Social media addiction linked to cyberbullying

I bet internet use is also highly correlated with cyberbullying

What I'm not seeing is what is going on in the lives of these people that fosters such negative behavior. These studies almost never ask questions like "Are you being abused by your parents?" or "Have you been molested?"

There is this presumption that they engage in malicious behavior simply because they think they can get away with it, basically. It's an "idle hands are the devil's workshop" theory and generally lacks substance.

Sure, people do all kinds of stupid stuff when bored and when they have time on their hands, but why are these young adolescents online all the time? Does this mean they have a terrible home life and no one is paying attention to them?

I don't really like proxies like "Spends a lot of time online." I spend a lot of time online. I don't bully people.

For me, the internet is a means to have a life when that wouldn't otherwise be possible. I earn income online. I have hobbies online. Etc.

I really dislike the subtext that "spending time online is bad and more time spent online is worse." I would guess it is something more like "Spending time online to try to escape your shitty life in an abusive household means you take your baggage out on internet strangers because that seems safer and more do-able than resolving your thorny problems."

I feel like every week there's a new study that implies causation where none is proven and has no link to a root cause.

"Possession of car linked to car crashes"

I would bet on a large scale it's not people who are being abused, just people who are miserable and unhappy with their lives for whatever reason.

I don't think social media was doomed from the start - there were many years of healthy enough communities (I'm mostly familiar with LiveJournal in the early 2000s) that didn't have all the downsides of modern social media. You saw updates in most-recent-first order, if you refreshed the page you got the same thing (perhaps with a new update at the top, but it was easy to tell when you'd caught up), and if you had too much stuff to read, you figured out how to trim some of it away ("FRIENDS CUT!"). The cost to operate the infrastructure was fairly minimal, and it accomplished most of the things we actually would like from social media without the downsides.

What we haven't proved is that you can have social media run by a publicly traded, ad-revenue-funded company without all sorts of harmful effects (with the main interface being smartphones with push notifications). That's where all the nasty "engagement" effects come from - trying to drive eyeballs to ads to improve revenue. It's very much a zero-sum game - every pair of eyeballs has 24 hours in the day, so the goal is to command their attention for as many of those hours as possible. That's where the evil creeps in.