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iak8god | 2 years ago

> I find press releases like this both not useful and overall bad for the scientific community.

University media offices seem to think it's their job to misinterpret and exaggerate scientific findings in whatever way will draw the most clicks to their press release.

I've only had a chance to skim, but there's all kinds of weirdness here. In "Study 3" they measure 171 college students' social media use on Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, ignoring TikTok, which those subjects probably use more than all the others combined.

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InSteady|2 years ago

Is it possible that the process of getting access to trustworthy and complete datasets is more streamlined with these American companies than it is for TikTok? It's hard to imagine the researchers ignored TikTok purely as an oversight, although it's certainly possible.

soudiere|2 years ago

Two of the researchers datasets were from 2012-2016 and 2018-2019, I can't find the full text of the third study with 171 participants. Likely pre-tiktok.

What's real interesting is their 2021 paper, showing the effect is mediated by high-self esteem (as measured by the 7 Item Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale).

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8474231/

Researcher goes along with this insane press release that does not mention self-esteem mediating it, why? Because they have an agenda.

If you want to figure it out, follow the money. Who is funding their research? I would not be terribly surprised to find a pharma pipeline with a drug that reduces c-reactive protein. Social media addiction isn't in the DSM-5 yet, but once it is you know there's a market for a drug to address it.

iak8god|2 years ago

They had students use screen tracking software to log what apps they were using. The researchers ignored TikTok because it wasn't included in some pre-existing methodology they were following.

Ignoring TikTok for any reason in 2021-2022 is a huge mistake. Once I saw that, I decided I'm not interested in their findings.