SIO317: Is Instagram Bad for Mental Health? What the Science Says Might Surprise You

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:12 Thomas: And welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode 317. I'm Thomas, and with me as always is Dr. Lindsey Osterman. How you doing? Best science person in the biz. I am good. I just watched hours of congressional testimony, which is always painful. Before we get into it, I think this is like we do things in the worst possible way. Like even the good guys, you know, even on stuff that's kind of bipartisan, Congress at its quote-unquote best, like when even Ted Cruz is kind of trying to like get at the truth, maybe, which is, which is, it was a real throwback, you know, to see like, oh, both sides are kind of interested in this issue, so they're not just attacking each other in really stupid ways. During, but it's still at its core, the format of this thing is hey, person, whistleblower, a Facebook whistleblower, come testify. And what we'll do is we'll give each senator 13 seconds to try to make a viral video out of you that won't maybe have anything to do with anything.

0:00:20 Lindsey: Oh, wonderful. How are you? Yeah,

0:01:18 Thomas: And then we'll go to another senator. It's the worst format. It absolutely is. I hate that they're five minute Q&A sessions with each member of of the committee.

0:01:26 Lindsey: I applaud you. I applaud you for actually listening to it. I just read the transcript because I couldn't I couldn't stomach actually watching all of it. But yeah.

0:01:35 Thomas: Well, uh, little known secrets, listening to it at like two X speed is how I do it, you know? So, and maybe I'm, maybe I can't read as fast as you can, but I can listen very quickly.

0:01:51 Thomas: Um, so this is something, I mean, this is a few weeks old now, but, uh, just to give the background, I'm sure, you Know, virtually everybody's heard of it by now, but there's a whistleblower. Frances Haugen, I think is how she pronounces it. And she leaked a bunch of stuff, I guess, to the Wall Street Journal is what I'm seeing initially, which is an interesting choice. All kinds of... I heard on a a podcast that she took, you know, like actual pictures with her camera of stuff on the system, you know? Because these days, if she had taken, you know, actually printed stuff or tried to save stuff in any way on the system, it would have been easy to detect, but because they have all these, you know, metadata and all this crap. But because she actually took pictures on her phone, you know, it's harder to trace and all that.

0:01:42 Lindsey: Oh, okay. Yeah. Smart. I

0:02:37 Thomas: And so she took thousands of pictures of stuff. And she became a whistleblower. She did a bunch of interviews, 60 Minutes. She testified to Congress, which is the thing I just listened to. And the thrust of it seems to be that Facebook and Instagram, which of course is all owned by Meta, the worst announcement ever. Mark Zuckerberg, who I cannot believe exists, and it bothers me that Mark Zuckerberg is the way he is. Something about him just deeply unsettles me. He's the uncanny valley Valley CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, it's not, okay, I know we're getting off track.

It's not just that he's in the Uncanny Valley. It's that he's been in the uncanny Valley for 10 years or more in the public eye, has more money than almost anybody, you know, like not, I guess he's not the richest person, but has, you Know, a bazillionaire and is still in the uncanny valley. Like not one time has anyone near him or him himself been like, Hey, we watched your announcement video. Like you, are in the uncanny valley. I don't know how to say this. You aren't quite a human and it's uncomfortable. How has nobody fixed that? I don't understand. Anyway, okay. So, all that

0:03:10 Lindsey: Was gonna say the same thing. Yeah, it's in the uncanny valley for sure.

0:03:30 Lindsey: He's up there. Yeah?

0:03:52 Lindsey: Yeah.

0:03:52 Thomas: Aside, Meta, who owns, you know, of course, Facebook and Instagram and some other crap, WhatsApp, apparently this whistleblower gathered this data, the internal conversations, internal internal studies, I think, indicating that Facebook, Instagram are causing harm in various ways. There's several ways that they're causing harm. I think we're limiting discussion to certain studies, which we'll get to. But just for a moment, one of them that bothers me so much was that there's, you know, which is not what we're going to talk about today is how, what we all suspected certain like celebrities and prominent people get a pass, you you know, on, as in terms of the rules of what they post, including, I saw something super gross that I didn't even know about.

0:03:52 Lindsey: Oh

0:04:40 Thomas: Did you know? Did you see that thing about like the famous soccer player? I don't follow soccer, so I don't know. Neymar, whatever Neymar. Yeah. He, because he's one of these, you know select influential people who Facebook has decided don't have to follow the rules, you know, because of, I guess, profitability, I think in the bottom line, he, he posted nude pictures of someone who accused him of rape and they were up for like, I want to say a day or something because of yeah.

0:05:12 Thomas: Because of these exemptions, you know, I mean, that is, so that's awful. There's all kinds of stuff, but in the past we've done done some episodes where you've broken down the studies on social media and perhaps how it's affecting us and kids and teens and all that. And I've come away from those, and feel free to characterize these and let me know if I have it wrong. I've come away from those with the understanding that the science doesn't quite say yet, or now, as you understand it, that social media is as harmful as we might think it is based on this whistleblower. Sure.

0:05:07 Lindsey: My god. That's awful. Yeah, I'd agree with that. It's yeah, before we get into the details of this, just a content warning, like we're talking about, um, a bunch of specific mental health struggles, including, like, eating disorders, self-harm, suicidal behavior, so just so folks know that going into it, um, but yeah, I would agree with that characterization, um, was focused particularly on this evidence that that she apparently presented to, I mean, she, those were provided directly to Congress as well, it, it wasn't just through the Wall Street Journal, right? Yeah.

0:06:22 Thomas: I think so. It's unclear. I've been trying to figure that out.

0:06:26 Lindsey: She's, uh, she leaked it to someone and Her takeaways were that, you know, Meta has been aware that there are significantly negative impacts on particularly young users, right? So teens, and that Meta has systematically ignored this evidence because it's more concerned with its bottom line than with protecting children. And I think that there are some legitimate things about that came up in the course of Haugen's testimony, but I also think that they're some things that, based on my current understanding of the evidence, are probably overblown, um, but in terms of, like, the legitimate things, right, I can think of absolutely no downsides and only upsides to Facebook making its data available to independent researchers in order to answer questions, and that was one of the things she said would be a good, good idea to do. Totally agree with that.

0:06:29 Thomas: Yeah.

0:07:10 Thomas: Yeah, no kidding. Yep.

0:07:16 Lindsey: That sounds great. Another claim that I believe is legitimate, and we've talked about this on previous episodes, is that I think that the evidence for the potential of these algorithms to exacerbate political divisiveness and radicalization is compelling. I mean, social networks do spread ideas, you know, that's what they do. And I don't just mean online social networks, but networks of people spread ideas. And the infrastructure that it allowed people to sort of self -sort into groups around polarized topics on Facebook is, yeah, I think it's tailor -made to strengthen and polarize people's pre -existing ideas. And there's a lot of existing research going back decades on how these dynamics operate in offline contexts.

