If teens are banned from social media they won’t miss out connections being made there, because those will have to happen in real life. I think the takeaway here that everything is fine in moderation but having laws that monitor number of hours spent would lead to even more anti-regulatory hysteria.
The problem is the way social media is structured, not the concept itself of online communication.
Addictive design is evil and hurts us all.
One obvious factor which I don’t see mentioned, is that these kids aren’t living in distinct isolated populations. They’re interacting with each other. If you’re a social-media-free kid and the majority of your peers are on social media, of course that’s gonna impact you negatively as you’re getting left out. That’s not going to be the case if your entire generation is off social media. Fairly obvious, but the article author just ignores this point entirely. Uncertain if it was addressed in the studies. All in all, pretty biased article.
