There is a growing scientific controversy about the negative impact of social media on teenagers mental health, and even adults. Social media companies deny these claims. Billions of dollars are at stake.
A study from the University of Pennsylvania found using social media increases depression and loneliness:
https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/social-media-use-increases-depression-and-loneliness
But a recent scientific study from Manchester University found that social media has no negative impact on mental health:
https://www.manchester.ac.uk/about/news/time-spent-on-gaming-and-social-media/
This contradicts another study from Harvard University that found a social media detox improves well-being and reduces anxiety:
What’s your opinion on this matter?
Social media takes hundreds of different forms (including e.g. Lemmy) and any study pretending that they’re all the same is useless — unless you can simply replace “social media” with “Facebook”, “TikTok”, or whatever they’re actually about.
For example the first of the studies linked above finds that using “Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram” more than they normally would makes people depressed, and the second finds that an unspecified mix of whatever people normally do that they think of as “social media” did not. Those findings do not contradict each other and do not represent a meaningful controversy.
Politically it’s a controversy, or a tangled mess of controversies. Scientifically it’s just a complete mystery that will — at the speed of science — take decades to unravel. With any luck all the findings about fucking Facebook and Twitter will be obsolete much sooner than that because at some point the enshittification will finally get so bad that people come to their senses and stop using them. The free-world versions of social media, such as the fediverse, continue to get better and will win in the long run.