You know, there's no reason to think that they wouldn't operate just as strongly in these online contexts, right? The thing that I want to spend more time on today is whether social social media has direct impacts on mental health, particularly of teens, which was a huge emphasis of both her sort of opening remarks and of the questions that she received from senators, which were all very much in the vein of, you know, Facebook intentionally getting kids addicted to social media in flagrant disregard of this internal evidence they had that social media harms their health.

0:07:28 Thomas: Oh, yeah. Yeah Wow.

0:08:27 Lindsey: In particular, Haugen claimed that there was evidence that Instagram was exacerbating problems among those most vulnerable to certain kinds of mental health problems, like eating disorders, and potentially exacerbating suicidality and self-harm among teens, right? I think that this idea is plausible in principle, and I think it's also undeniable that folks like Zuckerberg are making decisions about their operations based on how they affect the bottom line. Like, no part of me genuinely thinks that he gives a shit about the well-being of users, except as it affects Meta's success. But the evidence that was released in these reports, and side note here, I read two reports that in total contained like almost 100 pages of slides where they're summarizing evidence about these two studies that they conducted on Instagram users.

0:09:21 Lindsey: It is unclear to me whether I have all of the information that she references in her testimony. Like there are certain claims that she makes that I think I have tied to specific language in these two reports, so I feel pretty confident in saying that at least some of the claims were specifically related to these reports, but there may be other internal documents that I have not accessed. So if any listeners have found these and can send them our way and it contradicts anything that I'm saying here, I would welcome Because I'm genuinely unsure if have everything that she's talked about. But the evidence that was released in these specific two reports that I've read, right, which I think have been represented by a lot of media outlets as being sort of, you know, these bombshells, do not compellingly demonstrate that social media use is associated with worsened mental health among teens or otherwise.

0:10:15 Lindsey: And furthermore, we don't have to rely exclusively on these two reports, because quite a bit of evidence has been collected by independent researchers, especially in the last couple of years, that undermines the claim that social media per se is particularly toxic or corrosive to mental health, so

0:10:32 Thomas: There The idea that a whistleblower releases all this information, says it, says one thing about how harmful it is to teens or whatever it is. The actual stuff, if you do the reading like Lindsay apparently has done, doesn't actually support it. And then nobody says that. Because I'm not really hearing this much. I've heard a few rumblings about like, oh, some people think she's overblown it. I have heard a few little rumblings like that. But for the most part, all of Congress in that testimony, at least not all of Congress, everybody in that committee, subcommittee, at said this. Everybody just went with what she said. Everybody asked questions that really seemed kind of technologically ignorant sometimes. And so it's amazing to me that this could happen and yet also not surprising. But I just want to emphasize that even if, as we've said before, Even if what you're saying is true, that the research just doesn't indicate that social media causes this particular harm in this way, there's a lot of problems with social media and a lot of what

0:10:52 Lindsey: Am I Sure.

0:11:39 Lindsey: Yes.

0:11:39 Thomas: She said is a problem. And I think particularly the stuff about Facebook operating worldwide and not having any language support. Support, you know, like they don't have enough expertise in different languages to be able to police misinformation at all, like, well, around the world. So this isn't, I don't think, I want to make sure I have you right, like this isn't saying Facebook is totally cool and harmless. It's just this one particular claim that you're looking into, right?

0:12:11 Lindsey: That, that is absolutely correct. I in no way want people to come away from this episode with the impression that I'm defending Facebook or or Mark Zuckerberg Or Saying that, you know, we don't need transparency and accountability in these tech companies. I mean, we absolutely do. Um But I think you can make that point without over-claiming on the basis of weak evidence, and as far as I have seen, that's what was presented here. Um And I think, and I, and I do, I think that this matters. Like, I don't think I'm just splitting hairs saying that, you know, she didn't represent everything absolutely correctly. My contention is that if parents are are insisting that their teen children delete their Instagram accounts based on this testimony, they are probably not addressing the underlying issues that their teens may be facing. So that's my position based on, again, what I have seen so far. There may be other things that I haven't seen.

0:12:18 Thomas: Mm -hmm. Mm -huh. Wow.

0:12:57 Thomas: Well, shoot.

0:12:58 Lindsey: I think that I understand where some of the willingness to accept this on its face comes from, because it seems very intuitive that social media could exacerbate these issues. I, but like, just in case anybody's forgotten, adolescence really sucks, and it sucked before social media was there. I Mean, it's it's a time of really intense changes and social scrutiny and competition, and you know, for a lot of people it's not a time, like it's not a, I would want to relive. Right. And so I think that like, what my, my impression of where, why people's intuitions were sort of like, oh yeah, that's probably true, is that social media is a a very salient part of the social landscape right now, and um, these issues that are being associated with it are probably mostly, right, just manifestations of things that happen in adolescence, so I

0:13:15 Thomas: Yeah.

0:13:44 Thomas: Well, sure. Let me let me voice the other side of that, because and especially based on this testimony and what kind of the senators were articulating during that testimony, which really seems plausible to me. I'm again, I'm very skeptical going through this because it's, you know, for example, this is summarized in The Wall Street Journal as Facebook knows Instagram is toxic for many teen girls, company documents show. And the idea is, sure, all, sucks in general, like absolutely, of course. But it seems completely plausible to me that, you the ability to always be comparing yourself to actual pictures of other, for for example, you know, your, your teen girlfriends or whatever at all times and not really having much as much respite from it, uh, as you might've in the, you Know, in the past you might have been at school, felt shitty because adolescence sucks.

0:14:39 Thomas: I know I did. Uh, and I, I think it's worse for, for girls, uh oftentimes in terms of body image and all that stuff. Um, and then maybe you go home and it's kind of a respite form that, and you're, you're with your family, then you're You're not bombarded with images. Back social media, I you could open up a yearbook or something, but you're not bombarded with images that are, by the way, also altered and made to look better than they even are with this digital technology. That seems incredibly plausible to me that that would be making the problem worse than it would be otherwise.

0:15:14 Lindsey: Know, I think that seems intuitive as well. Um, so we'll get into some some details about this that I think will, will account for some of those intuitions. I mean, there is evidence that, that you know, some people use social media in certain ways that sort of rely is heavily emphasizes, emphasizes social comparisons, right?

There's not great evidence that social media per se is like facilitating people in using it that way in particular, but that, like, if some people are using social media to compare themselves to others, that, that can have negative consequences, right? Just that there's nothing, there's something about about these platforms that's necessarily facilitating that in people any more than they might do on other kinds of, or through other kinds of media, right? So you mentioned like yearbooks and things.

