Candice Odgers

And so that was really where we were stuck in the screen time debate for a while.

Well, it's not just screen time, it's social media and it's

oh, well, it's not just social media, it's social media among girls and it's depression.

And so the conversation really narrowed and we became laser focused on young girls and social media as the primary culprit.

So we kind of moved our target.

And now our new target is artificial intelligence and conversational agents.

And so the new tech will continue to evolve and that will continue to be the new target of our ire as parents and policymakers.

So that's the story that we're repeatedly told.

And I'm not saying that this is all a moral panic.

And so I've actually argued for a long time that tech companies need to do a better job with all kinds of things and designing platforms for all of us, including our children.

But what has been really shocking to me as I've

stood here and kind of watched this debate unfold and seeing how things are translated to the broader public is that there's just this massive gap.

And it really is massive between what, you know, evidence has been generated to date and

rigorous studies have found and expert panels have concluded, which is essentially that there's very tiny correlations between social media and mental health.

And that when we find them, it often is potentially a reverse direction where young people who are

Feeling bad to begin with or experiencing some problems, go on to use more social media, but not vice versa.

Our experimental research is telling us that when we do trials and we tell people or ask people to give up social media, we randomly assign them and then we follow them up to ask how they've done.

That's not ideal.

Anyway, we're kind of biased towards buying an effect there.

But in those studies, we're seeing that on average, the effects are zero or close to zero.