[jdietrich]

We had a mountain of data to show that smoking causes cancer by the 1950s, the industry just spent a lot of money on lobbying and PR to obfuscate it. Same with asbestos and most of the other examples people point to.

We don't have that data for smartphones. It's an extremely mixed picture, showing both benefits and harms. As far as we can tell, the association between smartphone use and poor mental health is strongly concentrated in a minority of people with very high usage. There's a strong probability that the causality behind this association runs in the opposite direction - troubled people spend lots of time using digital devices, because they're escaping their troubled lives.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6883663/

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00127-019-01825-4

[caseyy]

> the industry just spent a lot of money on lobbying and PR to obfuscate it

> It's an extremely mixed picture, showing both benefits and harms

So... you're saying it's similar.