I'd say before social media, you know, have access to magazines, they have access to other kinds of media in which social comparisons become sort of salient. If you're around Other people, you know, people who already have these sort of socially comparative motives are comparing themselves to people all the time. And so based on what I've seen, I don't actually think that social media is providing like as many unique opportunities for social comparison over what existed before as people might think there are, right?

0:16:04 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, true. That's a good point.

0:16:32 Thomas: Yeah.

0:16:32 Lindsey: There's a little bit of evidence for it, but it's not as compelling as you might think or as dramatic.

0:16:33 Thomas: Yeah. And obviously, magazines, as you say, TV, all that stuff's been airbrushed for decades and decades.

0:16:44 Lindsey: Yeah, and there's evidence that those kinds of things have had impacts for a very long time. So, right, so should we talk about these reports again?

0:16:51 Thomas: Sure. I mean, I could add to that case, by the way, the cyberbullying aspect, the never. What resonated with me from that testimony, which she articulated, was the idea that there just isn't a break from it, as there might have been. If there's bullying, if there's all that that stuff that might have been already a problem at school and is already a problem at the school, this allows it to be like a 24 seven issue possibly. Um, so, okay. So, but anyway, all right, let's go through the evidence of why you don't think this. Yeah. Good.

0:17:24 Lindsey: Like, I I do not want to suggest that, like, those things don't, don't make sense on their face, right. So, like, after I finished, here was my process. And sort of consuming this stuff, I saw these, these claims, and the thing I went back to, these reports, these two reports, and I was like, oh, okay, well, this isn't at all evidence for the things that she was claiming testimony.

0:17:43 Lindsey: These things don't match up at all. So then I went back to other independent research to look and see if, you know, better research that's actually designed to evaluate these causal claims has showed evidence for it, and it just, it really actually does not seem that compelling. So yeah, anyway, yeah, yeah. All right, so what were these two internal reports designed to address? Of them were released, or both of these two reports that I read, were designed to assess users' perceptions of how the platform impacted their mental well -being and mental health.

0:17:29 Thomas: Mm hmm. Mm hmm, that is so weird. Okay, well let's hear it.

0:18:19 Thomas: Okay.

0:18:20 Lindsey: So, in one of the two reports, they specifically surveyed and interviewed teen Instagram users, and in the other, they interviewed both teens and adults. So pretty wide age range, and the second one was like 13 to people over the age of 65. asked participants questions about life difficulties, well -being, mental health, and they they also asked them about their perception of whether Instagram exacerbated those problems or helped with them. Now, as we've talked about before, even recently, there are limits on what people can accurately self -report.

0:18:20 Thomas: Mm Hmm. Yeah,

0:18:53 Lindsey: Most of the time, I think it's totally reasonable to expect that people can accurate accurately report on the content of their own subjective experiences, but often people can be mistaken if you ask them to report on causal relationships relationships between various things they've experienced.

0:19:06 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Well, right away, what you said earlier might apply where it's like, hypothetically, under the theory that, you know, people would be doing this stuff with magazines or media in general anyway. If I were answering the survey, I might be like, yeah, no, I'm looking at these pictures. They're making me feel really bad. But I don't know for sure that I wouldn't be doing that with something else anyway. Anyway, yeah.

0:19:26 Lindsey: Yep. Nope. That's exactly the point I want to make, right?

0:19:33 Thomas: Does?

0:19:33 Lindsey: Like, in order for people to actually be able to report on this stuff accurately, they would have to have access to the outcome of the counterfactual, how good their mental health would be in the absence of social media. And while I think that these participants should be able tell us about their current wellbeing and the current frequency of social media use and how they feel when they're using it and their motives for using it, and so on, I'm less confident that they would be able to tell us whether social media is causing the issues with their mental health and well-being, or, as you say, whether they might be experiencing similar issues um they didn't have access to social media, right?

0:20:07 Thomas: That cut both ways, though? I, are you here to tell us that this is just merely inconclusive, and that it could entirely be making stuff worse, but we just can't for sure tie the causality, or does it actually vindicate social media a little bit?

0:20:21 Lindsey: So this, this definitely suggests that the internal reports that, from, from Facebook, um, not designed to answer the kinds of questions that I think Haugen was saying that they could answer, right? But in the other studies that I'm going to talk about, they're not asking the same questions. They're not relying on participant reports to tell them whether social media is causing these issues. Instead, they are using longitudinal methods to see like, okay, if we know how much or in what way people are using social media at time one, can we predict the problems that they're going going to have in the future with social, with a mental health and well-being, right?

So that actually gets you a little bit closer to being able to make causal claims. The way that these studies were conducted don't get you there. Yeah, by the way, it was never Facebook's intention. It, from reading these reports, it does not appear to me that it was their intention to establish whether there's a causal relationship between its platforms and mental health and well being My inference from the waythat these data were presented in the reports is, is that this team was conducting these studies for one of two reasons, and possibly both.

Like, the most cynical read on them is that they're just interested in user satisfaction with the platform and ways to change user perceptions or experiences with Instagram, because if these users are perceiving it negatively and perceiving that there's these problems with it, then their bottom line goes down, right? The more charitable read, I think, is that their genuinely interested in building features into Instagram that offer support and enhance the well -being of users who are experiencing difficulties.

0:20:32 Thomas: Okay. Okay. Wow.

0:21:53 Lindsey: And Zuckerberg may not personally care about that, but the people doing this research and working for this company likely do if they resemble most humans. So one of those two things, or both, seems to be the thrust of the way that they were talking about this data collection and these results and these reports, rather than trying to establish this causal connection. A little bit about each of these reports, and then I'm just going to talk about of the results that I think were being referenced in the testimony. So in one of the reports, which was titled Teen Mental Health Deep Dive, they said, quote, "We conducted market research to, one, understand how teens talk about mental health, and two, get a nuanced understanding of teens' perceptions of how Instagram affects their mental health, in order to, one, inform outreach teams how we might build meaningful and impactful campaigns in this space, and two, inform product teams about how to best support teams in this space."

0:22:50 Lindsey: So I think if we take those claims about purpose at face value, this sounds like a pretty responsible thing to do. And maybe it is about the bottom line, but they're keeping their finger on the pulse of an important issue and how teams perceive it, and what interventions might be be appropriate to improve the platform in that regard. In this particular study, they included an online survey of about 2 ,500 teens. They don't give a specific age range, but it's probably 13 to 19. About half of these users were from the United States, and about half were from the UK. Addition to the online survey, they also conducted in -person interviews with 40 individuals. This was not a subset of the 2 ,500 who took the online survey, as far as I can tell. These were users specifically based in London and Los Angeles that came in for these in -person interviews.

