I feel like a science researcher’s dream might be to spend years on a massively new and far-reaching study, and to release it at exactly the right time to hit a news cycle.
Let’s start with the news cycle. Last week, a bipartisan coalition of 50 attorneys general announced that Meta had agreed – subject to court approval – to pay up to US$17.1bil (RM68.8bil) and accept sweeping new child-safety restrictions on Facebook and Instagram.
A traffic ticket?
Meta reported US$200.97bil (RM809.02bil) in revenue last year alone, so that’s about 8.5% of one year’s revenue.
I’ve seen this described as the equivalent of a traffic ticket for Meta, although that’s not actually a good metaphor.
Imagine you got a US$100 (RM402) ticket for not coming to a complete stop before a right turn on red; it’s annoying but I’m going to bet you probably make more than US$1,176.47/RM4,736 (same percentage), so the math would be off.
Still, 8.5% might be enough to notice, but not exactly crippling.
‘Wait, not everyone?’
So, we have to look to the rest of the deal that Meta signed, which, as Mike Isaac, who reports on big technology companies for the New York Times, summarised, includes:
- stronger age verification,
- ways to prevent “unwanted contact from strangers,” and
- a way for teens (wait, not everyone?) to stop autoplay on videos and to hide “like” counts.
Finally – and actually this is first in my book, but I ordered it this way for a reason – a default limit for under-18s on Meta services like Instagram (and Facebook, although I’m not sure how many under-18s actually use Facebook) of just two hours total per day, along with no usage at all between midnight and 6 am, unless a parent overrides the restrictions.
183,000 adults
Now, maybe you look at something like that and think:
- Wait, two hours a day on social media works out to 14 hours a week, and 728 total hours a year.
- And this is how much Meta is agreeing to limit as the result of a major court settlement?
And yet, just a few days before the major settlement, we got news of a massive new study using 11 years of data from 183,000 adults, attempting to correlate the amount of time spent on social media each day with negative mental health outcomes.
Writing in the journal npj Mental Health Research, researchers from the University of Cincinnati and Northwestern University say they used more than a decade’s worth of data from the Media Behaviors and Influence Study, and found that intense use of social media was one of the most important predictors of self-reported depression.
“When it comes to depression and social media, the argument is salient across scientific test after test of those 11 years,” corresponding author and UC Professor Hans Breiter said. “It’s a damning picture. Social media is harmful for individuals across the lifespan. We should not subject ourselves to a product using addiction science to optimise our viewing time.“
Pretty good timing
See what I mean? The study was published on Aug 22; the Meta settlement was announced on Aug 26.
Sometimes you get lucky.
As an official summary put it: “Researchers observed a correlation with self-reported depression among respondents who spent at least 150 minutes on social media per day. They observed the same result in each of the 11 years studied.”
Researchers observed a correlation with self-reported depression among respondents who spent at least 150 minutes on social media per day. They observed the same result in each of the 11 years studied.
‘Harmful to children and teens’
You will notice that Meta’s new two-hour limit works out to 120 minutes a day – not the 150-minute threshold highlighted in the study, but awfully close for comfort.
And there’s a big connection here. In describing the case against Meta, the states said they had sued the company for “designing and implementing features that it knew to be harmful to children and teens in order to maximise their time on its social media platforms.”
So, maximising the amount of time people spend using these products was at the heart of the states’ case against the company.
Perhaps, like a cannibal using a knife and fork (an aphorism made famous by Polish poet Stanisław Jerzy Lec), we might be able to point to this as a bit of progress.
And yes; some very good timing. – Inc./Tribune News Service
