Why choose social media? Ah, it's roasted.
Why choose social media? Ah, it's roasted.
Plus the music industry is fretting about AI-generated music. As it should.
In 1950, two large studies in the UK suggested that smoking was “a cause, and an important cause” of lung cancer. As a followup, in 1951 Richard Doll and Austin Bradford Hill sent out questionnaires to all the doctors in the UK, asking them to take part in a more careful study. (This writeup points out why using doctors was clever. Women weren’t included because there were too few of them. Ah, the 50s.) After 10 years1, the study was already pointing to much greater risk of lung cancer from smoking:
The risk of death from lung cancer was related to the amount of tobacco smoked (the annual death rate was 0.07 per 1000 in nonsmokers and 3.15 per 1000 in men smoking 35 or more cigarettes per day). A reduction of the death rate from lung cancer was seen in those who stopped smoking.
Anyway: the US Surgeon General soon felt unable to ignore the rigorous studies:
On January 11, 1964, Luther L. Terry, M.D., Surgeon General of the U.S. Public Health Service, released the first report of the Surgeon General’s Advisory Committee on Smoking and Health.On the basis of more than 7,000 articles relating to smoking and disease already available at that time in the biomedical literature, the Advisory Committee concluded that cigarette smoking is—
A cause of lung cancer and laryngeal cancer in men
A probable cause of lung cancer in women
The most important cause of chronic bronchitis
Which meant laws soon followed:
Early on, the U.S. Congress adopted the Federal Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act of 1965 and the Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act of 1969. These laws—
Required a health warning on cigarette packages
Banned cigarette advertising in the broadcasting media
Called for an annual report on the health consequences of smoking
Though if you’ve seen Mad Men, you’ll recall that the very first episode (set in 1960) features ad exec Don Draper puzzling over the problem of how to market a cigarette brand, cognisant of the bad stories that have started to come out from the UK and are making their way into the media. His solution? Don’t go with the idea that people like smoking because they know the dangers—the “death wish” mindset—but instead focus on something that makes them special.
“It’s toasted”, he pronounces. To the puzzlement of the cigarette execs, who know that any tobacco is toasted during production.
And then this week the US Surgeon General put out a 19-page advisory (plus a couple of pages and references) about “Social Media and Youth Mental Health”. It’s meant to be noticed:
A Surgeon General’s Advisory is a public statement that calls the American people’s attention to an urgent public health issue and provides recommendations for how it should be addressed. Advisories are reserved for significant public health challenges that require the nation’s immediate awareness and action.
The sentence that I’d say sums it up is this, on page 4:
the current body of evidence indicates that while social media may have benefits for some children and adolescents, there are ample indicators that social media can also have a profound risk of harm to the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents. At this time, we do not yet have enough evidence to determine if social media is sufficiently safe for children and adolescents.
Emphasis added. Notice the flip: it’s not that we think social media is harmful, but that it’s not “sufficiently safe”, which is an odd phrase.
Benefits exist:
A majority of adolescents report that social media helps them feel more accepted (58%), like they have people who can support them through tough times (67%), like they have a place to show their creative side (71%), and more connected to what’s going on in their friends’ lives (80%).
But downsides too:
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.
As of 2021, 8th and 10th graders now spend an average of 3.5 hours per day on social media. In a unique natural experiment that leveraged the staggered introduction of a social media platform across U.S. colleges, the roll-out of the platform was associated with an increase in depression (9% over baseline) and anxiety (12% over baseline) among college-aged youth (n = 359,827 observations). The study’s co-author also noted that when applied across the entirety of the U.S. college population, the introduction of the social media platform may have contributed to more than 300,000 new cases of depression.
Again, emphasis added. The study about the “staggered introduction of a social media platform across US colleges” refers to Facebook’s initial rollout: you can read the full study.
There’s lots more in the advisory. It’s not a heavy read; you can skim it and get a clear idea of where the boundaries of our knowledge seem to lie. They’re quite fuzzy. But at the same time there are some baselines. Adolescents who spend zero or a lot of time on social media tend to be unhappy. Those who spend a couple of hours on it tend to be happy, or at least well-adjusted. If you make a graph and plot “time spent on social media” on the x-axis, and “unhappiness” increasing on the y-axis, you’ll get a bowl-shaped curve: high on the left, goes down, heads up as you go to the right.
The question—unanswered—is which direction the unhappiness flows. Is it that kids who spend more time on social media are made unhappy by their experiences there? (You’d need an alternate explanation for those who don’t use social media: perhaps they’re despondent at being cut off?) Or are they all just unhappy, and using social media to try to find some sort of relief?
