[bryant]

> The study tracked pupils’ self-reported social media habits, gaming frequency and emotional difficulties over three school years

This study is dead in the water. Teens have zero near-term incentives to be honest about any of these events.

For a study with this scope to be effective, parents will have to opt in using existing tracking/monitoring tooling for their child's habits. And even then, you might only be able to establish correlations with events serious enough to warrant mental health medical visits.

[Aurornis]

I think this is just another case of HN being hyper-critical of studies that don't fit the narrative. Contrast this with, for example, some of the extremely flimsy studies linking psychedelics to mental health improvement that have no control groups and n<30 subjects that are seemingly accepted without question.

Self-reporting is common in studies like this. Everyone knows it's not perfect.

Parental reporting is also heavily flawed. Parents have drastically different ideas about how their own kids are feeling and different children are more or less secretive with their parents. Parental self-reporting would likely be less accurate, not more.

[aeonfox]

The other flaw of the study is that it doesn't compare populations with no social media, to the ones with.^ Just because you're not on social media, doesn't mean you're not affected, specifically where bullying is involved. You might switch off social media because of this, but have worse mental health outcomes.

^ No-one can do this kind of comparison anymore because no such population really exists, save for the Amish and extant hunter-gatherers who would have plenty of other confounders contributing their mental health measures. However the upward trend in suicide since the late 2000s pretty well correlates with smartphone usage. As does the drop in fertility rates (which are now showing to not necessarily correlate with the oft-cited suspects like wealth, female educational attainment, etc.)

[fatherwavelet]

None of this should even be published. Comparing junk science to other junk science doesn't make one more true.