0:23:39 Lindsey: Importantly, according to a methodology slide, the group recruited for the in - person interviews were recruited non -randomly around several themes. So, specifically around the themes of body image, self -esteem, negative mood, depression, loneliness, and isolation. Not clear exactly what this means in terms of how they drew these users, but it does suggest that they were trying through these interviews to get a richer sense of users' experiences in a group that were already reporting a variety of these negative experiences. A little bit of a callback to the Lipman paper, I think, that, know, you this specific part of the study, these interviews, were not designed to be making generalized claims about how Instagram affects its users. A lot of the more provocative claims that came up in the testimony actually were drawn from conclusion slides about the in -person interviews.

0:24:26 Lindsey: So, yeah. Right, so in addition to those 40 in - person interviews, they also did follow-up video calls to an additional interview with eight of those 40 people that they did the original interviews with. With. Hard life moments mental health deep dive study, very similar sort of overlapping goals. They said that their goals here were, quote, wanted to understand Instagram's role for better or worse in the hard experiences in people's lives in order to, one, prioritize mental health and well -being issues that Instagram should focus on next, and two, understand areas in which our users may need most support. Sample characteristics here, this was 22 ,410 users from six different countries, the US, Japan, Brazil, Indonesia, Turkey, and India. And the ages here range from 13 to over 65.

0:25:15 Lindsey: Both studies addressed overlapping questions, which is about recent user experiences with mental health issues and life stressors, and their, their perceptions about whether Instagram makes those problems worse or better, around these specific kinds of issues. So here some of the findings from these reports that Haugen seemed to be referencing in her testimony. So some of these first ones are from the Teen Mental Health Deep Dive.

So one question asked participants to indicate whether they had experienced any of 13 different issues relating to mental health and well-being in the past month. So these issues were, were feeling down, sad, or depressed, feeling alone or lonely, feeling like they wanted to hurt themselves, feeling like they wanted to kill themselves, feeling like they're not good enough, feeling like they're not attractive, feeling like they have to create the perfect image, feeling like they have to be happy, feeling uncomfortable being honest about their emotions, feeling like the don't have enough money, feeling they don't have enough friends, or feeling like their friends are not really their friends, right?

Participants just selected all that applied in terms of how many of those things they'd experienced in the past month. Results here in terms of the the most to least commonly selected items, 70 % of these participants said they've either felt not good enough or not attractive enough. They didn't separate these percentages for those two questions, so it was just like 70 people combined answered at least and answered yes to either those questions or possibly both. Of those 70 % of users, 24 to 29 % from the US and UK respectively, said that their issues with not feeling good enough started on Instagram.

0:26:51 Lindsey: 41 to 43%, again, US versus UK, said their issues was not feeling attractive started on Instagram. Most common item selected, or next most common items, 67 % said that they've have experienced at least one of the following in the past month, having to create a perfect image, having to seem happy, or not being feeling like they can't be honest about their feelings.

And of those 67%, between 10 and 30 % of users said that those issues started on Instagram, 62 % reported feeling down, sad, or depressed and or lonely. Of those 62%, 10%, approximately 10 to 20 % said that those issues started on Instagram. 52 % said they didn't feel like they had enough friends or that their friends aren't really their friends. And of those 52%, about 20 to 30 % reported that those issue started on instagram, right? And this was something that came up in the testimony, 21% of the UK sample and 14% of us sample reported either wanting to hurt themselves or wanting to kill themselves. Again, they collapsed these into one item. So we're not sure how many reported suicidal thoughts versus self -harm, but that was 21 % in the UK, 14 in the US. And of those who reported thoughts of self - harm, 9 % in the US and 7 % in UK said those thoughts started on Instagram.

Those who reported suicidal thought, 6 % in US and 13 % in U .K. said that those suicidal thoughts started on Instagram. Now, I want to put those numbers against Klobuchar's summary in one of the questions that she posed to Haugen, which Haugen does not correct when she responds to Klobuchar's question.

0:28:30 Lindsey: So Klobuchar says, quote, when their own research found that more than 13 % of teen girls say that Instagram made their thoughts of suicide worse, what did they do? They proposed Instagram for kids. About as, that's not an accurate summary of what what those data say, right? Like moral panicky kinds of language, right. And I'm not saying that like, we shouldn't care about and investigate the role of social media in something as serious as suicidal thoughts. But these data just do not say what Klobuchar says they do. And she's the end Haugen does not correct her on this. Is a wild over claim. Like if I'm if if I'm trying to extrapolate like what percentage of the sample it was, it's probably like one to 2%, right? At highest.

0:28:44 Thomas: Wow.

0:29:16 Thomas: And?

0:29:16 Lindsey: To summarize, right, a lot of teens report having recently experienced these issues or feelings related to mental health and well being, and some proportion of those who experienced those problems, right, between 10 and 50 % who reported those problems in the first place, seem to be connecting those experiences with social media. In the report, there are a few slides that summarize qualitative themes from the in -person interviews, and the following claims appeared on some of those slides that also came up in the testimony. So one, quote, underlying emotional states play a key role in teens' abilities to cope with what they see. Quote, quote, teens having a bad day know they are more vulnerable to what they see. Quote, teens who struggle with mental health say Instagram makes it worse. And quote, teens called out ad targeting on Instagram as feeding insecurities, especially around weight and body image.

0:30:07 Lindsey: Right? Appropriate take-home claim that made its way into the testimony should not have been that Instagram negatively impacts teens' mental health based on claims like this. Right? And it shouldn't be that it disproportionately does this for teens who are already vulnerable and struggling. It is possible that the underlying claim is accurate. It's just not a good reflection of what's being presented here.

0:30:28 Thomas: Because, like you say, we already started, did we already cherry pick our sample a little bit, as you say, uh, really, like, relating it back to the Litman study, it's

0:30:36 Lindsey: Right. Yeah, and not in any way that I would think is a methodological problem. They just specifically wanted to get some rich descriptive information about the experiences of users who were having these struggles, which is fine. Like, the reports themselves don't over claim based on this, they have some sloppy language here and there, but they're not trying to make claims about prevalence. Yes.

0:30:57 Thomas: A case of something being Misapplied, you know, like it's It's perfectly acceptable study for what it's trying to do, but then it's being misappried to say these things that it's not saying. Yeah.

0:31:00 Lindsey: Yes.

0:31:09 Lindsey: Exactly, yeah, that specific claim that I, that I read at the end about, uh, so teens called out ads targeting on Instagram as feeding insecurities, especially around weight and body image, that came up specifically in the testimony as well. Haugen seemed to be suggesting to me that, that there was direct evidence that Instagram was like tweaking its algorithm in ways that exacerbated body image issues in groups who are vulnerable potentially to developing eating disorders. And, you this slide is the origin of her claim, and maybe it's not, it is a problematic interpretation of these summaries of a very small number of interviewees who were selected sort of on very specific criteria. Again, it is possible that Instagram is doing this. I just, I have not seen evidence of this. It's not in these reports.

