Censorship: How a National Academies Report Withheld Crucial Facts about Social Media and Adolescent Health

The Committee on the Impact of Social Media on Adolescent Health meticulously omitted from their report findings of higher risks of mental health problems associated with heavy social media use.

The recent report from the National Academies titled Social Media and Adolescent Health repeatedly dismisses associations between social media use and adolescent mental health as small and weak when in fact studies indicate that heavy social media users among teens suffer double the risk of serious disorders such as clinical depression and suicidal conduct. The National Academies report, however, simply omits any quantitative information on elevated risks of mental health problems associated with heavy social media use.

Without this censorship, the report’s ‘only small and weak links’ narrative would have been recognized as a grotesque distortion of reality by its readers. It is therefore no surprise that the authors of the report — the members of the Committee on the Impact of Social Media on Adolescent Health — seem as terrified of elevated risk findings as vampires are terrified of daylight.

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Censorship of Social Media Risks

Although the National Academies report has over 250 pages, there is not a single table, figure, or graph to indicate how health risks for adolescents vary according to their use of social media.

In other words, there is nothing similar to a figure (or table or graph) like the one below:

Besides a total ban on any absolute risks associated with social media use, there is also no information in the report to show relative risks specific to heavy social media use among adolescents -- that is no information like this:

Time spent on social media predicts significantly lower mental health and higher discomfort with one’s body in simple models adjusting only for child sex and age. Teens who spend more than 5 hours a day on social media were 2.5 times more likely to express suicidal thoughts or harm themselves, 2.4 times more likely to hold a negative view of their body, and 40% more likely to report a lot of sadness the day before. [p. 3 of an IFS & Gallup study]

The omission of such quantitative facts from the 250+ pages of the report is in stark contrast to the U.S. Surgeon General’s advisory report titled Social Media and Youth Mental Health, as it that includes information such as this:

A longitudinal cohort study of U.S. adolescents aged 12–15 (n=6,595) that adjusted for baseline mental health status found that adolescents who spent more than 3 hours per day on social media faced double the risk of experiencing poor mental health outcomes including symptoms of depression and anxiety. [Social Media and Youth Mental Health]

And yet this Surgeon General’s advisory is mere 25 pages long, one tenth of the National Academies report that failed to include any such information.

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Factual Hypocrisy

The ban on risk information within the National Academies report applies only to harm related to social media use.

The authors of the report, for example, do tell readers how risks vary according to sex, race, and sexual minority status, as seen in their Figure 1-3:

It is therefore fine, per the report committee, to describe how prevalence of some harm varies according to sex, race, or sexual identity -- what seems forbidden is showing how the harm varies according to the adolescent use of social media.

Remember, this report is not titled Sexual Identities and Adolescent Health, it is titled Social Media and Adolescent Health. And yet, the report has more quantitative information on how risks vary according to sexual identities than it does on how such risks vary according to social media use.

Note also that the ban on risk information within the report applies to all aspects of social media use, not just to the time spent using it. Therefore there is no quantitative information on how harms vary according to the degree of problematic use of social media, or according to the type of social media used, or according to a passive versus active usage of social media, etc.

The hypocrisy extends to relative risks associated with the heavy use of social media by adolescents. The committee has no hesitation, for example, to inform us on page 107 that adolescents "who slept more than 10 hours a night had 4.8 times increased odds of having a serious suicide attempt (95 percent confidence interval 1.3 to 17.1)" per CDC YRBS surveys.

Note that adolescents who report sleeping 10 or more hours daily constitute a tiny fraction of all kids (roughly 1.5% on the CDC surveys), which is why the confidence interval is so wide. The doubling of mental health risks for heavy users of social media, on the other hand, apply to far greater portions of adolescents -- e. g. 25% for girls and 15% for boys per Kelly et al.

And yet the National Academies report includes the elevated risks for heavy sleepers but not the far more robust elevated risks for the far greater numbers of teens who are heavy social media users. Indeed the 250+ pages report has no relative risk information on any harm associated with heavy social media use by adolescents.

