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Yes, social media is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness
Two major problems with a review in Nature
Psychologist Candice Odgers has taken the skeptical side for many years now (along with researchers including Amy Orben, Andrew Przybylski, Jeff Hancock, Chris Ferguson, and Aaron Brown), while Jean Twenge and I have been writing as alarm ringers. First, if the skeptics were right and the null hypothesis were true (i.e., social media does not cause harm to teen mental health), then the published studies would just reflect random noise and Type I errors (believing something that is false). I agree that those things are all bad for human development, but Odgers’ theory cannot explain why rates of anxiety and depression were generally flat in the 2000s and then suddenly shot upward roughly four years after the start of the Global Financial Crisis.
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