Researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute, who said their study was the largest of its kind, said they found no evidence to support “popular ideas that certain groups are more at risk” from the technology.
However, Andrew Przybylski, professor at the institute—part of the University of Oxford—said that the data necessary to establish a causal connection was “absent” without more cooperation from tech companies. If apps do harm mental health, only the companies that build them have the user data that could prove it, he said.
The scope of this study is way too broad. People use the internet for countless different things, and in many ways using the internet is a daily requirement. They need to focus on specific buckets like news, social media, gaming, etc, of which there are mountains of evidence to show they can cause mental health issues
On the other hand, I have seen strong anecdotal evidence suggestive of a link between poor mental health and the habit of regularly posting angry obscentiy-filled rants to social media.
Christ who funds them Google? What a farce.
There should be some institution or mechanism to assess the source of funding and possible conflict of interests in every study. We know that big corps regularly fund studies in order to downplay harms they perpetrate, scuttle regulatory proposals, mislead and create confusion about their activities.
The entire scientific community isn’t what people think. There is so much corruption or bias, it’s absurd. But I agree, every peer reviewed paper needs to have its top 3 sources of funding right there is the title. And we need to keyword them so every article Google or Microsoft have ever funded are right there in plain sight. And not some forgotten footnote.
Leave it to capitalism to mix everything with money and subsequently greed 👍
But then governments do this on the daily too. My first year bio prof left her job testing water samples for the government because she found things. Bad things. And they didn’t bring them findings to light, they suppressed them and told her to forget about it (applaud her for having the backbone to leave!).
Thanks for coming to my ted talk.
Maybe I’m a little pollyannaish, but I tend to think that the generations growing up with this stuff will grow around it and configure their social expectations and will settle into rhythms that work as well for them as older generations’ environments did for them. It will look weird to olds, but I always wonder if we’re looking back at the “good ol’ days,” and projecting our own reactions to the changes onto the generations that will take them in stride and make sarcastic wanking gestures at us when we complain.
Pamphlets/Newpapers/Films/Radio/TV/Video Games/Internet/Social Media will all rot your brain and subject you to misinformation and leave you depressed at how you must interact with the world, depending on when you were born and when you are speaking. Not to say there are not unique challenges to each in turn, or that some periods don’t end up worse than others, but I just don’t think our kids are going to treat the world and each other THAT much worse than all their ancestors have, and if they do I’m not sure it is uniquely social media’s fault. There are many things worth knowing about the social impact of new tech, and perspectives that the experienced can offer, especially in transitional eras while it’s new. I just don’t think think doomer handwringing or trying to put genies back into bottles is a good use of anyone’s collective time.
i wonder how they reached this conclusion.
There are many many studies proving internet and social media addiction can cause depression, and internet addiction is extremely widespread especially in teenagers. Also declining mental health and depression are so widespread in young people… this study seems strange.
The reason is because of the bias in the studies themselves.
For example, there’s more studies showing that internet addiction is bad for teenagers because more studies have been run on teenagers.
Addiction of any kind of harmful to all age groups. The ways in which it impacts people depends on their life circumstances. For example, older people are more likely to lose a job or a marriage due to addiction than a teenager is, that’s not because of the nature of their addiction.
The simplest explanation is that some teenagers are depressed or otherwise struggling and turn to social media and internet because that’s what they have to help them cope. It’s a natural correlation, this study is saying that we don’t have the evidence to imply causation.
It’s easy for some people, especially those unfamiliar with online activities and particularly those who don’t value online activity, to see the correlation and blame. This is really helpful as it means they can avoid addressing the cause of the initial depression.
Maybe it’s the opposite - mental health and depression cause Internet!
/S
It’s hard to measure happiness, but maybe they should study mental health and happiness of people who don’t use social media. Then compare the groups.
It’s also probably difficult to determine impact of social media in persons who never experienced life without social media. I would liken it to the this is fine, dog on fire meme.
The study is about the internet as a whole, not social media.
Johnathan Haidt has laid out all of his teams data and research on the subject. It is very compelling and conclusive.
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A study of more than 2 million people’s Internet use found no “smoking gun” for widespread harm to mental health from online activities such as browsing social media and gaming, despite widely claimed concerns that mobile apps can cause depression and anxiety.
Researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute, who said their study was the largest of its kind, said they found no evidence to support “popular ideas that certain groups are more at risk” from the technology.
Because the “stakes are so high” if online activity really did lead to mental health problems, any regulation aimed at addressing it should be based on much more “conclusive” evidence, he added.
Two years ago, Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen revealed internal research by Instagram on teenage girls’ use of the photo app that she said showed negative correlations in areas such as body image and self esteem, though its parent company, now called Meta, said the documents had been mischaracterized.
However, Przybylski said that while much of the existing research into the relationship between technology and mental health or wellbeing “attracts attention and clicks… the standards of evidence are quite poor.” The vast majority of studies published in this area focused on English-speaking countries, he said, while more than 90 percent of young people live outside North America and Europe.
Przybylski has for several years positioned himself as a buttress against outbreaks of moral panic over the social harms of technology, by challenging the data on which alarmist claims have been based.
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