I don't agree, we had about 5 solid years before she was doom scrolling and using social media. The first iphones in the home were the first gen iphones of 2009. Facebook was still called The Facebook in 2013 when we were on our 3rd phones. It wasn't popular outside of college until 2015 and by then we were on our iPhone 6's. This is when it started but it didn't become a "problem" until 2018...

> It wasn't popular outside of college until 2015.

This just doesn't hold up - FB ended Q1 2014 with ~1.3bn MAUs. I don't know when I would argue FB exploded beyond colleges but by 2014 it had already happened, long before.

> Facebook was still called The Facebook in 2013 when we were on our 3rd phones.

Facebook dropped the "The" and became "Facebook" in 2005.

I'm prepared to accept an argument that social media has contributed, but these dates don't make any sense.

I'm from a lower middle class family in India. We didn't even have access to smartphones, just a core 2 desktop. My friends had one as well. It was 2012, we were 12 years old and we all had accounts on facebook through the desktop. Feature phones had the actually good java facebook app as well which ran on 2g.

iPhones weren't ubiquitous for at least a few years after the initial release. Parents of teens and younger weren't the first adopters but it came on relatively quickly. The Social Network movie came out in 2010 which Facebook had already opened up to general public in 2006. Also was 2006 that News Feed was released and introduced the concept of doom scrolling and constantly checking into things. Respectfully, if you did not experience it's popularity until ~2015 I do not think you are representative of the overall trends; they hit a billion users in 2012 and that certainly wasn't just college students.

Facebook started getting popular outside of colleges in ~2007