As recently as 2010, the internet was simply the bee’s knees—it was drawing humanity together, bringing authoritarians to heel, and generally creating solutions to any problem you’d care to think of. And then it wasn’t. After the disappointment of the Arab Spring and the disillusionment of Edward Snowden’s surveillance revelations and Frances Haugen’s manipulation testimony, it actually turned out that the internet was rending our societies asunder and reducing us to enslaved, increasingly disturbed screen junkies.
I exaggerate for effect, but only slightly—there is a very strong narrative these days that tech is bad for us. So, in search of hard data, a couple of researchers from the Oxford Internet Institute studied two million people’s psychological well-being over the 2005-2022 period, and found…it seems we’re actually doing OK?
“We show that the past two decades have seen only small and inconsistent changes in global well-being and mental health that are not suggestive of the idea that the adoption of internet and mobile broadband is consistently linked to negative psychological outcomes,” reads the abstract of the study, published yesterday in Clinical Psychological Science.
“We looked very hard for a ‘smoking gun’ linking technology and well-being and we didn’t find it,” said coauthor Andrew Przybylski in a statement announcing the results today.
But wait, what about all those teenagers—especially girls—who need legislative protection from social media’s addictive, depression-inducing ways? You know, the youth mental health crisis that recently precipitated a 33-state lawsuit against Meta? If there’s a “there” there, it isn’t clearly showing up in the data, once you account for methodological deficiencies in earlier research.
Professor Przybylski again: “We meticulously tested whether there is anything special in terms of age or gender, but there is no evidence to support popular ideas that certain groups are more at risk.” As the study noted more pointedly, demography-specific trends and associations did not “support the commonly offered narrative that young individuals, particularly young women, have experienced disproportionately large decrements in well-being in association with the adoption of internet technologies.”
Reasons to be cheerful are in short supply these days, so these findings are certainly welcome. But before we rejoice too much, here’s the big however: There may not be any empirical support for the “tech bad” narrative, but we don’t definitively know its effects, because we just don’t have enough data. But someone does.
“Research on the effects of Internet technologies is stalled because the data most urgently needed are collected and held behind closed doors by technology companies and online platforms,” the researchers complained in their conclusion. “It is crucial to study, in more detail and with more transparency from all stakeholders, data on individual adoption of and engagement with Internet-based technologies. These data exist and are continuously analyzed by global technology firms for marketing and product improvement but unfortunately are not accessible for independent research.”
This is not a new complaint; researchers have for years been begging Meta in particular to be more open about the data it holds on young users’ mental health. But, especially with that 33-state suit alleging that Meta deliberately tried to hook kids on its products—including claims that Mark Zuckerberg refused to ban plastic surgery filters despite internal concerns over the harmful effects on girls—it’s past time for Big Tech to open up about what it knows its effects to be. Given the scale of adoption, the world deserves to know for sure, one way or the other.
More news below.
David Meyer
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