Fall 2021 has been filled with a steady stream of media coverage arguing that Meta’s Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram social media platforms pose a threat to users’ mental health and well-being, radicalize and polarize users, and spread misinformation.
According to Meta’s PR team and a handful of contrarian academics and journalists, there is evidence that social media does not cause harm and the overall picture is unclear. They cite apparently conflicting studies, imperfect access to data and the difficulty of establishing causality to support this position.
Some of these researchers have surveyed social media users and found that social media use appears to have, at most, minor negative consequences on individuals. These results seem inconsistent with years of journalistic reporting, Meta’s leaked internal data, common sense intuition and people’s lived experience.
As a researcher who studies collective behavior, I see no conflict between the research, leaks and people’s intuition. Social media can have catastrophic effects, even if the average user only experiences minimal consequences.
To see how this works, consider a world in which Instagram has a rich-get-richer and poor-get-poorer effect on the well-being of users. A majority, those already doing well to begin with, find Instagram provides social affirmation and helps them stay connected to friends. A minority, those who are struggling with depression and loneliness, see these posts and wind up feeling worse.
If you average them together in a study, you may not see a major change over time.
Yet if we zoom in on the most-at-risk people, many of them may have moved from occasionally sad to mildly depressed or from mildly depressed to dangerously so.
These nuances are buried in the context of population averages.
With most of the world now using some form of social media, I believe it’s important to listen to the voices of concerned parents and struggling teenagers when they point to Instagram as a source of distress. Similarly, it’s important to acknowledge that the COVID-19 pandemic has been prolonged because misinformation on social media has made some people afraid to take a safe and effective vaccine. These lived experiences are important pieces of evidence about the harm caused by social media.
Social scientists are not well-positioned to run randomized controlled trials to definitively establish causality, particularly for social media platform design choices such as altering how content is filtered and displayed.
But Meta is. The company has petabytes of data on human behavior, many social scientists on its payroll and the ability to run randomized control trials in parallel with millions of users. They run such experiments all the time to understand how best to capture users’ attention.
Meta could come forward with irrefutable and transparent evidence that their products are harmless, if it exists. Has the company chosen not to run such experiments, or has it run them and decided not to share the results?
Either way, Meta’s decision to instead release and emphasize data about average effects is telling.
Joseph Bak-Coleman is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for an Informed Public at the University of Washington. Distributed by The Associated Press.
