There is no evidence that social media use shortens attention spans or reduces social engagement offline. This is a meme, and a false one.

What you’re implicitly saying here is that we should wait until there is empirical evidence. That could take multiple decades, and even then will be tenuous at best because you’re dealing with a soft science. At that point the damage will have been done and much harder to address.

If you don’t think attention spans are on the downtrend & that social media has something to do with that, I don’t know what to tell you. I think it’s pretty clear.

Except that there are studies linking social media use with reduced attention spans. Here is one: https://www.dialoguesreview.com/index.php/2/article/view/930

There are at least other two that I could find