0:31:49 Thomas: And By the way, we're all ears, uh, emails open, messages are open, if if there's any evidence that we're missing about that particular claim, let us know, but nothing that, nothing that you've seen justifies that. Yeah.

0:31:50 Lindsey: Um, yes, please. No, no, not in these reports. Um, but yes, I would like to second that strongly. Like if, if I'm very concerned that there's something I've missed here, honestly. Um, so yeah. Here's what I think that we can reasonably infer from results like this. Teen Instagram users struggle with various mental health and wellbeing difficulties at pretty high, high rates.

And unfortunately, these findings are not inconsistent with past research that is aimed at determining prevalence rates for these kinds of issues just among adolescents in general, right, not just social media users. For example, right, there's been decades of research on the prevalence of body image issues, right? So in this particular sample, the report on teens didn't report the percentage of teens who said that they felt just unattractive because they combined it with another question. In the second report, which included teens and adults, they did give percentages of teens versus adults who reported body image issues.

So in that second report 56 % of teens and 52 % of adults reported experiencing body image issue. So there's research going back decades, far predating the emergence of social media, that has documented just problematically high prevalence of body dissatisfaction, especially in girls and young women, and apparently especially especially in Western cultures. So there was a study in 1996. This was sad. They looked at body dissatisfaction in pre -adolescent children, ages 8 to 10, and found that 55 % of the girls in this sample were dissatisfied with their bodies, as well as 35 % of boys in the sample being dissatisfied. This is kids age 8 to10.

0:33:19 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:33:36 Lindsey: That's very sad. Was a 1999 study by Vose and all. They did a study on disordered eating during the transition to college, so these folks would largely be in their late teens, and they cited rates around 40 percent of adolescent girls engaging in unhealthy or excessive dieting. Presumably, the rates of experiencing body image issues would exceed the ratesof these kinds of behaviors that are linked to those kinds of dissatisfaction, and those behaviors are already being reported at very high rates. There was a 2013 large -scale study of nearly 2 ,000 U.S. adults, so 18 and older, regarding various dimensions of body satisfaction and dissatisfaction, and on satisfaction readings regarding specific aspects of their bodies, 55% % of women reported dissatisfction with their middle torso, 41% % reported dissatisfied with their lower torso, and 46% % reported dissatisfiction with their weight overall.

0:33:37 Thomas: It is, until

0:34:29 Lindsey: All. The results also indicated that body dissatisfaction is highest in young adults and it remains high into middle age, doesn't seem to drop for women into late adulthood.

0:34:40 Thomas: You finally don't give a shit anymore. Yeah, I, yeah, so the lesson here is, the message here is, not everything's hunky-dory, but that these Studies long predate, in some cases, social media, and and seem to indicate to me, just, just guessing here, that could have more to do with, with like the Mad Men era of, you know, advertising and all that, like it could be, that might be why You see it in Western, whatever you said, in America more than other places, like that, that capitalistic admin type thing that over time that seems to have had a profound impact on us. And so that could be something that's already going on in the background here. And I suppose it's up to these studies that you're referencing that you are going to take us through to determine whether or not social media, Instagram, is adding to that over and above it, or, you, or we can't determine that, or it might just be something that would have already happened anyway. Hmm.

0:34:49 Lindsey: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, Exactly. Right. And it's good timing that you mentioned the historical aspect to this, because one other thing that they did in that study in 2013 by Fallon and colleagues was that they compared the prevalence estimates in their study, which was during the early 2010s, and compared it to previous estimates of body dissatisfaction in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. And interestingly, it did not appear that these things were increasing over time. So, yeah, right? So body satisfaction, appearance evaluation, and preoccupation with being overweight, according according to their results, have actually gone down in recent decades compared to what they were, you know, like in the 70s and 80s.

0:36:17 Thomas: Wow. That's interesting.

0:36:21 Lindsey: Yeah, right? I mean, yeah,

0:36:21 Thomas: Well, that's, I mean, That's a positive. I mean maybe, maybe, because I know a lot of my friends, a lot people they see on Facebook and a lot of people these days are trying to get out that counter messaging of like fat acceptance or just body acceptance or body positivity and maybe that's having some, some impact.

0:36:34 Lindsey: I think that it probably is. Now, I mean that aside, they're still seeing dissatisfaction rates in the 40s and 50s that's still bad, right, yeah, it's, you know... It used to be even worse, so people can and take comfort in that, I guess.

0:36:44 Thomas: Sure. I know that's, that's genuinely good news. I'm glad that, you know, perhaps the body positivity kind of movement is having impact. That's great.

0:37:00 Lindsey: Yeah, yeah, it is, right? So I do, I think that social media seems to be an awfully convenient scapegoat for this kind of problem, because it seems, as you were saying, it seems very ingrained in our culture more broadly, and so to just point to social media and say that's the problem, it's like, well, you know, maybe there's more that we need to inspect here.

0:37:06 Thomas: Hmm. Yeah. It could be every single advertisement on every, and also the characters in every TV show and movie. And every magazine and every single ad that's selling us anything could also be having an impact.

0:37:22 Lindsey: Yep, entirely possible, right, and as you mentioned, those are things things that are shifting in response to pressure, I think, you returning to the report regarding the percentage of users who reported suicidal ideation or ideation about self-harm, right? One question I think here is whether the rates in these reports suggest higher rates than we've seen in studies that have attempted to estimate population prevalence. And unfortunately, the answer is no. Because those seemed like higher rates than I would like there to be, but yeah. So in the report of teens only, 21% of the sample reported suicidal or self-harm related thoughts in the past month. Again, this will collapse into one question. In the report of both teens and adults, suicidal or self-harm related thoughts were reported by 13% of users during the past months, and that was 20% of teens and 12% of adults.

0:37:28 Thomas: Yeah. Well,

0:38:20 Lindsey: So it's hard to to compare these results directly to past prevalence studies because generally you would not combine these two questions given that suicidal ideation and self-harm are quite different constructs, right? So like

0:38:31 Thomas: And remind me again, was this all users, or was this that one cherry pick sample, full full everybody, okay, just making

0:38:32 Lindsey: Oh so, so these results were actually for the full samples, so in that, yeah yeah, um yeah um, yeah, so, uh, I just, I wanted to point that out because, like, um, suicidal self-harm, right, is kind of a different character than non-suicidal self-harm. And so the fact that they're sort of collapsing all these things into one question is problematic. Like, those are quite different things that are predicted in different ways. So, yeah, so combining them, it makes it difficult to compare to past studies, right? And the other thing that made this difficult is that they asked about ideation within the past month. And the studies that I found that were generally trying to assess prevalence, prevalence, um, used, like, the occurrence within the past year, or they use lifetime prevalence, so whether somebody had ever experienced those kinds of thoughts, right? Yeah.