Again, keep in mind this report is not titled Sleep and Adolescent Health -- it is titled Social Media and Adolescent Health. And yet the committee treats relative risks associated with heavy social media use by adolescents as if they were state secrets.

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Censorship of Social Media Time

I was able to find only one partial exception within the 250+ pages report to its otherwise total ban on any quantitative information about risks associated with social media use: on page 103 the committee admits that a meta-analysis found "risk of depression increasing an estimated 13 percent with every additional hour of exposure" and that this relationship was stronger for girls.

The committee, however, then promptly declared such associations to be essentially useless (we'll look at this separately in another post as the arguments are particularly preposterous).

Incredibly, the committee also ensured that there are no estimates within the 250+ pages report of the time teens spend on social media!

There is consequently nothing in the report similar to a figure (or table or graph) like the one below:

Note that by age 17, girls report an astonishing 6 hours daily average spent on social media.

The absence of any such information in the National Academies report makes it difficult for ordinary readers to realize that even a 15% increase per hour spent on social media could easily explain nearly all of the doubling of depression among girls in a dose-and-response model.

The absence of any such information in the National Academies report also makes it difficult for ordinary readers to realize that time spent on social media is so high among teens that it is bound to impact important activities such as in-person socialization and perhaps even sleep.

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Misrepresentation of Risks

Why did the National Academies report fail to include a single table, figure or graph to indicate how health risks for adolescents vary according to their use of social media?

Why did the National Academies committee effectively censor any facts about the elevated risks of heavy social media users among adolescents?

The reason is quite simple: the committee had to do so in order to get away with misinforming readers by constantly dismissing associations of social media with harm as weak and small.

Indeed the committee does this to such an absurd degree that we will have to look at this misinformation campaign in a separate article.

Had the committee admitted that associations with social media involve the doubling and tripling of serious mental disorders among adolescents and then declared such links small and weak, they would have had immediately lost the respect and trust of most of their readers.

To severely mislead the public, the committee simply had to resort to extreme censorship.

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Fooling the Public

It is important to understand that the National Academies report is written for the general public, not for experts who are expected to look up various studies on their own and then evaluate them. Indeed the report has entire sections dedicated specifically to parents.

This is why the report is likely to succeed in severely misleading most of its readers, including parents, regarding what is known about risks associated with social media — hardly any readers would suspect that crucial facts are being withheld from them by the National Academies committee in order to make readers believe the fairy tale of ‘small and weak links’ between social media use and adolescent health.

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Censorship versus Science

Imagine that a huge National Academies report on obesity and health would omit all information about the increased health risks that obese people suffer — and instead dismiss associations between weight and health as weak and small.

Imagine the report on obesity would not even reveal estimates of how many people in the U.S. are obese.

Imagine that a National Academies report titled Alcohol Consumption and Health would fail to print a single figure or table or graph to indicate health risks associated with various levels of alcohol consumption.

Imagine the report would not even tell the public how much alcohol is consumed on average by Americans or how many Americans are considered to be alcoholics, etc.

Imagine all this crucial information is omitted despite each of the reports having over 250 pages.

It would be unthinkable.

Imagine the 1964 Surgeon General's report on smoking would fail to publish a single figure or table or graph to show how health risks associate with various levels of cigarette consumption.

Imagine the report would even fail to inform its readers how many Americans smoke and how many packs a day do they consume on average.

Imagine the authors of the report would even refuse to acknowledge the fact that, among adult men of similar age, smokers were found to have a roughly 65% higher mortality rate than non-smokers (one of the key findings of the actual 1964 report). Instead, the report would have dismissed such a link with mortality as weak and small.

Again, this is unthinkable. Had it happened though, it would have been considered as one of the most infamous episodes in the annals of science corrupted by corporate power.

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Conclusion

The extreme censorship of even the most crucial findings concerning the risks associated with social media use by adolescents is inexcusable and constitutes a breach of trust with the public. The fact that even estimates of time spent on social media by teens have been withheld from the public by the committee is outright surreal. Censorship within science is like cancer that can destroy it from within. The publication of such an astonishingly censorious report by National Academies amounts to an abandonment of science by this important institution.