Marginalium

John Haidt very desperate to prove social media bad. His most recent book seems to have got people up in arms (I guess there’s only so much complaining you’re allowed to do) and so he’s back in to prove it with a four part post on a meta-analysis that someone else did. It’s a stretch, even from the first post, but it certainly seems plausible that reducing consumption for about two weeks might reduce mental health symptoms, but it’s already weird that doing this for longer seems to reduce the effect size (Table 1), and short term (one week) reductions seem to go both ways—improving or worsening. It could be ‘withdrawal’ causing these backfire effects like Haidt reckons, or it could just be like I keep saying, that social media use really isn’t more than a symptom of all the other ways life is worse and so there’s really variable responses to removing it.