The main concerns expressed in Robyn's note, as I read them, seem to be 1) generative AI has polluted the web with text that was not written by humans, and so it is no longer feasible to produce reliable word frequency data that reflects how humans use natural language; and 2) simultaneously, sources of natural language text that were previously accessible to researchers are now less accessible because the owners of that content don't want it used by others to create AI models without their permission. A third concern seems to be that support for and practice of any other NLP approaches is vanishing.
Making resources like wordfreq more visible won't exacerbate any of these concerns.
ActBlue and WinRed are now used by Democrats and Republicans respectively for fundraising at just about every level, even pretty local races, and they're clearly selling access to their lists.
I donated a small amount to a Democratic candidate for a legislature race in my state (via ActBlue) and spent the next year unsubscribing from mailing lists that sending me hyperbolic nonsense about national races.
I donated a small amount to a Republican presidential primary candidate (via WinRed) and got signed up for campaign spam from Republicans running tight races all over the country, as well as like fifteen subscriptions to different mailing lists run by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Epoch_Times.
ActBlue doesn't sell data, but they do pass your email and phone number to the people you are donating to - they are the ones who are likely selling it.
Word salad is "confused or unintelligible mixture of seemingly random words and phrases." Which part of the article seemed confusing/unintelligible/random to you?
> Providing stronger evidence of the directionality of this effect, Study 3 (N = 171) showed that in college students CRP predicted increased social media use in the subsequent week even after controlling for current week’s use.
The basic methodology for this part is:
* Blood sample (measured for CRP)
* 1 week later: survey on social media use (participants using Screen Time app to objectively measure their activity)
* 1 week after that: survey on social media use again
Then they ran some regression analyses.
I didn't see anything here that rules out the alternative possible explanation: college students who use social media more are more stressed out as a result of their social media use.
Most people won't be able to access the paper via that link.
I was able to get to it by going to Google Scholar and searching "Brain, Behavior and Immunity" david lee. The first result was a sciencedirect link that did allow me to read the whole thing.
> I find press releases like this both not useful and overall bad for the scientific community.
University media offices seem to think it's their job to misinterpret and exaggerate scientific findings in whatever way will draw the most clicks to their press release.
I've only had a chance to skim, but there's all kinds of weirdness here. In "Study 3" they measure 171 college students' social media use on Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, ignoring TikTok, which those subjects probably use more than all the others combined.
Is it possible that the process of getting access to trustworthy and complete datasets is more streamlined with these American companies than it is for TikTok? It's hard to imagine the researchers ignored TikTok purely as an oversight, although it's certainly possible.
Two of the researchers datasets were from 2012-2016 and 2018-2019, I can't find the full text of the third study with 171 participants. Likely pre-tiktok.
What's real interesting is their 2021 paper, showing the effect is mediated by high-self esteem (as measured by the 7 Item Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale).
Researcher goes along with this insane press release that does not mention self-esteem mediating it, why? Because they have an agenda.
If you want to figure it out, follow the money. Who is funding their research? I would not be terribly surprised to find a pharma pipeline with a drug that reduces c-reactive protein. Social media addiction isn't in the DSM-5 yet, but once it is you know there's a market for a drug to address it.
> Our data came from a larger project investigating college students’ lifestyle and well-being. In this project, one hundred and seventy-one college students (102 females; Mage = 19.24, SDage = 2.68) participated for partial course credit between September 2021 and May 2022. For our purpose, we focus on the longitudinal component of this study, which consisted of two parts: a baseline lab session (Phase 1, N = 171) and two follow-up weekly surveys (Phase 2, N = 160; Phase 3, N = 160).
I don't think you have to search for some nefarious pharma connection - to me the simpler explanation is that "social media is bad" is an opinion that is very much in the zeitgeist right now, so any "scientific" findings that supports this belief will generate lots of press attention, which is beneficial to the researchers careers and institutions.
They had students use screen tracking software to log what apps they were using. The researchers ignored TikTok because it wasn't included in some pre-existing methodology they were following.
Ignoring TikTok for any reason in 2021-2022 is a huge mistake. Once I saw that, I decided I'm not interested in their findings.
That's fair. It sounds like they wanted to iterate on something that's been established on a preliminary basis, which makes the choice to stay within the parameters of of the original study likely the correct one. We have to be choosy about which variables we tweak when building upon previous works, otherwise people will correctly point out ambiguities if not outright flaws in reasoning when the authors analyze current results in the context of the previous study (the whole point of iterating).
This approach does have it's drawbacks though, such as rapidly fading into irrelevance and obscurity given the ever-changing landscape of the study environment. It is of course your prerogative to disregard research as you see fit, but hopefully we can agree that this isn't bad science (at least not on that basis), even if you find the results uninteresting.
I slightly misinterpreted the following from the article:
> We decided to assess social media use across four platforms for three reasons. First, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook were the most popular social media platforms among college students at the time of our study design (Perrin and Anderson, 2019).
This is telling us that they designed the study at a time when a 2019 report on social media usage was the most up-to-date available. I misread initially, thinking that (Perrin and Anderson, 2019) was the study design they followed, but it is actually this:
Perrin, A., & Anderson, M. (2019). Share of US adults using social media, including Facebook, is mostly unchanged since 2018. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/04/10/share-of-u-....
I get that they probably didn't feel like revising their design in the fall of 2021, but this would have been the right thing to do, given trends in social media use in young people at the time. It is odd that this 2023 paper doesn't even mention TikTok. Its exclusion, justified or not, is a limitation worth noting.
I'm boycotting reddit this week, and I will never use their app, but I just don't know where else to go for communities related to niche non-tech interests, and state & local stuff. I guess Facebook groups, but FB is practically unusable these days.
Just a few weeks ago I went through the exercise of closing my FB account because I was getting all of my local NYC discussion from subreddits, instead. Poor timing I guess.
If reddit bungles this whole thing, the loss of /r/asknyc will be truly tragic. Such a great way to crowdsource local recommendations without the extra veneer of tourist feedback on top.
I'm in a much smaller city than NYC and /r/<mycity> is a very reliable place to find out what is going on around town, chat about the best place to go for <cuisine>, etc.
What's wrong with FB groups? It's almost as good at surfacing good stuff as Reddit for my niche interests and it has a lot of buy/sell/trade activity that never makes it to eBay or Reddit.
That might be a good goal. It doesn't seem to be the goal of this project.