Of course, I have a few. The case for correlation is clear, and numerous studies of varying statistical power have proved it. The question is causation. So if s

Of course, I have a few. The case for correlation is clear, and numerous studies of varying statistical power have proved it. The question is causation. So if social media usage isn't causal, then what is? I think most people who are skeptical of causation would point to a hidden latent variable that is actually causal. One way this could take place is some feature, say "susceptibility to fomo", that's actually causal. Folks who have a higher susceptibility might see frequent, sharp decreases in mental health outcomes from social media usage. Folks with low susceptibility might be relatively unaffected from social media usage. It could be interesting to see what the prevalence of this susceptibility is in the general population, whether there are certain cohorts that have high prevalence, and whether there are interventions that can be performed to decrease this prevalence. A similar analogous cause is the presence of schizophrenia in an analysis of psychedelic use. Most folks are fine using psychedelics infrequently. However, folks with a predilection for schizophrenia frequently have bad outcomes from psychedelic use and may even accelerate the onset of latent schizophrenia. The above "fomo susceptibility" might even be too simplistic a model. There might be a cluster of features, combinations of past experiences and perhaps biological traits, that actually act as "fomo susceptibility." I loosely think the real model works something like this. Age may be a controlling factor as well. Regardless, I'm not convinced there's causation here. Social media usage research is like a lot of other poorly understood psychological and mental health phenomenon where studies are underpowered, causality is hard to establish, and effect sizes are small which all lead to conflicting conclusions.