0:38:43 Thomas: Sure right well Geez, that seems like it would be everybody, most people

0:39:25 Lindsey: Yeah. It's a lot, it's, it's actually quite a lot, um, but with those caveats in mind, uh, here are some stats on the prevalence of suicidal ideation alone within this population, and then I got a few about self-harm, um, so this was from a JAMA article, I said, quote, for adolescents and young adults, lifetime prevalence estimates, estimates range between 12% and 38% for suicidal ideation. Those are pretty wide ranges, I know, but these estimates vary quite widely by country and a variety of other demographics.

But we do know that rates of suicidal thoughts and behavior are especially high in adolescence and young adulthood compared to other developmental periods across the lifespan. Another study by Lim and colleagues in 2019. This was a meta-analysis that estimated the prevalence of suicidal ideation, attempts, and non-suicidal self-injury, and they did both lifetime estimates and 12-month estimates in children and adolescents, and so this analysis ended up including nearly 700 ,000 children and adolescence. To their estimates, the 12 - month prevalence of suicidal ideations was 14 percent, the twelve -month prevalence of non - suicidal self - injury was 19 .5 percent, and the 12 -month prevalence of deliberate self -harm was 14 percent, right? So in line with the estimates from these internal reports, right, unfortunately.

And then finally, I read a meta -analysis by Swannell and colleagues from 2014 that was looking at non -suicidal self -injury across time, and they concluded that after adjusting for methodological factors, so differences in measure of how these things tend to be measured across various studies, there was no evidence that non -suicidal self -injury prevalence increased over time, and their analysis included studies published from 1990 to 2012, which is after the advent of social media, and I just found that interesting, right?

0:41:17 Lindsey: That in and of itself is not conclusive about whether social media is a problem here, but it is interesting. The is, if we compare the prevalence of these problems in and these internal reports to studies that have been conducted on prevalence more generally, the numbers look quite consistent, right? Doesn't suggest that Instagram is leading to increase in problems. But even if Instagram doesn't lead to an increase in prevalence, it could very well be the case that people who might develop these issues anyway, experience them more severely or intensely because of their social media use, right. These reports also suggest that some teen Instagram users do connect their struggles with their Instagram use and say that Instagram made specific struggles worse than they would have been otherwise.

0:42:02 Lindsey: And during Haugen's testimony, both she and various senators who questioned her were clearly interpreting these findings and claims to mean that Instagram does, in fact, exacerbate mental health issues. Again, assuming that these claims were coming from these these two reports, right? And these data do not directly shed light on whether or not social media does exacerbate these mental health issues. It wasn't designed to do that, and it does not shed light on that. So let's get into some of the research on social media use and depression and anxiety, right. Does the research indicate about social media use and and depression and anxiety. So some studies have linked increased risk of problems with depression and anxiety with media usage or social media usage in particular, but it's still a question as to what variables are causing that, right?

Some cities indicate that factors like sleep deprivation, right, so people staying on social media instead of getting enough sleep, might actually account for apparent problems caused by social media on these things. Other variables that they've linked with this include fear of missing out and social comparisons as things that might explain the observed relationships between social media usage and depression and anxiety, right?

0:42:26 Thomas: Yeah

0:43:14 Lindsey: The other problem with some of, I'd say, the earlier studies that were conducted on social media and things like depression and anxiety were that the vast majority of them were cross -sectional. And we've talked about the problems with cross -sectional designs before when you're trying to draw causal conclusions. If you're measuring everything at the same time, then you can't determine whether pre -existing problems with depression, anxiety, you know, things that underlie fear of missing out, right, sleep deprivation, tendencies towards social comparisons, all those things, you canít tell whether they are causing greater social media use or whether itís actually the other way around. Those are some of the big issues here and sort of like the first studies that weíre trying to establish whether or not social media media use was leading to greater problems with these kinds of things, right?

0:44:03 Lindsey: Now, is it conceivable that social media platforms are exacerbating these issues? Absolutely. But in order to demonstrate that, what you really need ideally is longitudinal evidence, right. And I say that, you know, experimental evidence would be really nice. But it's unlikely in sort of the constraints of what you can do in a lab study, that experimental data are going to tell us what we really want to know, which is what happens when somebody uses social media a lot over time and what, you know, um, lab studies can tell you about sort of acute effects on well -being but yeah, I don't know if that's, if that tells us really what we want to know in this context, but if you have longitudinal evidence then we can look at um whether social media use at time one is predicting declines in mental health in the future, right? So predicting declimes over time, um, and of course, right, this is not what is presented in this internal report, right?

0:44:57 Lindsey: We've got two cross-sectional studies providing self reports from Instagram users about what they think the causal relationships are, and that's it. So I looked at several longitudinal studies that have been done that I think are better suited to speak to whether social media is actually an important cause of mental health and well-being struggles or whether it's the other way around. Of these use longitudinal methods. So the the first study specifically evaluated the effect of social media on eating disorder symptoms and life satisfaction in adolescent girls. So this was conducted by Ferguson and colleagues in 2014. It was a prospective analysis, meaning that they gathered baseline data on the variables they were interested in and then did a six-month follow-up.

Specifically, the variables that they looked at were social media, competition, which is sort of like feelings of inferiority compared to other girls, as well as TV consumption on body dissatisfaction, eating disorder symptoms, and life satisfaction in about 100 adolescent girls, right? So not a huge sample, right. Here were some of their key results. So peer competition emerged as the strongest and most salient predictor of negative outcomes, right, so they did two two kinds of analyses here. They did concurrent analyses, meaning that they correlated time one variables with other time one variables and time two variables with the time two things, and then they did prospective analyses as well, right? So they looked to see if the time one things predicted things at time two.

0:46:28 Lindsey: So their concurrent analyses indicated that more peer competition predicted more body dissatisfaction and lower life satisfaction. So people who reported more peer competition also reported more body dissatisfaction, lower life satisfaction. TV and social media use were not related to body dissatisfaction or eating disorder symptoms, although there was a significant, although it was pretty weak, correlation between social media Use and life satisfaction. So adolescents who reported using more social media also reported less satisfaction with life. But again, this was the concurrent analysis. So that causality could go either way. Be that poor life satisfaction is causing more social media use or vice versa, right? Or it could be something else causing both. The prospective analysis, using our baseline to predict our six -month follow-up, more competition at time one predicted more body dissatisfaction and eating disorder symptoms at time two.

0:47:23 Lindsey: But time one reports of social media and TV use did not predict body dissatisfaction, eating disorder symptoms, or life satisfaction at time 2. So this is a strike against the interpretation that the the lowered life satisfaction or elevated body dissatisfaction and eating disorder symptoms are caused by social media use, right?

0:47:41 Thomas: Can you remind me the year on this one? I'm trying to keep them all straight.

