Lawmakers seized on the fact that 32% of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, they used the platform to feel worse.
Professor Andrew Przybylski, director of research at the Oxford Internet Institute, believes that the research isn't a smoking gun.
In an interview with Insider, Przybylski, an experimental psychologist who specializes in social media, said that the leaked research was only a small part of the picture. If you ran a giant social media platform, this is like a research project. He said this was the beginning of research.
A lot of the work wouldn't pass muster as a bachelor's thesis. If you're a responsible scientist, you wouldn't hold the research to bedamning proof of the ill effects of social media.
There wasn't enough to draw conclusions about the effects of social media on mental health because Meta's research was based on self-reporting by users of the photo-sharing app.
He was drawing a parallel with smoking. "You don't use people's opinions about whether or not smoking is good for them to draw some health inference," he said.
Przybylski is not ruling out the possibility that social media platforms have an adverse effect on the mental wellbeing of teens and children.
He said that this was about inviting Facebook to be a partner in a maturing science. "That doesn't mean that you can't use proprietary computing environments."
The Meta CEO is being urged to open his company's doors to scientists to allow them to scrutinize its mental health research by Przybylski. More than 300 people signed the letter.
Meta's in-house research may be insufficient to deal with issues like child and teen mental health, as expressed in an open letter to Facebook's CEO. The letter says that they do not believe that the methodologies seen so far meet the high scientific standards required to investigate the mental health of children and adolescents.
Adam Mosseri, the CEO of the photo sharing platform, testified before Congress about child safety.
Mosseri said that researchers should have regular access to Meta's data, but stopped short of promising full transparency, citing privacy concerns, The Wall Street Journal reported.
The open letter is an industry-wide challenge, according to a Meta spokesman. According to a survey from last month, more teens in the US are using TikTok and YouTube than Facebook, which is why we need an industry-wide effort to understand the role of social media in young people's lives.
