alt Hacker NewsThis can be proven. Simply measure a population of typical social media users for relative measures of neuroticism. Then have an experiment population of healthy military leaders and police officers that have low social media use. The assumption is that the second population would score dramatically lower in neuroticism than the population average.
That establishes a of divergent populations baseline. The change their, such as deny, social media access or content. Measure the change to those two populations.
Assumed facts:
* social media access dramatically increases prevalence of anxiety and a state of dependency/addition. When true, removal of social media triggers addiction withdrawal that displays as emotional health illnesses.
* Populations that do not frequently make use of social media are not at risk of withdrawal.
* persons in high risk professions are typically conditioned into states of substantially lower neuroticism that population averages are not exposed to
It's hard to control for mere provision of social media access. Eg., if you're supposed to be out in the field all day, when are you mean to access social media?
Social media is, in that case, a replacement activity.
The question, which is i think unanswered, is whether and what its replacing in the lives of children. It may turn out to be: not much. That when taken away, children don't suddenly get more time, attention, socialisation, etc. instead, they just get less. Or that the kinds of tech hellholes theyre dumped in have purely passive interaction, eg., ipad kids.