0:47:44 Lindsey: This, yeah, this was published in 2014. Yeah. The only finding that suggested any contribution of social media to negative outcomes was that social media use at time one predicted more peer competition at time two, which again was related to those other negative outcomes pretty strongly. So, the authors interpreted this as evidence that social social media is a forum in which peer competition can take place. Again, the results of this study don't necessarily suggest that removing social media from the lines of teens is going to fix the underlying problem here. So, yes.

0:47:47 Thomas: Okay. Yeah. Really? So that didn't... So sorry, did I misunderstand? It's not saying... social comparison seems to be the problem, right? I mean, that seems to be causing a lot of these issues. And I thought you just said that social media consumption was predicting increases in social comparison. Is that not true?

0:48:38 Lindsey: I suppose it is. I'm considering the counterfactual in which there is not social media, right? Don't think that these findings necessarily suggest that if we took away the social media that all of a sudden there's no peer competition, competition, right? Is not a new phenomenon.

0:48:54 Lindsey: But yes, no, I will absolutely grant that they are indicating that peer competition is taking place on social media, right, and so in this sort of indirect way, right you are getting this effect of social media through the specific sort of mechanism, right. It's not, I don't know, it doesn't seem like nearly as strong a claim as was was being touted here.

0:49:17 Thomas: Is interesting that TV consumption and social media consumption didn't, yeah, predict these things at time too. I mean, that seems, I mean it is 2014. I, it's a little early. I know Instagram, you I don't know when when it started, but I don't know that it was as prevalent as it is now. You know, like I think that's pretty early days for Instagram. I know I definitely wasn't on it back then, if that's any indication. So is there the possibility that this is newer data that would contradict these findings?

0:49:40 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah, it is absolutely a possibility, and I've got some newer meta-analyses that we're going to talk about, probably not in this episode, but maybe in a follow-up.

0:49:52 Thomas: Oh, okay.

0:49:59 Lindsey: But last thing that I want to talk about for this part is a more recent study, and this includes data that were collected between 2009 and 2016. Where was Instagram by 2016? Okay.

0:50:12 Thomas: Just fact -checking in real time here. It does look like it launched in 2010. wow. I didn't know Facebook bought it in 2012. I would have guessed that was way later than that. That's so interesting. So, I don't know. Yeah, 2014, you know, I suppose that that's a number of years past its inception. I guess my memory was perhaps a little bit off. I thought it was maybe a little bit later that it took off, but maybe that's just Just because I didn't start Instagram until I think I had kids to post kid pictures of. So far more recent for me.

0:50:22 Lindsey: It was interesting. Yeah.

0:50:44 Lindsey: Well. And everything was 70 years ago, so. There's that, um, yeah, um, yeah. So this, the second, the second longitudinal study speaks to the um body image thing, or at least the image part of this, but it also speaks to some other things. So this was, um, it's by Orban and colleagues, published in 2019. This was a large-scale longitudinal study of UK adolescents aged 10 to 15 years old. And participants were measured eight times over eight years. So again, 2009 to 2016. And the number of participants in each analysis varied because in a longitudinal study like this, especially if you've got eight points at which you're collecting data, you're likely to get some years of missing data, right? But between 539 and 5,492 participants were included in the analyses they did, and the median sample size in their analyses was 1,699.

0:50:47 Thomas: Yeah.

0:51:40 Lindsey: So pretty good size samples. Interesting thing that they did here in the study was to test a range of analytical, analytical strategies and compare the results across them. So essentially they, you know, with the predictors that they were interested in, they ran thousands of models that varied in terms of their assumptions and the number of variables that they included and how many waves of data they included, and so on. And they looked at how many of those analyses yielded statistically significant results, right? So instead of just evaluating like one p -value or, you you know, whatever. They're looking at sort of the entire distribution of p -values, and this can provide a sense of how robust an effect is to the kind of analysis that's employed. So if you've got a strong, you know, large effect, it should show up consistently.

0:52:29 Lindsey: If you have a weak inconsistent effect, whether or not it shows up is going to be highly dependent on how you analyze your data. So I thought this was a really interesting approach to sort of testing these effects, right? Because they've got, yeah, I don't know, they've gotten, you, know, massive longitudinal, I just, yeah, I thought that was kind of interesting.

0:52:39 Thomas: Uh -huh. Yeah.

0:52:45 Lindsey: So, Orban and colleagues examined associations between social media use and various domains of life satisfaction. So satisfaction with friends, family, appearance, life in general, schoolwork, and school. And they also used a composite measure. So they took all of those sort of facets of life satisfaction, and they averaged them into an overall aggregate measure. So they looked at all these things as predicted by social media use.

They also did comparisons between participants as a function of social media and within participants across time as a functional social media. So in other words, they examine the question of whether adolescents who use social media have different life satisfaction compared to those who use it less. They also examine the question of whether a particular individual's use of social media predicts changes in their life satisfaction over time, right? They They also examined those effects separately by gender. They found, and this was for the between person effects specifically, in general, very few effects were significant here. Across all domains, only a couple were significant within each gender. So for boys slash men, effects for satisfaction with school and schoolwork only emerged. So men who used more social media were less satisfied with school and schoolwork than men who use less social media.

The girls and women in the sample, they found that they found small effects for life satisfaction and appearance. So girls and women who use more social media are slightly less satisfied with their lives and appearances than those who used less social media, right? Now for the within person effects. So these are the things about like trying to predict things over time based on amount of social media usage.

0:54:26 Lindsey: So So they examined these analyses in two ways. So first, they looked at whether earlier measures of social media predicted later reports of life satisfaction. And second, they look at whether early reports of life satisfaction predicted later social media use. And so this can speak to that issue of causality, right? Which way is the causal arrow most likely to be pointing in this relationship? First analysis, this was whether social media early predicts life satisfaction later. Later, among boys and men, there were very small decreases in satisfaction with life and with that mean satisfaction rating. So that was the average across all domains, right? All the other specific domains, they did not find significant effects, right. So those who used more social media showed slightly lower satisfaction over time in those particular two or on those particular two measures.

0:55:18 Lindsey: Girls and women, there were very small decreases in satisfaction across all domains except two, satisfaction with friends and satisfaction with appearance. Mm-hmm. In the second analysis, so this is the one where you're using life satisfaction to predict social media use later, for boys and men, they got no significant effects. For girls and women, they found small significant effects in all satisfaction domains except friends. So let me highlight one particular finding for the girls and women that's relevant to the previous slide that we talked about. So again, there was a small between-person correlation between satisfaction with appearance and social media use. So women and girls who use social media more were less satisfied with their appearance than those who used it less. This could be because those who are less satisfied with their appearance are using social media, or it could be that social media is causing less satisfaction with appearance.

0:56:10 Lindsey: But then when they did those lagged correlations across time, using social media to to predict later appearance satisfaction, and then conversely, using appearance satisfaction predicts later social media use, they found that using social media does not predict later satisfaction with appearance, but higher satisfaction with appearance does predict slightly less social media use later.

