there was this absolutely devastating graphic about rising suicide rates of teen girls which coincided with mobiles and especially instagram. Sorry can't find it right now.

The cdc [1] has some figures that show a remarkably clear trend upward after ~2007. But IIRC it's pretty even across gender.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db352-h.pdf

thanks for picking up my slack. Another CDC study/poll is shows even worse data than I imagined[1]: e.g. ~8% of high schoolers try to kill themselves every year (I know, sounds unbelievable. Please, everyone, check yourself and correct me if possible). The numbers for girls are higher than for boys but the rises over the years (and the influence through instagram) not necessarily, see the diagrams.

[1]https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/su/su6901a6.htm?s_cid=su...

There's rising competitiveness for everything else, not just body issues.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/12/the-sil...

This was interesting:

> students who reported having sex with persons of the same sex or with both sexes (30.3%); and students who identified as lesbian, gay, or bisexual (23.4%)

Assuming that most people who have sex with others of the same sex do so because they are gay (rather than e.g. because they are experimenting), this indicates that people who are in denial about being gay are more prone to suicide.

Facebook might be asking girls where their body image issues came from, but boys/men are not much different.

It's reasonable that if one gender is developing self esteem issue from a social network, then the other gender _probably_ is too.

I wonder, though, if body image issues tend to manifest differently in boys and girls. I suspect that we're somewhat better at spotting girls' issues than we are at boys'.

No one cares about the boy issues and while maturing they find out about it very quick.

So, around the same time as the Great Recession?

If we're going to correlate, we can do it with with obesity as well.

In 2018 "obesity prevalence was [...] 21.2% among 12- to 19-year-olds." [0] according to the CDC. That's one out of 5 being obese, not overweight. And it has more than tripled since the 70's [1].

And then we start blaming the "evil screens" for people not finding themselves attractive.

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/childhood.html

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/obesity_child_15_16/obe...

Correlation isn't causation, society is shifting massively, regardless of Facebook and Instagram.

Good point. Let's do an experiment and shut down Facebook altogether, and see if things improve.

Move fast and break Zuckerberg!

you don't think people can identify something that hurts them?

I'm not on any side in this particular argument, but there are thousands of things we do/eat/experience every day which hurt us and we have no idea.

this clearly meets the threshold, though. i don't know a single person who has used social media that considers it not-harmful overall, mostly it's a justified use of "i need it for x so i have to put up with the downsides"

it just seems really silly to me to walk into this thread about how Facebook internally believes they're doing harm, and reply to a statement about how the harmed demographic feels they're being harmed, in the context of well-documented ways that harm occurs and what kind of effects it has, with a statement doubting the harm actually exists and questioning the self-reported experience of harm

The long term, creeping effects of medium (not very heavy) air pollution are incredible. They sneak up on you so slowly, few rational people can understand when it begins to affect your health in measurable ways.

People can identify things hurting them, but not always correctly. But people also can blame personal failings on external sources easily as well.

It’s like asking why studies using self-reported survey numbers on penis sizes cannot be treated as the ultimate truth, despite adults surely being able to use a measurement tape or a ruler. There is a reason for why the average numbers on all those studies using self-reported numbers are always at least one standard deviation larger than the average numbers obtained from a study that wasn’t just a self-reported survey.