Is social media bad for people? The answer is more complicated than we thought

TikTok Isn’t WhatsApp: Why “Screen Time” is the Wrong Object of Debate

We Have Been Arguing About The Wrong Object

For a decade, the public debate over social media has been trapped in a binary loop: either it is a “toxic wasteland” destroying a generation, or the effects are “statistically negligible”. Both sides point to data, and both sides think the other is ignoring reality.

The problem isn’t the data, but the category.