"But internal study found users who stopped using Facebook and Instagram for a week showed lower rates of anxiety, depression, and loneliness."

This isn't causal though. The users who quit were not randomly selected. Maybe they were receiving some kind of mental health treatment, and as part of that they stopped. Then the recovery could have been from the treatment or it could have been from stopping.

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malfist 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

So this argument you've made, you've just constructed a strawman.

> The users who quit were not randomly selected. Maybe they were receiving some kind of mental health treatment

You don't know that? You don't know anything about the selection process since facebook did not share their research. Your whole argument pins on the selection process you have no idea what happened. I'd find it very difficult to believe that researchers could not anticipate and control for situations like that. Researchers are after all, experts in research.

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	▲	noslenwerdna 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I don't know that, which is why I said "maybe." Facebook does not typically do academic level research - they do quick studies to verify product direction. From what I have seen, the actual academic studies on this are mixed. It is hard to say one way or the other, and it can affect different teens differently depending on how they use it.

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watwut 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Internal study does mot have access to people who left because of unknown mental health treatment. They would had no way to evaluate them.

There is no reason to make imaginary issues of studies just to defend companies.

	▲	noslenwerdna 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		My point is if the people in the study were not randomly selected, there are any number of confounding factors that could influence why their anxiety changed.