No evidence social media time is correlated with teen mental health problems

Full title: There is no evidence that time spent on social media is correlated with adolescent mental health problems: Findings from a meta-analysis.

Meta analysis because scraping a bunch of studies about mental health is a robust way of understanding risk? This is really shameless and implies the writers have no connection with children who use social media.

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Since the full text is only available behind a paywall it's difficult to make any substantive comment except that there sure is a lot of grant money available to study this topic. The lack of any conclusive or strong evidence given the multiplicity of the same studies over and over suggests if there is an effect it is weak at best. Also notable is that most studies pre-2019 on childrens mental health were fairly positive and most post 2019 negative. I can think of a lot of things that changed in 2019 but use of "social media" is not one of them.

Jonathan Haidt, who's been driving a lot of the work against social media for kids, directly refutes these findings in this post https://www.afterbabel.com/p/fundamental-flaws-part-3.