> Which means, IMO: (1) regulation should be limited to what the general public's gut on average agrees with, since science won't be the neutral arbiter we want it to be for the foreseeable future. (2) I personally want to severely limit my kids access to social media because my gut says it's addictive and harmful. But I don't expect society as a whole to agree with me on that.

Well:

(1) there is no "the general public's gut" -- the general public is millions of separate guts that don't agree with each other;

(2) our political system defines explicit boundaries for the reach of regulatory power, especially where communication, expression, and social interaction are concerned, regardless of anyone's gut feeling on these issues;

(3) science can't be the arbiter here at all, since science only answers "is" questions, but this is an "ought" question; which leads us to

(4) as you alluded to in your final remark, this is a purely cultural issue which families/parents must address according to their own normative values, independently of each other, and there is no legitimate political or legal question here.

I agree with you that nothing has been proven either way. But I would say that, because people hate social media so much, we should perhaps be a little skeptical of claims that it causes harms. It's very easy to believe "X thing I hate" causes harm, even when the evidence is not solid.

> So since I can't wait another century for their to finally be good science about social media, I have no choice but to go with my gut.

Doing nothing seems fine!

That seems like a very lame claim, given that Social Media is data in abundance by design, and for at least 2 decades now.

Of course they did? What do you think school is? Just because it's useful to society doesn't mean it isn't also a reduction in freedom.

Meta-analysis, very large, shows small correlation between unhappiness and social media use: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/...

Large AU observational study. Moderate social media use correlates to the happiest kids, high use and no use correlates to unhappiness: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/article-abst...

Swedish obervational study, after adjusting the data there was no correlation: https://www.jahonline.org/article/S1054-139X(26)00162-X/full...

I can't find the specific inverventional study I mentioned. As I recall, it was mixed but possibly I remembered wrongly.

Some studies do show a significant correlation between unhappiness and social media use, but causation has not been established and the bigger, better done studies have weaker correlations. People believe in causation because it suits their bias against social media.

I dislike social media but I doubt it's harmful. This substack summarizes my view on what really makes children unhappy: https://substack.com/home/post/p-186087964 (school). I'd guess that lack of freedom is what makes school so awful; modern schools are like little totalitarian states, where every minute of your day is accounted for and there is no privacy.

You're doing the exact same pitchfork thing but against the diffuse group of "parents".

> Anything to shift blame from parents, I guess.

Shifting blame from parents presumes there is a problem to blame on them, but isn't the determination of whether anything here constitutes a problem in the first place up to the parents themselves?