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Comment by InSteady | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

"Study 3" was September 2021 - May 2022:

> Our data came from a larger project investigating college students’ lifestyle and well-being. In this project, one hundred and seventy-one college students (102 females; Mage = 19.24, SDage = 2.68) participated for partial course credit between September 2021 and May 2022. For our purpose, we focus on the longitudinal component of this study, which consisted of two parts: a baseline lab session (Phase 1, N = 171) and two follow-up weekly surveys (Phase 2, N = 160; Phase 3, N = 160).

Most of this team looks like they're more interested in policy than pharmaceuticals.

Baldwin Way's research focus may put him in more contact with pharma: https://psychology.osu.edu/people/way.37

His R01 is looking at substance abuse: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10304875

I don't think you have to search for some nefarious pharma connection - to me the simpler explanation is that "social media is bad" is an opinion that is very much in the zeitgeist right now, so any "scientific" findings that supports this belief will generate lots of press attention, which is beneficial to the researchers careers and institutions.

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.

That's fair. It sounds like they wanted to iterate on something that's been established on a preliminary basis, which makes the choice to stay within the parameters of of the original study likely the correct one. We have to be choosy about which variables we tweak when building upon previous works, otherwise people will correctly point out ambiguities if not outright flaws in reasoning when the authors analyze current results in the context of the previous study (the whole point of iterating).

This approach does have it's drawbacks though, such as rapidly fading into irrelevance and obscurity given the ever-changing landscape of the study environment. It is of course your prerogative to disregard research as you see fit, but hopefully we can agree that this isn't bad science (at least not on that basis), even if you find the results uninteresting.

I slightly misinterpreted the following from the article:

> We decided to assess social media use across four platforms for three reasons. First, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook were the most popular social media platforms among college students at the time of our study design (Perrin and Anderson, 2019).

This is telling us that they designed the study at a time when a 2019 report on social media usage was the most up-to-date available. I misread initially, thinking that (Perrin and Anderson, 2019) was the study design they followed, but it is actually this: Perrin, A., & Anderson, M. (2019). Share of US adults using social media, including Facebook, is mostly unchanged since 2018. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/04/10/share-of-u-....

I get that they probably didn't feel like revising their design in the fall of 2021, but this would have been the right thing to do, given trends in social media use in young people at the time. It is odd that this 2023 paper doesn't even mention TikTok. Its exclusion, justified or not, is a limitation worth noting.

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