clever example discussed in the blog I linked:
> We also found five studies that used a similar design applied to the rollout of high-speed internet. It’s hard to have a phone-based childhood when data speeds are very low. So what happened in Spain as fiber optic cables were laid and high-speed internet came to different regions at different times?
https://www.afterbabel.com/p/social-media-mental-illness-epi...