Does the evidence actually say anything about social media bans helping? Because these bans aren't really based on anything other than vibes. The proponents are the same people who will say that social media has rotted the brains of kids and reduced their attention spans. Their evidence for that? Someone else said so. That someone else said so, because
1. Microsoft research saw that people spend less time on a website (less time to see an ad) in the modern day compared to a decade prior
2. knowledge workers now spend less time before they look away from a screen when composing an email
From this somehow we've concluded that kids have shorter attention spans today. And the obvious 'culprit' is social media.
Evidence is optional. It's all about vibes. It feels right to ban social media, so we're gonna do it. If the "researchers" get it wrong it doesn't matter, because there will be no consequences for them.
Also how else do you get evidence on them working if nobody else has done a ban. Why does you have to wait for someone else to do it before you do it for your own country.
The Australian 'social media' ban is only blocking specific platforms, so not really a social media ban. Lots of 'but what about' and 'kids will just' articles in the media, which didn't really address that forcing kids to move from a known toxic environment to a hopefully less toxic environment is at least a step in the right direction, even if not a silver bullet. There are certainly good reasons for kids to be on social media, but none of those reasons are valid when talking about Twitter. Youtube seems the hardest one to deal with, combining a great information resource with uncontrolled toxic comments and borderline illegal and harmful content.
> The best large-scale work I’ve seen finds the average association between overall screen/social-media use and teen well-being is tiny
Can you share the source? The last time I looked the association was both clear and pretty strong, e.g. "There was a linear dose–response association of TSSM and risk of depression. The risk of depression increased by 13% (OR = 1.13, 95%CI: 1.09 to 1.17, p < 0.001) for each hour increase in social media use in adolescents." DOI:10.3390/ijerph19095164
> “Social media” lumps together very different things
HN does this, but the research is usually pretty clear in spelling out they mean FB, Insta, TikTok and so on.
> If you want a lever that actually changes incentives, go after business model & design
I too would like changes in that direction (mostly because adults are also affected negatively by social media), but keep in mind even a non-optimized, strictly chronological feed produces these negative effects, see keyword (and associated studies for) "upward social comparison", i.e. people are always more inclined to post about things that went well or are fun, and thus even a pure chronologically sorted feed produces a warped perception of normal social reality.
Yep — what I had in mind was Orben & Przybylski, Nature Human Behaviour (2019). They use a specification curve analysis across three large datasets (total n ≈ 355k) and find the association between digital technology use and adolescent well-being is negative but very small (explains ≤ 0.4% of the variance). DOI: 10.1038/s41562-018-0506-1.
I think your cited meta-analysis (Liu et al., IJERPH 2022; DOI: 10.3390/ijerph19095164) is useful too — but it’s answering a narrower question (depression specifically, “time spent on social media” specifically) and it’s based on 5 studies with high heterogeneity, mostly observational/self-report. The paper itself basically says “interpret with caution; motivation/content/engagement matter.” So I don’t read these as contradictory so much as “big-average effect looks small, but there may be real effects for specific outcomes / subgroups / behaviors.”
Also worth noting newer longitudinal work is starting to tease directionality: e.g. Nagata et al., JAMA Network Open (2025) (ABCD cohort) finds higher social media use predicts later depressive symptoms more than the reverse. That to me is the strongest argument that “time” isn’t purely a proxy for pre-existing depression.
On “social media lumps together”: agreed research often names Facebook / Instagram / TikTok etc — but even within one platform, the mechanism differs a ton (DMs / group chat / creating vs passive feed consumption + ads + notifications). That’s why I’m more bullish on regulating business model + engagement features than banning the category.
And on “upward social comparison”: totally agree it’s not “solved” by chronological feeds. People curate; viewers compare. There’s direct work on the “everyone else is happier” perception effect on Facebook (Chou & Edge 2012, DOI: 10.1089/cyber.2011.0324) and adolescent social-comparison/feedback-seeking being linked with depressive symptoms (Nesi & Prinstein 2015). My claim is just that algorithmic ranking + push/autoplay/infinite scroll likely makes that dynamic more frequent/intense, so design changes still buy meaningful leverage even if they don’t make the risk zero.
Thanks for the reply, will look into the links. And yes, full agreement, algorithmic ranking is a whole different dynamic, and has to be both researched and regulated differently than a dumb feed. Even the latter probably has levers moderating human reception, i.e. if we evolved in communities of less than 150 individuals, being able to routinely follow the curated lives of e.g. 500 people probobly has other effects than a feed of 50 actual RL friends.
> 2) “Social media” lumps together very different things: - messaging friends, hobby groups, learning communities, identity-affirming support - infinite-scroll algorithmic feeds + targeted ads + push notifications + autoplay People in this thread are mostly describing the second category (“attention media”). If that’s the problem, regulate that layer.
I think you're not focussing on the "media" half of social media to differentiate some of that stuff.
Once again I am hoping for a ban on _smart_phones. Not laptops. Not tablets (although those could get tricky I admit). Not dumb phones. Details will need to be worked out (like smart watches or future VR devices). Maybe a combination of:
- SIM
- large enough screen or video playback capability
- camera
Easier to democratise enforcement (report and fine) and you don’t need to rely on the very platforms you are trying to restrict.
I think that's misguided. It's tricky to define a smart phone in a useful fashion as kids could get hold of mini devices that have wifi and bluetooth, but no other phone connections and surely that would be as bad as the smart phones.
I don't really see the issue with smart phones themselves - the problem is the attention whoring platforms that are warping people's minds and especially with young people, pushing unrealistic beauty/body standards.
The mob responds with a 1-sentence emotional meme. Classic moral panic 101.
It's impossible to fight feelings with logic unfortunately, which is why many western countries are going to fall into this trap and ultimately kill the idea of digital privacy and the open web forever.
This particular moral panic is reaching peak trendiness, and the baptists and the bootleggers are out in full force. Both parties are begging for hamfisted over-reaction from government (the bootleggers and politicians for more nefarious reasons of course).
> The mob responds with a 1-sentence emotional meme. Classic moral panic 101.
it was one person.
im writing this comment 1 hour after yours, and still only a single person has responded and you’ve called one person, a mob. you’ve declared one person commenting to be a “moral panic.”
I shall echo the comment of pibaker with one caveat.
>The exact same sentiment is widely observed across this entire website.
You do see this sentiment across this website, but this doesn't mean that it is a view held by the majority of people here, the people motivated to act can create the illusion that their opinions are more widely held than they are.
A few days ago I posted a comment which, in it's entirety reads
>Perhaps things would work out better if people didn't say mean things regardless of who it's about.
>You can still criticise without being mean.
The comment sits at -4 today, and has one antagonistic response. I don't really think most people disagree with this sentiment.
The antagonistic response came from the same one person as the comment in this thread.
