[broptimist]

I assume your third link was meant to be to this study: https://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/facebook.pdf

My first criticism would be that intervening only to restrict Facebook would likely just result in a substitution effect, with instagram, snapchat, youtube, reddit, etc filling the void. Likewise, if I remove cake from my diet for 4 weeks but make no restrictions on all other forms of sugary baked goods, I'm not likely to see the same magnitude of effect as I would've otherwise.

Here's an associational study that found almost 3x odds of having depression between the most and least frequent users of social media sites. This was among US adults aged 19-32 and adjusted for age, sex, race, relationship status, living situation, household income, and education level https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4853817/

[verteu]

Thanks for the study! I was hoping for something about teens (not adults >=19), and ideally a meta-analysis.

This article looks promising: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Facebook#Psycholo...

I know the media often cites Instagram's internal research saying "we make body image issues worse for 1 in 3 teen girls", but the actual stat is not too damning IMO: 'Among teen girls with body image issues, 32% said Instagram made it worse, 22% said Instagram made it better, and 46% said it had no impact' [1]

[1] page 14 of https://about.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Instagram-Te...