Week 5: data hoarders
Hi there…
This is my newsletter where I write weekly about deleting all of my social media accounts and getting rid of my smartphone.
This week I spoke with Dr Ben Carter, Reader at King’s College London IoPPN (Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience), who leads a group exploring the impact of technology and devices on children.
He helped me solve a puzzle that has been frustrating me since the start of this project, namely: why isn’t there scientific acknowledgment of social media’s harms.
If you want to share this newsletter or read any previous episodes, click this link: LINK
As always, feel free to respond to this – I’d love to hear from you.
I hope you enjoy reading.
Week 5: data hoarders
This week’s episode is a little short. For the last few days, my time has been split between writing this and writing a piece about writing this for Tortoise Media’s next quarterly print journal. I’ll post a link here when it comes out… But check out previous quarterlies here.
(Tortoise is the journalism company I work for - it is all about slow news. It was founded by James Harding, former head of BBC News, and Katie Vanneck-Smith, former president of the Dow Jones & Wall Street Journal. They saw a pretty fundamental flaw in modern journalism: its speed and lack of accuracy - tabloids, clickbait, etc - and sought to fix it… I’m proud to work at Tortoise)
***
This week was significant - I have solved a puzzle that has been troubling me over the last few weeks.
The puzzle has been: why isn’t there widespread scientific acknowledgment of the obvious harms of social media and phone use?
Most people seem to realise that social media has a negative impact on mental health, but every time I interview academics on the subject they make statements like: we can see a clear correlation between high social media usage and anxiety/stress/depression/lack of sleep etc. but it’s very hard to prove or young people seem to be addicted to phones much in the same way that one might be addicted to alcohol or drugs, but we lack the evidence to classify it as such.
Until this week I hadn’t really understood why…
But after an illuminating discussion with Dr Ben Carter, Reader at King’s College London IoPPN (Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience), who leads a group exploring the impact of technology and devices on children… I think I do.
The main point was this: proper researchers lack sufficient access to the absolutely vital data required to fully understand the effect of social media on people's brains.
Other reasons include:
overall lack of scientific understanding of how the brain works
general issues surrounding survey-based research
the fact that the professional psychologists and researchers trying to understand the effects of social media on young people are often kind of old… and perhaps don’t fully understand what to look for.
***
This all came about because I wrote to Ben asking to interview him about his research on the link between poor sleep and social media/smartphone addiction…
I had noticed that since starting this project I’d been sleeping a lot better. Before ditching my phone, I would use it for hours each night, right before falling asleep… and (I think) as a result, it would always take me ages to fall asleep. But now I have nothing to do before sleeping, other than read a book… so I just kind of roll around in bed till I crash out. It’s the same when I wake up, I can now set my alarm for later knowing I won’t mess around on my phone for an hour in the morning.
A 2021 paper by Ben and others was published in Frontiers, surveyed 1,043 participants aged 18 to 30, and concluded that: “39% [of] young adults reported smartphone addiction”, and “Those exhibiting smartphone addiction experienced poorer sleep.”
As Ben explained this research to me, I was hoping he would give me some brilliant slam dunk quote and say something like “we can 100% prove that phone usage causes people to lose sleep and become depressed” - but as I hinted above, that wasn’t the case. He got very close, but then said, ‘people like me have to be really balanced about how we present this, because whilst it may well become provable, we can't just jump into reporting and say things like, “phones are addictive, and we're all going to end up splitting our wrists because of them.” So we just have to be really, really careful and scientific about how I report my findings because I'm very mindful that there are many - even within my institution - not convinced of this area of research.’
Ben said that for legitimate researchers in the field, it would be so useful to have access to the kind of data Meta or Apple collect and store…
At the moment all this data - which shows things as specific as how angry or depressed someone is - lies (well protected) in the hands of big tech companies…
You may remember that in 2012 Facebook “Manipulated 689,003 Users' Emotions For Science” - a controversial study in which “Facebook's data scientists manipulated the News Feeds of 689,003 users, removing either all of the positive posts or all of the negative posts to see how it affected their moods… [so] If there was a week in January 2012 where you were only seeing photos of dead dogs or incredibly cute babies, you may have been part of the study.” Forbes
Or, last year, you may have seen the controversy surrounding the private research conducted by Facebook - which was presented internally to senior staff and found things like:
“Thirty-two percent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse,”
“Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression. This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups.”
But naturally, rather than making this information public, or attempting to fix these problems, Facebook kept quiet.
It required Frances Haugen - a product manager at Facebook - to whistleblow and disclose tens of thousands of Facebook's internal documents to the Securities and Exchange Commission and The Wall Street Journal in 2021.
Frances said: “The company’s leadership knows how to make Facebook and Instagram safer, but won’t make the necessary changes because they have put their astronomical profits before people,”
So here we see the problem: Big social media companies like Facebook have access to all of this data: they can work out exactly how their platforms are affecting the mental health of users - and are seeing the damage - but instead of sharing this information, they cover it up, and use the findings to make their platforms more addicting…
These drawings, by my friend Callum Mason, capture it perfectly…
Ben said: “What if legitimate researchers also had access to this data… What if the recently drafted Online Harms Bill made an allowance for researchers to access the information needed to assess social media’s effects on mental health?”
My guess? We would have consensus across the general public, academics, news outlets, and governments. We would be able to categorically say “people are addicted to their phones.”
And then who knows, maybe then we would be able to protect and help people with smartphone addictions.
Thanks for reading.