Science

The other aspect to this is that even if social media is bad it is mostly because people are terrible to each other via social media. They are judgemental, demanding, lack empathy,... Those things were already a problem with social interactions before social media, just not this visible and a bit easier to avoid. And the same is true about companies being exploitative via social media (the ones that run it and the tracking/advertising aspect and companies just acting as regular users on there), that problem wasn't created by social media, it just became more visible.

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I'm surprised they found that there is no evidence that using these platforms is "rewiring" children’s brains. Wasn't it shown that social media companies base pretty much their entire technical decision making on psychologically conditioning not just children's brains but everyone who uses it?

Not really. There's a difference between things being sticky and actually altering the brain.

Yeah, we spend more time on social media than we intend, but I also take longer to get up in the morning than I'd like. The big question is does this alter the rest of my behaviour, or my mental state, when I'm not doom scrolling or refusing to leave my duvet?

That's a much harder question to answer, and the evidence is a lot more mixed.

This is a rebuttal by the author of the book that was the target of that recent Nature article. He's a professor at NYU who's been studying this for a long time

His second point in his rebuttal is particularly eyebrow raising.

Do you mean this one?

Odgers’ alternative explanation does not fit the available facts.

Because that's obviously correct. I don't know where you live, but I live in continental Europe, where issues such as "opioid crisis, school shootings and increasing unrest because of racial and sexual discrimination and violence" simply do not exist or are, at worst, not increasing. (One exception might be a very specific variant of opioids, which is gambling. Edit: Besides, gambling is also heavily promoted online, made easier to access, even packaged into video games, so it's just a further problem for defending phone-/internet-centric teenage culture.) They also frequently have little to do with how young people feel, think and live in general even in US, as far as I see from the stuff (conversations, media) that I see online. Projecting these very specific issues onto all young people all across the world looks like nothing more than American defaultism.

I've read both the review and the response, and I find the response more convincing, supported by much more explicit data and clear arguments.

Not just an opinion piece, but a reactionary opinion piece.

Video games and social media are very different things. Social media is actually a detriment to society.

I don't know if you're joking, and there definitely is other problems. But it's the fucking smartphones too mate they are a huge issue.

I have no idea what you mean about cringe boomer shit. It sounds like you're going on a Facebook rant but you got sidetracked.

And if you're wondering why teenagers would want to use social media, it's a very freeing kind of technology. Kids are trying to understand their worlds, they're dealing with a ton of stress in various ways, they have situations going on that they can't talk about, and social media is one very good way for them to try to figure out how to handle it all.

Good for kids. I wish we had some of these tools when I was young.