0:56:26 Thomas: Huh. That's so interesting. Wow.

0:56:35 Lindsey: Yeah. So all of these effects are small, and there are, you know, lots of limitations that that prevent us from making really strong causal claims, but these results are more consistent with satisfaction influencing social media use than the other way around.

0:56:48 Thomas: Yeah. Going the opposite way, essentially. If any. But again, you're saying small effects, so who knows? But at least from this study, it seems to indicate the inverse causal relationship than what was presented in the congressional testimony, huh?

0:56:50 Lindsey: Yeah, right, Mm-hmm, yeah, right. In terms of the other domains, for the women and girls specifically, the effects, again, they were small, but they were significant in both directions. So the authors suggested that this does provide some tentative evidence that social media and satisfaction have sort of reciprocal relationships with each other, but in their overall conclusions, they qualified the hell out of this. So they said, quote, the relations linking social media use and life satisfaction are more nuanced than previously assumed. They are inconsistent, possibly contingent on gender, and vary substantively depending on how the data are analyzed. Most effects are tiny, arguably trivial. Where best statistical practices are followed, they are not statistically significant in more than half the models.

0:57:46 Thomas: Yeah.

0:57:47 Lindsey: That understood, some effects are worthy of further exploration and replication. There might be small reciprocal within-person effects in females, with increases in life satisfaction predicting slightly lower social media use, and increases in social media use predicting tenuous decreases in life satisfaction, are some very qualified kind of things, right? And again, I know we're out of time, so we don't have time to talk about, like I found a bunch of longitudinal studies that sort of look at social media effects longitudinally across a bunch of other domains. So with depression and anxiety and with a bunch of other effects. And I think it's worth doing a second episode on what those effects look like, because they do seem to contradict earlier cross -sectional research that suggested that social media was a big cause of mental health problems.

0:58:07 Thomas: Yeah. Huh.

0:58:38 Thomas: Well, Don't know what to make of this. I mean, I guess the basic question of why in the world would Facebook's own internal stuff show that Instagram is harmful for teens, um, because that was my first question when you presented me with this. It just sounds like, as As you said a bit earlier, that this was some sort of user satisfaction survey that was never meant to measure that actual claim,

0:59:04 Lindsey: That's how it read to me. It didn't... The conclusions that they were drawing here were very focused on user perceptions of things. It did not seem to be the case that they were reading into this that Instagram was actually causing these problems.

0:59:18 Thomas: Which, again, even if, as we've talked about frequently, humans are imperfect at being able to report that causality accurately. However, for a company, it actually doesn't matter, you know, because from their perspective, if X percent of their customers think their product is harming them, then it really doesn't matter if they're wrong about that or not, if the customer is wrong about that or not.

0:59:29 Lindsey: Oh yeah, yeah, that's a problem. That's right, yeah.

0:59:48 Thomas: Hmm. So, so that might suggest that it is more, it could be anyway, more of a, that internal document, quote unquote, that, you you know, was leaked and all this kind of stuff, that it was more about being satisfaction, and in just the broadest generic sense of a product, and you know customers being happy with it than it is about some, you know broader claims of psychological effects of social media on teens and all that.

0:59:48 Lindsey: That Is exactly how it read to me. And again, I want to qualify this again, if there is more stuff that really does speak more directly to this that I will reverse. Because the one thing, the reason that I'm so so stuck on this, is that I'm very compelled with the independent research that's been done longitudinally on this. I think it's really valuable. But I could imagine that Facebook has way more direct and compelling access to data that would be way more direct and impelling in terms of some of these issues. And so if they do have internal research that I haven't seen, it have fewer sort of issues than independent stuff where they're relying more on self-reports about social media usage and things, right? Yeah, I just, I want to keep heavily qualifying this. Like, I could be wrong. I could be convinced that I'm wrong about this.

1:01:07 Thomas: Huh? That's think we we have plenty for a part two. We can also, if there are responses, if there are people who, again, yeah, if you have any further info, if you think we're missing something, let us know. Definitely curious to hear back. But it sounds like the conclusion from all this is that, you know, again this is not the only problem with social media by a long stretch. So many of the claims that the whistleblower made may be entirely correct. You know, things about about other countries, things about misinformation and how they kind of after the election, they relaxed those standards that they had had done going into the election. And then that could have contributed to January 6, because, you know, that that interim period, so many claims, this is not at all a Facebook is actually, oh, totally cool. You know, just want to make very clear. This is just about that specific claim on social media, and I guess, particularly particularly, Instagram's influence on teens and stuff like that. And it just doesn't seem like the claims made by the whistleblower are backed up by the evidence. This is really fascinating.

1:01:45 Lindsey: Nope, nope, nope. Yeah, yeah.

1:02:15 Thomas: Wow. I don't know what to make of that. I'm highly skeptical because it just seems like it makes so much sense. But I also want to be on the side of what the science says and And if science best science person in the biz, Lindsay Osterman, is saying that this is what it says, then that's that's definitely interesting,

1:02:33 Lindsey: Yeah. And, like, just, I think that the strong intuition is that social media use and these problems would co-occur, right, and I don't think that any of this necessarily suggests that they don't, right? I mean, actually, some of these relationships actually do look a lot weaker than I think we originally thought, but these things can co-occur, it's just a question of like what the causal model actually looks like, right?

1:02:44 Thomas: Mm hmm. Uh huh. Oh, yeah. There's no disputing the body image problems that you referenced. I mean, that's not to say this stuff doesn't exist. It's just the causality. Right. Really interesting. So much to digest there. I think we will likely do a part two. Do definitely want to hear from you, though, if you have any thoughts on this, any evidence, anything you think we're missing, because it's certainly a surprising conclusion, I think it's safe to say, right?

1:02:57 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I

1:03:23 Thomas: Thanks as always for listening, everybody. Thanks so much to Lindsay for the excellent breakdown and to patrons. Hey, oh, I'll get that November question thread up on Patreon. That's certainly the place where you could post questions about this and every episode throughout the month. So I will get that up right as we speak. So it should already be up. So go check that out patreon.com/seriouspod.

1:03:22 Lindsey: Think that's true, yeah. Oh, boy, can't

1:03:46 Thomas: So much. We'll see you next time.

1:03:46 Lindsey: Wait,

1:03:55 Clip: Thank you so much for listening to Serious Inquiries Only. If you like the show, the absolute best thing you can do is support us at patreon.com/seriouspod. The second best thing you can do, is please share it on social media or by word of mouth. Speaking of social media, follow me on Twitter at Serious Pod. If would like to be Facebook friends, send me a request at facebook.com Thomas podcast. If not up for that level of intimacy, that's fine. Maybe you want to join the discussion at facebook.com/groups/SIO members. Thank you again for listening. We'll see you next time.