So my prior is definitely "it's the phones", and I am totally fine with being old-man-who-shakes-fist-at-cloud about what phones and social media are doing to k

So my prior is definitely "it's the phones", and I am totally fine with being old-man-who-shakes-fist-at-cloud about what phones and social media are doing to kids (and all of us). But this article does the thing that infuriates me the most about any kind of discourse in the US, across all political tribes: Ameri-solipsism. How do youth suicide, depression, anxiety, and isolation trends in the US compare to other countries? Across countries, what's the correlation with smartphone and social media adoption? Is there a plausible causal link where we see these trends rise in each country a few years after wide adoption? If it doesn't always follow, what factors separate countries where phones seem to cause depression from those where it doesn't? How do political polarization, economic shifts, and different cultural norms correlate with these things across countries? No idea! Because a space alien reading this article would come away thinking that Earth consists of precisely one country. Use comparative data to tease out other factors at play? Ha! As if America could have anything to learn from anyone else. I expect this from jingoistic conservatives, but it's infuriatingly common even among progressives who supposedly reject nationalistic exceptionalism: dive deep into some big problem (which on its surface has nothing US-specific about it) without any curiosity whatsoever about how anyone who's not American deals with it.