News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on /story/28752512. Parent comment

Re: by jimsimmons on Monday October 04, 2021 @06:31PM (#28753043)
If you keep up with current affairs the past few weeks have shown that FB’s alleged problems are supported by data which is disregarded by it’s leadership
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re: by TheOtherHobbes on Monday October 04, 2021 @07:22PM (#28753651)
For example:

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.0271...

https://bmcresnotes.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s1310...

https://hbr.org/2017/04/a-new-more-rigorous-study-confirms-t...

Facebook's own research: https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/29/22701445/facebook-instagr...

It's nice - and of course timely - that there are some heartwarming feel good stories in this thread.

But the plural of anecdote is not science. And the science is pretty damning.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re: by Karrot_Kream on Monday October 04, 2021 @08:45PM (#28754231)
Papers 1 and 3 are about correlating _duration_ of FB usage with happiness. Look at the papers referenced here [1] for the same effect as applied to TV. These papers, sans the new controversy over the mental health of young women on Instagram, _don't_ actually point to any stronger of a conclusion than "consuming large amounts of media is correlated with bad mental health".

I'm not saying that FB and this huge corporate capture of the internet is _good_, but making arguments like this doesn't actually make coherent sense.

[1]: https://buddingpsychologists.org/binge-watching-mental-healt... (I didn't read the article, but I did skim the referenced papers)

[ Parent | on HN ]