These studies are honestly incredibly hard to do, because as the author points out, social media is simply part of the lives of the majority of people in the we

These studies are honestly incredibly hard to do, because as the author points out, social media is simply part of the lives of the majority of people in the western world. It's impossible to isolate social media from the rest of the changes that happened in society. The attempts at doing "social media cures" and measuring the effects are cute, but since they only lasted a few weeks, are hardly good indicators of something (habits that don't stick are quite pointless to measure). Teenagers are increasingly under more and more stress with high stake testing, an increasingly competitive college admission process and increasingly grim prospects for economic mobility and long term environmental sustainability. Plus, the "smartphone revolution" lands bull's-eye on the aftermath of the 2007 Great Recession, which impacted a lot of families (was the teen depressed because of the smartphone or his house getting foreclosed?). To me, social media sounds like an incredibly convenient scapegoat to ignore all these deeper issues. Now, your daughter drives a good point and is extremely eloquent. There's two points where I feel like expanding what she said. > First of all, the article stated that people using social media moderately (half an hour to one and a half hours a day) had little to no decline in their mental health, compared to a large mental health decline in those using it a lot (3-5+ hours a day) I don't know how they measure time spent using social media (to me that's vague, is having iMessage running on my Mac "using social media"? If so I'm at at least 7 hours...). But if they measure "active use" (so let's say scrolling) 5+ hours is a lot. 35h/week, almost a full time job. I'm wondering if the causality isn't reversed here (unhappy and depressed people in an environment where they aren't stimulated enough do end up scrolling 5+ hours a day as a consequence of their mental state). To me, a kid that ends up on social media 5+ hours a day reeks of bad parenting. He/She should have hobbies and activities to fill that time. > Yet another point was that people will compare themselves to other people on there. In 2018 "obesity prevalence was [...] 21.2% among 12- to 19-year-olds." [0] according to the CDC. That's one out of 5 being obese, not just overweight. And it has more than tripled since the 70's [1]. I have to wonder if it's related. A lot of teenagers are bombarded with images of perfectly healthy bodies that, quite simply, won't match what they see in the mirror. [0] https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/childhood.html https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/childhood.html [1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/obesity_child_15_16/obesity_child_15_16.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/obesity_child_15_16/obe...