Back in October I wrote about the analysis of data that I’d done, which showed American kids getting less happy:
in every year, [American] teenagers at every age say they’re less happy than adults. The difference is significant, and though the gap has been smaller since the Great Recession beginning in 2007, it’s still there. Here’s the graph:
The second point, which may seem surprising, is that until 2011 children would always end their teenage years happier than they began them. But since 2011 their final reported happiness score has been lower when they finish than when they begin secondary education.
There’s definitely something happening here; the question is still what the causes are. The US SG offers courses of action for legislators, tech companies, parents/caregivers, researchers, and, last but not least, the children/adolescents. Probably the two most valuable ones are “Be cautious about what you share” and “Don’t take part in online harassment or abuse”.
But the US SG also notes that the dice are loaded:
“For too long, we have placed the entire burden of managing social media on the shoulders of parents and kids, despite the fact that these platforms are designed by some of the most talented engineers and designers in the world to maximize the amount of time that our kids spend on them. So that is not a fair fight. It’s time for us to have the backs of parents and kids.”
The problem is, what’s going to happen? The US Congress is sclerotic and struggles to pass anything bipartisan. State-level action tends towards the insane—Florida’s law which broke the 1st Amendment, or Montana’s law banning TikTok which does the same—and the EU’s peculiar antipathy to anything not invented here, which thus means “to anything”.
I suspect that the social media companies, which are anyway beginning to be eclipsed by the frantic attention on ChatGPT and similar technologies, will be hoping for their “it’s roasted” bridge to the future. Honestly, social networks make you happy! At least, used in moderation. Maybe in 40 years’ time, there will be a TV series (come on, there will still be TV, just in all sorts of forms) about how the social networks dealt with it. And most of all, don’t suggest it’s a death wish.
Glimpses of the AI tsunami
(Of the what? Read here.)
• A guy called Tim Boucher says he has used ChatGPT plus Midjourney (or similar) to write 97 books, each around 5,000 words, with illustrations. Each one takes only around eight hours to produce, he says. “AI has proven to be a remarkable catalyst for my creative work. It has enabled me to increase my output while maintaining consistent quality, and has allowed me to delve into intricate world-building with an efficiency I could never have achieved otherwise.” In other news, their blurbs indicate that they’re absolutely terrible.
• An AI-generated picture purporting to show an explosion at the Pentagon in Washington went viral, because well done Elon Musk removing verification. The stock market dipped briefly, because who cares about checking? Certainly not the computer-controlled systems scanning social media (especially Twitter) for dramatic news.
• Folk in Kenya who write essays for struggling (aka: dim/lazy) college students in the west suspect that ChatGPT is taking their sidelines. Demand is falling, and the logical reason is those damn LLMs. Once more it’s the low-paid jobs that get hit.
• A PR company is going to use ChatGPT to write press releases. Not sure people are going to be able to tell the difference from the human-written ones; and not sure either that it’s going to make a big difference to the cost of generating them, because that’s much more dependent on the way the drafts ping back and forth for approval. (Thanks Wendy Grossman for the latter insight.)
• This five-minute video from Adobe about the latest update to Photoshop, now in beta, with “Generative autofill”, shows how far we’ve come in less than a year: from Midjourney looking a bit of a mess, to this being incorporated into tools used by professionals all the time. (Notice though that the demo doesn’t include generating hands/fingers.)
• AI may have found a new antibiotic to beat a superbug. Chomped through 7,500 potential candidates in 90 minutes, to identify one that has worked well in tests on animals against Acinetobacter baumanii, which kills about a million a year.
• The music business is worried, increasingly worried, about AI-generated music (£ paywall). Which makes sense, since if there’s more music (of whatever quality) then it will be spread more and more thinly, leaving less money to be collected from subscriptions. There’s no easy solution to this. And they know it.
• You can buy Social Warming in paperback, hardback or ebook via One World Publications, or order it through your friendly local bookstore. Or listen to me read it on Audible.
You could also sign up for The Overspill, a daily list of links with short extracts and brief commentary on things I find interesting in tech, science, medicine, politics and any other topic that takes my fancy.
• I’m the proposed Class Representative for a lawsuit against Google in the UK on behalf of publishers. If you sold open display ads in the UK after 2014, you might be a member of the class. Read more at Googleadclaim.co.uk. (Or see the press release.)
• Back next week (and then taking a break for a couple of weeks in June). Or leave a comment here, or in the Substack chat, or Substack Notes, or write it in a letter and put it in a bottle so that The Police write a song about it after it falls through a wormhole and goes back in time.
The study carried on for 70 years, which is astonishing given that it originally recruited qualified doctors. They must have started young and finished late: one presumes those left in 2001 were almost all nonsmokers, and had qualified in their early 20s.