> Even before investigations revealed that the company’s products were destroying teens’ mental health
This is tangential, but are we all just credulously swallowing this claim now? What's next, casual references to the obviously-stolen 2020 election? The Facebook study claimed nothing close to "destroying teens' mental health"; it didn't even show net harm! The topline claims were something like 30% of teens self-reporting that use made them feel worse... With 30% reporting no change and 30% reporting it made them feel better. That's ignoring the multiple other problems with the interpretations of the study that are floating around:
1) intentionally unrepresentative sample and minuscule sample size
2) self-reporting, which decades of higher-quality research has shown is not correlated with harm when it comes to the relationship between teens and media use (high-quality studies have so far shown a minimal relationship between phone/social media use and any objective measure of teen mental health)
3) other larger studies are even more positive than Facebook's internal study, showing almost 3x as many teens claiming an improvement in mental health from social media than a decline[1]
I know we're in a post-truth world, but it's a really jarring reminder how universally the rot has spread that this is an Ars Technica article posted on HN, both entities that I once considered to at least display a _pretense_ of intellectual honesty.
The weirdest part about all of this is that I hold and have always held a very low opinion of Facebook, and think their amoral reputation is fully deserved. It's just a more strongly-held belief that it's insane to barrel full-speed towards destroying any sense that we all live in the same reality. It's no more defensible when Ars+HN does it than when a QAnon Facebook group does.
You're so right about this. I'm surprised so many HN users just blindly accept any critical claim about facebook.
The article on Ars is pure click bait. Nowhere in the article 6yo kids are mentioned. The article doesn't even contain any news material, it just regurgitates things published a week ago.
Reliance on self reported studies, that doesn't even paint Facebook bad by itself. If you want to prove that Facebook is bad for mental health, show me at least an observational study that so that I can compare the baseline prevalence of mental health disorders with the mental health of FB users. I doubt it would be different for any other social network user. The key word here is comparison. Raw numbers rarely mean anything by themselves.
From the article... "Facebook was considering new products targeted at children as young as six years old, according to a new document handed over to Congress by whistleblower Frances Haugen."
You hit the nail on the head. Any other study which is nothing but a few dozen people surveyed about how an intervention X made them feel, with the results split would barely register on HN. Yet if X = Instagram use it’s suddenly this huge news.
I also wish people on HN would be more thoughtful. If they don't believe six year olds should be marketed to, shouldn't they be similarly outraged about candy companies (where sugar is known to be both addictive and incredibly harmful), ads for toys and other products during Saturday morning cartoons, etc? The simple answer is, they aren't outraged about those things because they're not being fed that message through their media bubble. Most people here probably didn't even read the article about the documents, but they commented or upvoted. That is, like you said, no better than when people are doing the same on crazy conspiracy theories.
Yes, and these pitfalls are so obvious and straightforward that I've been careening for the last decade towards the conclusion that most people who do this simply aren't capable of understanding the concept. It's beyond their ability to understand that their opinions about the world should be anything but an uncritical regurgitation of every single _mood_ that their media bubble pushes on them (despite being in a state of permanent horror at how the "other side" uncritically regurgitates everything _their_ media bubble pushes on them).
I'm sure this is a process that every person with a brain has gone through in every period of history, but being in the early stages of the Internet's massive transformation of the way society communicates with itself seemingly makes it a lot more volatile.
We're not in a post-truth world; people have always made stuff up. We've just got the cultural values of the scientists, applied to our good ol' traditional behaviour, so people are a little more credulous at the moment than they usually are.
> We're not in a post-truth world; people have always made stuff up.
A post-truth world doesn't mean that lies now exist, but I suspect you know that. I'm referring to things like the dramatic declines in trust in journalism[1], a crucial part of how we build our aforementioned shared reality. There are cultural and technological explanations for this, but no small part of the blame falls on journalism itself (though arguably, this is just the inevitable consequence of the structural economic challenges that they've faced).
The explosion of communication and information access engendered by the Internet is a double-edged sword. Decent, intelligent people are able to sift through the firehose of lower-quality info to build a clearer view of the world than ever before, without being bottlenecked by the pitfalls faced by the institutions that used to have a monopoly on producing and transmitting knowledge.
But it seems that the vast, vast majority of people benefited from the paternalism of our scientific and journalistic institutions, and are helpless before the one-two punch of a) a firehose of low-quality info and b) the spreading rot in the scientific and especially journalistic establishment.
True. I was comparing now to the days before newspapers and investigative journalism. Perhaps “post-truth” does make sense as a term, if there was also “pre-truth”, and we have left the golden age of truth.
No, the problem is scientist getting paid by conglomerates. The Institute of Tabaco Studies is the best examples or the bogus pain experts Perdue had on their payroll. People trusted scientist so big cooperation bought the scientists.
This is tangential, but are we all just credulously swallowing this claim now? What's next, casual references to the obviously-stolen 2020 election? The Facebook study claimed nothing close to "destroying teens' mental health"; it didn't even show net harm! The topline claims were something like 30% of teens self-reporting that use made them feel worse... With 30% reporting no change and 30% reporting it made them feel better. That's ignoring the multiple other problems with the interpretations of the study that are floating around:
1) intentionally unrepresentative sample and minuscule sample size
2) self-reporting, which decades of higher-quality research has shown is not correlated with harm when it comes to the relationship between teens and media use (high-quality studies have so far shown a minimal relationship between phone/social media use and any objective measure of teen mental health)
3) other larger studies are even more positive than Facebook's internal study, showing almost 3x as many teens claiming an improvement in mental health from social media than a decline[1]
I know we're in a post-truth world, but it's a really jarring reminder how universally the rot has spread that this is an Ars Technica article posted on HN, both entities that I once considered to at least display a _pretense_ of intellectual honesty.
The weirdest part about all of this is that I hold and have always held a very low opinion of Facebook, and think their amoral reputation is fully deserved. It's just a more strongly-held belief that it's insane to barrel full-speed towards destroying any sense that we all live in the same reality. It's no more defensible when Ars+HN does it than when a QAnon Facebook group does.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2021/10/06/1043138622/facebook-instagram...