Ever since The Wall Street Journal published internal Facebook research that found Instagram harmed the well-being of teenage girls,the company’s defense has been to minimize and dismiss its own findings,saying documents were only relevant for internal product development.That’s nonsense, social science researchers say.

Though Facebook’s work by itself is limited,it fits into a larger set of data including from researchers outside the company that suggests social media can have harmful effects on mental health.And even if that context didn’t exist,Facebook’s work alone suggests something bad enough is going on that it should cause concern.

The Wall Street Journal’s reporting included internal slides discussing data that showed Instagram was linked with issues like anxiety,depression,suicidal thought,and body image issues.Facebook immediately went on the defensive,saying that the data was taken out of context,that it was subjective, and that it couldn’t prove anything about Instagram.The company’s efforts to obfuscate the research and smear the whistleblower who leaked it appear to be straight out of Big Tobacco’s playbook.

Facebook put up its own version of the leaked slides — complete with annotations that it said l“give more context”on the research.Many of those annotations stress that the data is“based on the subjective perceptions of the research participants,”and that it wasn’t designed to assess if or how Instagram caused any positive or negative effects.

Facebook said in a statement to The Verge that the studies were designed to help its product teams understand how users feel about the products,“not to provide measures of prevalence,statistical estimates for the correlation between Instagram and mental health or to evaluate causal claims between Instagram and health/well-being.”That changes the inferences people can make about the data,a spokesperson said in the statement.

Mark Zuckerberg said in his note to Facebook staffers that the company was committed to doing more research,and that it wasn’t suppressing data.“If we wanted to hide our results,why would we have established an industry-leading standard for transparency and reporting on what we’re doing?”he wrote.

But so far,the company hasn’t released the type of information third-party researchers want to see to actually understand the questions around social media and mental health.

Source: The Verge